"Those are the travailleurs. The sergeant will be coming in and I must
report to him. Good-bye, American friend, and come again."

A melancholy dusk was beginning as I turned home from the romantic
house, and the deserted streets were filling with purplish shadows. The
concussion of exploding shells had blown almost all the glass out of the
windows of the Church of St. Laurent, and the few brilliant red and
yellow fragments that still clung to the twisted leaden frames reminded
me of the autumn leaves that sometimes cling to winter-stricken trees.
The interior of the church was swept and garnished, and about twenty
candles with golden flames, slowly waving in the drafts from the ruined
windows, shone beneath a statue of the Virgin. There was not another
soul in the church. A terrible silence fell with the gathering darkness.
In a little wicker basket at the foot of the benignant mother were about
twenty photographs of soldiers, some in little brassy frames with spots
of verdigris on them, some the old-fashioned "cabinet" kind, some on
simple post-cards. There was a young, dark Zouave who stood with his
hand on an ugly little table, a sergeant of the Engineer Corps with a
vacant, uninteresting face, and two young infantry men, brothers, on the
same shabby finger-marked post-card. Pious hands had left them thus in
the care of the unhappy mother, "Marie, consolatrice des malheureux."

The darkness of midnight was beginning at Pont-à-Mousson, for the town
was always as black as a pit. On my way home I saw a furtive knife edge
of yellow light here and there under a door. The sentry stood by his
shuttered lantern. Suddenly the first of the trench lights flowered in
the sky over the long dark ridge of the Bois-le-Prétre.