At the end of this street was the railroad crossing, the passage a niveau, and the station in a jungle of dead grass and brambles.  Like the bridge, its rustiness and weediness was a dreadful symbol of the cessation of human activity, and the blue enamel signpost lettered in white with the legend, “Metz—­32 kilometres,” was another reminder of the town to which the French aspired with all the fierce intensity of crusaders longing for Jerusalem.  It was impossible to get away from the omnipresence of the name of the fated city—­it stared at you from obscure street corners, 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