I said good-bye, at last, and turned my car toward the bridge over the Sâone and the main arterial road southward. About a half mile from Thoissey there was a sawhorse set out in the middle of the macadam, and a sign, “Road Closed.” I got out of my car and walked forward. The old bridge, over which I had crossed perhaps a hundred times, was gone, its cables a tangle of wires down in the hurrying river, and its piers blasted by demolition charges.
I looked more closely. Around the damaged piers workmen had already constructed a framework of wood, and stonemasons had begun to lay, slowly, laboriously, the stones of new piers for a new bridge.
And that, I said to myself, as I turned my car round and started south over a secondary road, is France, A.D. 1945.
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