and was to be found on the covers of printed
books and post-cards. I saw the city once from the top of the hill of
the Mousson; its cathedral towers pierced the blue mists of the brown
moorlands, and it appeared phantasmal and tremendously distant. Yet for
those towers countless men had died, were dying, would die. A French
soldier who had made the ascent with me pointed out Metz the much
desired.

"Are you going to get it?" I asked. "Perhaps so," he replied gravely.
"After so many sacrifices." (Apres tant de sacrifices.) He made no
gesture, but I know that his vision included the soldiers' cemetery at
the foot of the Mousson hill. It lay, a rust-colored field, on the steep
hillside just at the border of the town, and was new, raw, and dreadful.
The guardian of the cemetery, an old veteran of 1870, once took me
through the place. He was a very lean, hooped-over old man with a big,
aquiline nose, blue-gray eyes framed in red lids, and a huge,
yellowish-white mustache. First he showed me the hideous picture of the
civilian cemetery, in which giant shells had torn open the tombs, hurled
great sarcophagi a distance of fifty feet, and dug craters in the rows
of graves. Though the civilian authorities had done what they could to
put the place in order, there were still memories of the disturbed dead
to whom the war had denied rest. Coming to the military cemetery, the
guardian whispered, pointing to the new mounds with his rustic cane, "I
have two colonels, three commandants, and a captain. Yes, two colonels"
(deux colonels). Following his staff, my eye looked at the graves as if
it expected to see the living men or their effigies. Somewhat apart lay
another grave. "Voila un colonel boche," said the sexton; "and a
lieutenant boche--and fifty soldats boches."

The destroyed quarter of Pont-a-Mousson lay between the main street and
the flank of the Bois-le-Pretre. The quarter was almost totally
deserted, probably not more than ten houses being inhabited out of
several thousand. The streets that led into it had grass growing high in
the gutters, and a velvety moss wearing a winter rustiness grew packed
between the paving-stones. Beyond the main street, la rue Fabvrier went
straight down this loneliness, and halted or turned at a clump of
wrecked houses a quarter of a mile away. Over this clump, slately-purple
and cold, appeared the Bois-le-Pretre, and every once in a while a puffy
cloud of greenish-brown or gray-black would flo