after a while at the front the intellect will not read anything
intellectual. It simply won't, perhaps because it can't. The soldier
mind delights in rough, genial, and simple jokes. A sergeant, whom I
knew to be a distinguished young scholar in civilian life, was always
throwing messages wrapped round a stone into the German trenches; the
messages were killingly funny, amiably indecent, and very jejune.
Invariably they provoked a storm of grenades, and sometimes epistles in
the same vein from the Boches. In spite of the vicious pang of the
grenades, there was an absurd "Boys-will-be-boys" air to the whole
performance. Conversation, however, did not sink to this boyish level,
and the rag-tag and bob-tail of one's cultivation found its outlet in
speech.

At the end of this street was the railroad crossing, the passage à
niveau, and the station in a jungle of dead grass and brambles. Like the
bridge, its rustiness and weediness was a dreadful symbol of the
cessation of human activity, and the blue enamel signpost lettered in
white with the legend, "Metz--32 kilomètres," was another reminder of
the town to which the French aspired with all the fierce intensity of
crusaders longing for Jerusalem. It was impossible to get away from the
omnipresence of the name of the fated city--it stared at you from
obscure street corners, and was to be found on the covers of printed
books and post-cards. I saw the city once from the top of the hill of
the Mousson; its cathedral towers pierced the blue mists of the brown
moorlands, and it appeared phantasmal and tremendously distant. Yet for
those towers countless men had died, were dying, would die. A French
soldier who had made the ascent with me pointed out Metz the much
desired.

"Are you going to get it?" I asked. "Perhaps so," he replied gravely.