Part 15

It was on August 19th that our company set out from the village of Couture. We crossed the fields to rejoin the Metz road. After we had marched two kilometres along this road, we took shelter in a wood in order to avoid being seen by a German areoplane. After a short hault here, we started off once more towards Fresne-en-Saulnois. We left this village on our left to march upon Auron and Vivier. We found trenches made by the enemy and some dead horses. In the evening we were before Duron and Vivier, the Germans having left these two villages a couple of hours earlier. We, the company “146,” occupied all the exits from the villages. At about half past eight in the evening the company shoulders knapsacks and we go to the outposts before Frémery. We passed a fairly quiet night, a few shots were fired towards midnight, and we thought there was a night attack, but it was only a skirmish between patrols. Next day, August 20th, at three in the morning the captain commands us to extend in skirmishing order, for we had been warned that the enemy is in front of us. In two or three leaps we reach the crest of a little hill in front of us. At this moment we receive a few bullets which oblige us to assume the ofensive. The lieutenant orders us to fire at five hundred yards upon the enemy advancing towards the crest. At this moment our comrade Arnold, the cook, comes from the village of Frémery, the bombardment of which has just begun, he held in his hands two pales of coffee which he brings to his section, although the captain told him to go back. But, he listening only to the commands of his own courage and coolness, succeeds in joining his section which was then engaged with the enemy. On reaching the line he began to distribute the coffee, but hardly had he begun when he was hit near the left eye not seriously, which stopped him for a moment. But this did not hinder him from continuing his round, stopping from time to time to fire his rifle. It was when he had nearly reached the end of the line of skirmishers that he was hit on the right rist. At this moment he was close to the sergeant-major, who was lying at full length in a furrow and who with the aid of his soup spoon was digging a hole for his head; at this moment we had no orders, for most of the non-coms and privates had been killed or wounded.—The sub-lieutenant gives the order to retire to those who are able, but the sergeant-major stoped where he was saying to a man who was near him and who was wounded. “No slackers here” giving him a blow with the flat of his sword.—At this moment, the Germans make their charge and come close up to us, the sergeant-major lifted his arms into the air, crying, “quarter! my wife my child.”—A little while after we were under the guard of some German soldiers, who conducted us as best they could to the hospital at Lucy. On the way the sergeant-major said to us that but for his spoon he would perhaps be a dead man?

I was touched by this little story. Maze thinks only of praising Arnold’s heroism. He says not a word about his own wound, although this was severe. He was struck in the neck, and the bullet is still beneath the shoulder-blade. One day he stripped in my presence and I felt the projectile. At the same time I had a good view of the sun, the stars, and the nymphs wherewith his chest is decorated, framing the great portrait of Carpentier which Maze had had tattooed while in Paris.

Speaking generally, the memoirs I have read have lacked interest. The hero speaks of the beer he has drunk, of the naps he has been able to snatch between the attacks, gives the names of his sergeant, of his comrades. We get absolutely no idea of the battle he was in. I reproduce, however, the story of Marius-Eugène G⸺, who was made prisoner on August 27th at Moyen-Moutier. It is the best I have discovered in the fort:

_ACCOUNT OF WAR AND IMPRISONMENT by Marius-Eugène G⸺_

_Moyen-Moutier, August 27, 1914._

Am alone, have lost my regiment, my company, am at Moyen-Moutier. Endeavour to join up with the 52nd or the 75th, can’t do it, stop and think, the firing begins again. The Germans are bombarding the town. What on earth shall I do? I lose my head, I am alone, I have no friend, no one to advise me. I run like a madman; I stop when I hear the whistling of the German projectiles I stretch myself at full length on the ground they fall two hundred yards from me and then come nearer. At length I give myself up for lost, I loose my head more and more however I think much of Rive-de-Gier of my dear employers of my dear love also of my brother and sister-in-law and of my dear little niece in fact of every one dear to me and it is with sorrow that I see the shells raning round me I ast myself if I shall ever see again this dear family, this idol which I carry in my heart. Having received a slight wound in the arm I went to the red cross and I have made the acquaintance of a dear friend of the 75th where we always remain brothers in misfortune since the hour when we were made prisoner, Thursday August 27 1914 at five o’clock in the evening; from there they sent us to sleep in a school, without a straw, still get through the night somehow and early next morning they make a list of the prisoners and send us to Saale which is on the frontier twenty kilometres from Moyen-Moutier, on the way the German soldiers make a long stop and gives us a bit of food a meal which I and my compatriots much enjoyed for we were getting very hungry at length we reach Saale it is about five in the evening, they make us sleep hard just like last night only instead of a school it is a church which has been transformed into a dormitory no great catch, the night is rather cold but we get through it somehow. Saturday August 29 we entrain at Saale station at nine o’clock in the morning without knowing where we are going it was a day of anguish for me and also for all my friends in the same situation as myself, we remain all day in the train all night and all Sunday August 30 when we arrive at our destination Ingolstadt at eight o’clock in the evening, they tells us that there is still 2 hours march to reach Fort Orff where I am still in prison after 4 weeks.

September 24. The weather to-day is rather grey and cold we stay in the rooms, tell what has hapened to us during the campane and the poor fellows serving with the colours when the war broke out said that this was the day of their discharge however we did all that we could to enliven the dull life we have had since our imprisonment.

Being quite without money to provide for my little wants, I am sorry to say that I have had to sell the ring that belonged to my dear mother the one she gave me the year before she died I was forced to sell it to buy food for they do not give us enough to eat and it is with regret that I sacrificed it in order to avoid coming to a bad end, all this is due to this cursed war from which I have been suffering for 2 months now, I hope it will soon be over and that I shall be able to resume the life of peace and happiness I led in the barracks where I had a happy time during the week and on Sunday was happy to be able to get leave to go to Rive-de-Gier where I passed such a pleasant day with my dear employers and my dear girl and that dear family of which I often think, at every moment of the day my thoughts turn to them.

Now at length the day is finished and the moment has come to go and fetch the wretched pittance which they give us as food then to have some talk with my friend, companion in misfortune, bedfellow for we sleep together on one heap of straw and with one blanket, all this because of this cursed war, still never mind the suffering, it is for France.

September 25. Glorious weather, one can feel the warmth of the sun, I take advantage of it to get up quickly, to have a wash, then I go to fetch the trickle of hot water they give us for coffee, I profit by the opening of this fine autumn day to take a turn or two about the fort to take my thoughts off and to proffit by this fine sunshine which has been very rare since my imprisonment in Bavaria.

Then, I do like many of the comrades my fellow-prisoners, try to do some work upon Bavarian stone, to make a souvenir of the fort, but I have no patience and chuck the thing away, for it does not take my thoughts off?

Good biz! a friend in the room has a pack of cards and we begin to play game after game of manilla, this turns our thoughts a bit but its not as good as the old games we used to play in the taverns of the old Couzonnais quarter. In spite of all I think of everyone I left behind me in that old town, of my dear employers, of their old parents who was so good to me and also of the dear parents of my dear girl who is never out of my thoughts and who I hope she thinks much of me.

Thursday, October 1st. Having been one day without writing I hasten to quickly write these two words, these moments are so sweet for me besides to write one is obliged to be alone and that is why to-day finding myself at the top of the fort where I look over all the plane and at the end of it the fine town of Ingolstadt I see many factory chimnies which are smoking also the fields where some Bavarian peasants is working in this place one would never think, seeing the sight which is spread beneath my eyes, one would never think that canon are thundering a few(?) kilometres away. All that I have written on this page makes me feel sick at heart for outside this cursed fort there would be liberty and peace for always. For such a life as we have been living, everyone of us here, is not to be envied. After a war like that we are going through, just as much for the german people as for the French, there is ruin for the 2 countries where are killed or wounded numerous fathers of families who leaves a wife without support with one or more children! I have not yet the rite to be mourned like these fathers of families, but in spite of everything I think much of my life in the future when I hope to be able to make the girl I love happy and whom I hope will not desert me even though she gets no news of me. Here then is the month of October begining very sadly I live in hope that the end will be a little better.

There, it is not very grand, but it is so sincere, and in any case this work of the pen makes the time pass less heavily. Poetizing, music, memoirs, tobogganing, little dinners, German, cards, whittling, stone-carving—some of the prisoners find the days too short. What an odd creature is man!

Tesson came to see me just now, bringing his last piece of work, a great slab of stone depicting the entrance to Fort Orff. The whole kitchen staff formed up in circle round the masterpiece. “Well I’m blowed!” said Devèse. “That’s not been done with the point of a pickaxe,” remarked Deschênes by way of praise. I also expressed my admiration. Then the master drew from his pocket a book with clasps, cut in limestone. He had carved on it the title: _Les Mémoires de Victor Tesson, prisonnier de guerre, à sa méchante Louise Huber.—Dolomieu, Isère._ While I was praising the dedication, he showed me his tools, saying: “Here are my cold chisel and my piercer. I made them out of my bicycle pliers. Here’s my ruler; I ‘forged’ it out of the tyre of a wheelbarrow.”—“Is that all?”—“That’s all. I have no dividers; I measure with a straw.”

Unquestionably the Frenchman is a very live animal. When I hear my fellow-prisoners applauding the artistes of No. 7, Lannessan, Grignon, Saint-Lanne, Bouquet, or the “artistes socialistes” of No. 38, the members of the audience splitting their sides with laughter at the satirical allusions and joining lustily in the choruses; when I go to No. 13 to visit Le Second, who receives me with the affected airs of a dandy as he ushers me into his domain of five feet square, incredibly elegant and quaint, fitted up à la Martine; when I contemplate the roguish gaiety of all these “Gavroches,” their indefatigable activity, the effervescence of their wit—I think of a Swiss friend of mine who is always saying, “These devils of Frenchmen!” I can even understand the stupefaction of that great barrel of a Max! One will never get the better of these fellows. One will never bend such bodies beneath the yoke of servitude. Without violence, by the simple play of their natural life, they would tame the most mulish of masters. The substance of which they are composed, ever radiating energy, is irreducible. It is evident that, by special privilege, they are born “free men.” Sovereign people!

How right is Péguy when he says that their watchword is “Hope.” Misfortune befalls them; they seem overwhelmed. From disorganization they pass to grumbling and from grumbling to revolution. Come back to look at them to-morrow; you will find them valiant, dashing, light-hearted heroes recking no longer of yesterday. They laugh at their sufferings. They sing. They defy their gollywogs of gaolers. They combine to think out some new plan. They engage in some fresh piece of work. Merely to look at them renews the savour of life.

At first everything went amiss here. Apart from eating our starvation rations, we had nothing to do. It was a terrible time. But contemplate them now; they are blithe enough. They are prisoners, and yet you would say they were in their own homes, masters, owners. Prisoners? They seem to be the guardians of their sentries; they go so far as to chide the sentries if these are slovenly in the performance of their duties. It is not that the prisoners have adapted themselves to the environment, but that they have forced the environment, willy nilly, to adapt itself to them. Like certain mosses which grow where there is no humus, they catch flying grains of dust and force these to yield the scanty soil which will enable them to live.

Moreover, events seem to favour this natural propensity to hope.

* * * * *

The last thing was your card with a picture of the _Victory of Samothrace_. You had erased the title and put a date in its place. Every one came to see this bulletin of victory which I had put up beside your portrait! I wish you could have heard the comments.

“Then we shall not have suffered for nothing,” said a lad from Montmédy. “I was two days in the forest with five comrades. We made holes in the trees to suck the sap. We had hallucinations. Two of them killed themselves.” Louis Ludes, a baker from Pouzolles, wounded in Morocco, and wounded again at Lunéville, the worst of wounds, a shell in the abdomen (his recovery astonished all the surgeons), exclaimed: “I too, tonnerre, I am in this victory!”

And while they were looking at the beautiful Greek with the mighty wings, Dutrex, who was reading the _Burgraves_, declaimed to us in his grating bass voice, full of cruel irony, the mendicant’s apostrophe:

Les Vandales ont pris Berlin! Ah! quel tableau! Les païens à Dantzig! Les Mogols à Breslau! Tout cela dans l’esprit en même temps me monte Pêle-mêle, au hasard; mais c’est horrible!… ô honte!… Allemagne, Allemagne, Allemagne.… Hélas![29]

DAWN

_December 8, 1914._

Half awake, I stretch out my hand to see whether Dutrex is there. His palliasse is deserted, his rug folded up. I raise myself on my elbow. All the others are still asleep, lying like long mute mummies. I draw on my shoes. At the main entrance, the sentries, hands in pockets, heads between their shoulders, are stamping their feet, their eyes white with cold. “_Guten Morgen!_”—“_Guten Morgen!_” I grope my way down the stair and along the passage. The lamps have gone out. There is a light in No. 22. I go in. Dutrex is shaving; his little mirror is perched on the vice. In front of him stands a smoky lamp. All around is darkness. Bouquet passes from one cauldron to another, singing softly and sentimentally:

La petite Française Qui m’attend là-bas A les yeux de braise Le cœur de lilas.…[30]

The kitchen is full of sulphurous fumes. “What time is it?”—“Five o’clock.” Dutrex has finished shaving. I take his place before the mirror and the lamp with the broken chimney. Some one knocks at the door. A little man comes in. He wears a fatigue-cap; his head is bowed, his face is tied up in a handkerchief, he holds his left cheek with both hands. He looks at us like a whipped dog. “I’m in such pain!”—“What’s the matter?” asks Bouquet, who is tender-hearted. The poor fellow is unable to speak plainly. “I have been walking up and down the corridors for a long time. I can’t keep still. My wound is gnawing at me. It seems to be screaming there, just under the ear!”—“Poor chap, you must see Laloux, but he is still asleep. Sit down there between the stoves. There’s a stool for you. Drink a mug of coffee while you’re waiting. That’ll warm you.”—“Yes, I’m perished with cold.”

Instead of a cheek he has a great violet crevasse with lines of scar tissue radiating from it. He was struck by a bullet which passed in obliquely through the nose and on its way out shattered half the left side of the face, including the articulation of the jaw. He has an abscess forming in the internal ear, which is pretty sure to kill him. While I shave, I look at this reservist.

He arrived with the last batch of convalescent wounded. Most of them were but half cured. They were sent away from Ingolstadt to make room for refugees from Pomerania, children, women, and old men, broken down through privation. The Russian wave is washing these refugees by thousands into the southern hutments.

“Does it still hurt?”

“Not quite so much.”

“Where are you from?”

“From a village near Mans.”

“Do you think that your missus will be able to love you with that hole in your cheek and your hanging jaw?”

“I hope so.”

“Where were you in barracks?”

“At Saint-Mihiel.”

“Where did you get your wound?”

“At Marville, near Virton, in Belgium.”

“Long ago?”

“August 24th.”

“Here’s another mug of coffee for you.”

The man, Vouvard by name, puts his hand behind the ear, closes his eyes, and rocks to and fro, saying: “I don’t know what to do, it hurts so.”

The cooks come in. With great hooks they take down the boiling cauldrons. Dutrex goes out for the roll-call. Steam fills the casemate, stifling us, and I open the window. Day is breaking; tiny clouds of a pale silver tint are floating at a great altitude. Deschênes, the woodman from the forest of Argonne, catching sight of the white frost on the slope, says with conviction: “This sort of weather gives one the hump here. Think how jolly it would be to be at work. Think how there are people perishing of hunger while we are shut up here doing nothing. And when we get home we shall have to work ourselves to death to pay off the debts our wives have made while we have been away. A lot of good one gets out of war!”

Dutrex enters with a martial stride. “I say, Riou, here are the latest orders from headquarters: ‘The purveyors and the workmen employed at the fort must be accompanied by a soldier of the guard; the prisoners are forbidden to approach them. The sale of food and drink to prisoners is strictly forbidden. The commandants are responsible for seeing that these orders are carried out.’”

“Very well, the slopes are also forbidden. I will immediately go for a walk there.”

I linger on the ramparts. The sun is about to rise. The air is pure, like that of the high mountains. Beyond the huge Danubian plain I catch sight for the first time of the blue serrations of the Tyrolese Alps, crowning the delicate lines of the middle distance. To-day is the feast of the Immaculate Conception. The air is filled with the sound of bells. The deep notes of those of Ingolstadt mingle with the brighter chimes of Hepperg, Wegstetten, and Lenting. The cocks are crowing. The crows are flying at a great height, and the harmonious silence is broken from time to time by their croakings. Everything glistens. The sky is superb. The earth rejoices. The soul finds refreshment and delight in the elysian dawn.

Over there, towards the rising sun, upon the Warthe and in the Carpathian defiles, men are killing one another. In the opposite quarter, beyond the gentle undulations dotted with white farms and beyond the magnificent barrier of the Swabian Jura, men are killing one another in Alsace, in Lorraine, and in Flanders. The villages of Europe are filled with truncated limbs, wooden legs, broken lives. Poor world of men!

HE GOES AWAY

_December 13, 1914._

He leaves this evening. Every one is sad. Who will replace him? If only it is not a man belonging to the school of the _Münchener Neueste Nachrichten_,[31] which has been summoning the government to take reprisals against the French prisoners. “_Geduld genug!_” exclaimed the official journalist; “We have been patient long enough!” He demanded the head of Colonel Grey, Sir Edward Grey’s brother, and also that of Delcassé’s son, both of whom had been wounded and taken prisoner. The _Ingolstädter Zeitung_ has been even more drastic than the Munich journal.

Yesterday passed gloomily. The men of the guard, like all those who have not been at the front, were spiteful and meddlesome. The patrol refused to allow us to set foot upon the slopes, even insisting that we must remain in the mud and puddles of the lower courts. Brissot and I contended that they did not know the regulations, and that the great track half-way up which dominates the two courts was certainly within bounds. Anyhow, taking advantage of the mist, I had before sunrise walked as usual on the forbidden escarp. Then, having a slight cold, and feeling poorly, I lay down upon a pile of palliasses in the Salle du Jeu de Paume, and spent the day in re-reading _Eugénie Grandet_, which Corporal Henriot had just received from Paris.

But I was thinking more about the baron’s departure than about old Grandet. The others were playing chess. “What a fine chap he is!” exclaimed Détry. “Riou, old boy, we ought to make him a grand speech when he leaves. Did you see the farewell note he sent round the casemates? He thanks his ‘fellow-workers.’ He courteously congratulates every one. He wishes us good luck. There’s a man for you, one who has never failed to treat us as men. Nothing of the Ploss about him!”

* * * * *

Lying with my head beneath the rug, my book closed, and my eyes shut, it suddenly seemed to me that the recent weeks had been almost enjoyable. I forgot the long nights of the first month or so, when my stomach was continually gnawing, and when the memories of meals eaten before the war, their steam, their odour, were so vivid as to constitute a veritable torture of Tantalus. Forgetting home-sickness and tedium, I found myself looking back wistfully to that which in actual experience had appeared horrible.

It seemed to me that with the transfer of von Stengel a fresh imprisonment was about to begin, harassing, with no security, and inhuman; that henceforward I should be truly in prison.