IN LORRAINE
By D. W. BROGAN
0 F course I knew the song: " En passant par la Lorraine avec mes sabots," and it was absurd never to have visited that famous province. So my friend the deputy told me in his usual rapid and authoritative manner (you don't lose overnight the habits acquired commanding a company of the Foreign Legion) that 1 must go with him ; he was going to visit his constituency.
So there was the Gale de l'Est, still a tragic name for all French- men and Frenchwomen over forty. There was the large, not very good but touching, picture of the mobilisation of 1914, the soldiers in their suicidal red trousers kissing goodbye to wives and babies. And there was the " Micheline," the aluminium super stream-lined D:esel Paris-Strasbourg express with its interior fittings recalling one of the bigger air liners, a memory sometimes evoked also by its movements. We slid out with the horn of the train sounding a peculiar melancholy note like that of the Martians in The War of the Worlds.
Naturally we could not know at the time and have not had time to realise since what were the terrible material losses of France in the late war. There was no obvious open wound like the western front of 1914-1918, but there was probably more deitruction between 1940 and 1945—and it was far more widely spread ; from Dunkirk to Marseilles ; from the mouth of the Gironde to Alsace. We were coming into country where war, invasion, destruction and the slow, painful, exhausting undoing of the destruction were an old story. There were the great new marshalling-yards at Chalons-sue _Marne not yet finished, and close by was the great battlefield where Romans and Goths, at an earlier battle of the Marne, had stopped Attila. There was Vitry-le-Francois, which was an important strategic point in 1914, which was very badly knocked about in 1940 and which was still more badly knocked about in 1944, for an intelligence officer of the Underground had signalled the presence there of an S.S. regiment to the Allied air forces ; the S.S. left an hour before the bombers arrived. So there were huts, not pre-fabs, but much cruder things. " They're still living in shacks," said an angry and famous Frenchman to me: " lots of French towns now look like the slums of Beyrouth."
Vitry-le-Francois was the old frontier town ; here you enter the once independent duchy of Lorraine, which has not yet been French territory for two hundred years. Of course "Lorraine" is a bigger place and idea than the Duchy. Metz, Toul and Verdun have been French for nearly four hundred years and the Vosges much longer. But this was a debatable land, indeed far more than Kentucky " a dark and bloody ground." At that street corner in Nancy Charles the Bold of Burgundy was killed in his desperate attempt to create a great border State, a new " Lotharingia." In the admir- able Music Lorrain at Nancy there is a portrait of that Duke of
Lorraine who at the Battle of Saverne in x526 saved the province from " the Lutherans." "And my host was told by an old peasant with a note of real surprise at seeing a record broken, " The Ger- mans! They were worse than the Swedes "—so vivid is the memory of the Thirty Years •War. And so there are few great historical monuments ; one or two great châteaux, one or two good country churches ; but this is a scarred border-land. It is a little ironical that the cross of Lorraine, here an old and treasured local possession, should have become the emblem of .resurgent France, for France was for long enough the enemy. It is natural, too, that the patriotism of the Lorrainers should be vigilant. There are old people who have survived three invasions. Nancy was, before 1914, the headquarters of the 20th corps, " the iron corps," which was the crack covering force of the French army•and whose commander in 1914 was Foch. The failure of the Crown Prince to take Nancy in 1914 was one of the decisive defeats of the Germans in the general defeat of the Marne. And in 1940 and 1944 over this land war has twice swept—as well as descending from the air.
So the review on the Place Stanislas of Nancy was a more relevant method of celebration than it would have been in a less war-ravaged province. The soldiers were admirably drilled ; the general was the handsomest I have ever seen ; "Dans la paix it faut avoir de beaux generaux." And " Sambre et Meuse," a rather monotonous march as a rule, sounded better in this frontier city than I have known it sound elsewhere.
But it was not all the pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war here. Indeed, some of that pomp and circumstance is resented in this battered province. Everywhere there are vast barracks (Toul used to have a garrison of 2o,000—a good deal more than its civil population). And the army is still clinging on to empty barracks when accommodation of any kind is so bitterly needed. There was the regatta on the narrow Meurthe with a great slag heap, a " bing " as we say in Lanarkshire, looming over the course. There were crews from all the neighbouring cities, and Strasbourg seemed to be the most ,popular. Pont-A-Mousson seemed to be unpopular, and even I noticed something odd in the course they steered. So though they came in first, they were asked through the loud-speaker to come to the judges' stand to give explications, and the race was declared off. But the river was very narrow and they had some excuse. I tried to argue the case of bumping races in the Oxford and Cambridge style, but it became too difficult to explain, much less advocate, the system.
There was a village celebration, too. There were the sapeurs pornpiers in their brass helmets (later a little boy was gloriously happy parading in a fireman's helmet down to his shoulders) ; there were two good brief speeches , there was dignity and a sober gaiety. There was less dignity but a certain touching seriousness of effort at the prize-giving of the girls! school in the much battered fortress city of Toul. For they teach Greek in the school as well as Latin and German (and English), and all the children in the infants' department got prizes, even if it was only for espihglerie or malice. In Nancy there was the permanent delight of the lovely Place Stanislas (and the Carriere); a more graceful, light, engaging classical style than Dublin or Edinburgh or Bath, yet re- calling them all.
We went on pilgrimage, too, to the hill shrine of Notre-Dame de Sion, the " colline inspiree " of Barris. This fine hill has on the top the ugliest church I have ever seen, and it was with relief that we drove to the other end to what is now officially called the "Montagne Barris" where we admired the unoriginal monument to the great Lorraine man of letters and looked out on one of the most magnificent panoramas of France. There was a useful table d'orientation which enabled you to locate and identify near and far places. It was often a melancholy satisfaction to discover where lay so many famous names of old and recent battles. There was Verdun and the Heights of the Meuse ; the Grand Couronne and Belfort. You thought of the endless wasteful wars and your heart sank. But suddenly on the table there was a name, tragic indeed, but the most famous and sacred of all Lorraine place names and for all its tragic significance, a ground of hope ; for it is a very famous name indeed ; " Dornrerny-la-Pucelle."
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