Nancy, capital of French Lorraine, is so near Metz, the great German fortress town of German Lorraine, that excursion trains used to run to Nancy in the opera season. “They are not running this winter,” say the wits of Nancy. “For one reason, we have no opera--and there are other reasons.”
An aeroplane from the German lines has only to toss a bomb in the course of an average reconnaissance on Nancy if it chooses; Zeppelins are within easy commuting distance. But here was Nancy as brilliantly lighted at nine in the evening as any city of its size at home. Our train, too, had run with the windows unshaded. After the darkness of London, and after English trains with every window shade closely drawn, this was a surprise.
It was a threat, an anticipation, that has darkened London, while Nancy knew fulfilment. Bombardment and bomb dropping were nothing new to Nancy. The spice of danger gives a fillip to business in the town whose population heard the din of the most thunderously spectacular action of the war echoing among the surrounding hills. Nancy saw the enemy beaten back. Now she was so close to the front that she felt the throb of the army’s life.
“Don’t you ever worry about aerial raids?” I asked madame behind the counter at the hotel.
“Do the men in the trenches worry about them?” she answered. “We have a much easier time than they. Why shouldn’t we share some of their dangers? And when a Zeppelin appears and our guns begin firing, we all feel like soldiers under fire.”
“Certainly, monsieur!” she said. “The Germans can never take Nancy. The French are going to take Metz!”
The meal which that hotel restaurant served was as good as in peace times. Who deserves a good meal if not the officer who comes in from the front? And madame sees that he gets it. She is as proud of her _poulet en casserole_ as any commander of a _soixante-quinze_ battery of its practice. There was steam heat, too, in the hotel, which gave an American a homelike feeling.
In a score of places in the Eastern States you see landscapes with high hills like the spurs of the Vosges around Nancy sprinkled with snow and under a blue mist. And the air was dry; it had the life of our air. Old Civil War men who had been in the Tennessee Mountains or the Shenandoah Valley would feel perfectly at home in such surroundings; only the foreground of farm land which merges into the crests covered with trees in the distance is more finished. The people were tilling it hundreds of years before we began tilling ours. They till well; they make Lorraine a rich province of France.