The loudest
cannonade had not made "them" seem as real as that!...
At this point the military lines and the old political frontier
everywhere overlap, and in a cleft of the wooded hills that conceal
the German batteries we saw a dark grey blur on the grey horizon. It
was Metz, the Promised City, lying there with its fair steeples and
towers, like the mystic banner that Constantine saw upon the sky...
Through wet vineyards and orchards we scrambled down the hill to the
river and entered Pont-a-Mousson. It was by mere
meteorological good luck that we got there, for if the winds had
been asleep the guns would have been awake, and when they wake poor
Pont-a-Mousson is not at home to visitors. One understood why
as one stood in the riverside garden of the great Premonstratensian
Monastery which is now the hospital and the general asylum of the
town. Between the clipped limes and formal borders the German shells
had scooped out three or four "dreadful hollows," in one of which,
only last week, a little girl found her death; and the facade of the
building is pock-marked by shot and disfigured with gaping holes.
Yet in this precarious shelter Sister Theresia, of the same
indomitable breed as the Sisters of Clermont and Gerbeviller, has
gathered a miscellaneous flock of soldiers wounded in the trenches,
civilians shattered by the bombardment, eclopes, old women and
children: all the human wreckage of this storm-beaten point of the
front.
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