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"Are you going to get it?" I asked. "Perhaps so," he replied gravely. "After so many sacrifices." (Après 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. "Voil
Through the windows bees hummed, the garden rustled, and one felt, close by, behind the walls of other gardens, the untroubled continuance of a placid and orderly bourgeois life. We started early for Mousson on the Moselle, the ruined hill-fortress that gives its name to the better-known town at its foot.
On the following day, Mailhe, in the name of the jurists, reported that there was no legal obstacle, from the inviolability acknowledged by the Constitution. Mousson replied that since Lewis was deposed, he had no further responsibility.
It marks the exact spot at which, last August, the German invasion was finally checked and flung back; and the Muse of History points out that on this very hill has long stood a memorial shaft inscribed: Here, in the year 362, Jovinus defeated the Teutonic hordes. A little way up the ascent to Mousson we left the motor behind a bit of rising ground.
No troops are visible, and the pictures of war that made the Argonne so tragic last March are replaced by peaceful rustic scenes. On the way to Mousson the road is overhung by an Italian-looking village clustered about a hill-top.
His old Mother came to visit him, and she told me he was the last of her three sons; the two elder ones had died the first week of the war at Pont Mousson, and her little home had been burned to the ground. The boy had spent his time inventing new and terrible methods of dealing with the enemy, but with his Mother he became a child again and tenderly patted the old face.
It was for this that in our fathers' days the Seigneurs de Montmord and de l'Assigni, defending Mousson against the Count of Nassau, were so highly censured.
Mousson found the delivery through the canal to be at the rate of 24.88 cubic feet to the second; at what stage of the tide does not appear. Other mills of the same sort have been erected, and there appear to be several points on the coast where the sea flows into the land.
Pupil of Bonnassieux and Falguière. The principal works of this artist are "Diana Surprised," in marble; "Saint Hubert," in the church of the Sacré-Coeur; the same subject for a church in Canada; "The Virgin," a commission from the Government, in the church at Poissy; "Jeanne d'Arc," at Mousson; the monument to Émile Augier, the commission for which was obtained in a competition with other sculptors; and many busts and statuettes.
At the end of the bridge, ancient and gray, rose the two round towers of the fifteenth-century parish church, with that blind, solemn look to them the towers of Notre Dame possess, and beyond this edifice, a tile-roofed town and the great triangular hill called the Mousson.
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