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The soul of the gay mill had left it! Then the French began the assault. There was a furious fight with swords and bayonets. Beneath the rust-colored sky the valley was choked with the dead. The broad meadows had a wild look with their tall, isolated trees and their hedges of poplars which stained them with shade.
Beyond the meadow, on the other side of the valley, extended the forest, and that ended in the rising bench of thicket, which gave place to green slope and mossy terrace of sharp-tipped spruces and all this led the eye irresistibly up to the red wall where a vast, dark, wonderful cavern yawned, with its rust-colored streaks of stain on the wall, and the queer little houses of the cliff-dwellers, with their black, vacant, silent windows speaking so weirdly of the unknown past.
While the men are at work making portages I climb up the granite to its summit and go away back over the rust-colored sandstones and greenish-yellow shales to the foot of the marble wall. I climb so high that the men and boats are lost in the black depths below and the dashing river is a rippling brook, and still there is more canyon above than below. All about me are interesting geologic records.
"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
League upon league, the rich land fell away to the west, there to end at a wall of high mountains into whose fastnesses no one had ever ventured. Yet the mountains were very beautiful. In the cold of a clear winter's day, the snowy summits and rust-colored pinnacles shone bright and near at hand; in the spring, fogs hid them, and lay like gray mantles upon the lower slopes.
He did not speak to her as if they had never seen each other before but as if he knew her quite well. Mary knew nothing about boys and she spoke to him a little stiffly because she felt rather shy. "Did you get Martha's letter?" she asked. He nodded his curly, rust-colored head. "That's why I come." He stooped to pick up something which had been lying on the ground beside him when he piped.
Between the leaves rust-colored ants were creeping, and a lizard rustled down into the green depths. Silently they both stood there, and Paul trembled. Neither dared to interrupt the solemn stillness. "Where have they buried my father?" Paul asked at last. "Your sisters took the body over to Lotkeim," answered Elsbeth. "That is as well," he replied.
All around her, indeed, Lilla could see the pretty women in their slate-gray and rust-colored cloaks, in their rakish little toques from under which their sophisticated eyes peeped out in search of homage. Some had the expression of those for whom love is an assured phenomenon solving all questions. Others seemed to be waiting impatiently for its advent or its departure.
He stood just within the hollow of a cavern so immense that he had no conception of its real dimensions. The curved roof, stained by ages of leakage, with buff and black and rust-colored streaks, swept up and loomed higher and seemed to soar to the rim of the cliff.
Then he slid quickly to the ground, and without other words knelt down and, baring one arm, dipped out of the bottom of the spring a handful of rust-colored flakes. "This is what you put on his back," he said. "Just lay it right on. It doesn't hurt; it just feels cool." The directions were quietly obeyed, and the horse made no movement, save a slight quiver of the skin, as if to shake off a fly.
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