Part 5

Do you remember last May, during the week when the great poplars of the Allée Sully were scattering their down on the water of the pond? There was some of it in your hair the morning when I spoke to you. You looked straight in front of you, as in a vision. You were walking without saying a word, bending backwards, restraining the impatience of the enleashed Katia and Douchka.

In the evening we walked together on the fringe of the forest. The night was warm and fine, and the petals rained gently on us as we went. Our acacias were in flower. We looked at the moon through the slender network formed by their white clusters.

My poor Fontainebleau of Ingolstadt!

AN OLD CAMPAIGNER

_September 22, 1914._

There are more than a thousand of them squatting on the grass. The sun rages down on this quadrilateral, as big as the Place des Victoires, enclosed by the steep slopes of the scarp. Every one is nodding. The German flag and the Bavarian flag hang inertly along their twin staves. This frippery has been hoisted to celebrate the taking of ⸺. There is not a breath of wind. The heat is stifling. Sentinels pace to and fro. What is going on behind the forbidden slopes? Above the parapets crowned with flowers we can see nothing but the sky—a wide sky, barely blue. Some prisoners are chatting as they sit on a pyramid of grenades.

“How short our campaign was!” exclaims Sergeant Foch of the 10th Chasseurs, a fine fellow who seems modelled in bronze. His dark, golden-speckled eyes seem to devour you. He speaks harshly, and one feels that his wrath is intense. He spits out his phrases, with long intervals of silence.

“And all this happened through an idiot who led us straight to Raon-l’Etape, a regular Boche ambush!…

“As for me, tonnerre de Dieu, I could not help thinking of our captain. Captain B.! He was a soldier, if you like—first man of his year in the Ecole de Guerre, certain to become a general. One day he showed us the photo of his children, seven children, all in a row. He had tears in his eyes. He was a man! He could do what he liked with us. He was brave and prudent, and we had nothing to do but to follow where he led. One felt safe with him. There was a man who knew how to take care of his company.

“I wish you’d seen what happened at Vallerystal! Such a rain of shells we had there. I counted five hundred on my own section alone. I lost my two chums there. One of them came from my own village, and he and I were like brothers—always together. All of a sudden there came a pig of a melinite shell. There was a hell of a noise and a lot of smoke. I was knocked out of time, bowled over and over. Then I got up and dusted myself. Absolutely unhurt! Oh, how that black smoke stank! And on either side of me my two chums, blown to bits, their guts bulging out all over the place. Cré nom de nom! My knapsack did me good service that time! It stopped a shell splinter which set the collar of my coat on fire behind. Just look.

“While this was going on, what do you think our captain was doing? He was walking quietly up and down, pipe in mouth, in front of our rifles.

“‘Better lie down, captain,’ we said to him.

“‘What’s the use? One’s just as likely to be hit lying down as standing.’

“By the evening he had a wound in the head and a torn biceps. Do you think he left us on that account? His wounds were temporarily dressed.

“‘You must go to the field hospital,’ said the surgeon. But he did not go! There’s a fellow for you. If they were all like this B.…”

“Did it do well, your section?” asked Piétri, a red-haired sergeant-major, sturdy, with bloodshot eyes, a Corsican with the trick of staring you in the face, seeming to listen with his eyes, greedily, like a deaf man.

“Did they do well? I believe you! My reservists were splendid. ‘The beasts!’ they cried. They were spoiling for the fight; they clenched their fists. The 10th battalion was proverbial. ‘The men at Provenchères are devils,’ said the Boches; it was we.

“At the start it was like playing at soldiers. The Uhlans were coming on in little groups, their gloves spotless with pipeclay, wheeling to right and to left, as if on parade. Bram! Bram! Down goes one of them. The others perform a fantasia of retreat. We pursue. They dismount. I say to my men: ‘Lie down!’ Not a bit of it! They kneel to take better aim. ‘Fire!’ A lieutenant is killed; there are six dead or wounded. Another time, four Uhlans are trotting quietly along the road, as if on scouting duty. ‘Fire!’ Ten shots: patrol gone! Yes, it was funny at first. One might have imagined oneself at the summer manœuvres. But from the 10th to the 25th, oh Lord! Nothing but artillery fire. It rained! It rained, I tell you!”

“Did you kill any Boches yourself?” asks big Corporal Durupt, compared in the 2nd to a buffalo’s head on a pikestaff. “In my section at Mesnil, near Senones, I handed my rifle to the bugler, a record shot. In a quarter of an hour, at two hundred yards, he brought down ten.”

“I did my share,” answers Foch. “But the shot of which I am proudest was one which I fired at twelve hundred yards, just for a lark, at a Uhlan patrol. There were three of them; I bowled one of them over. But I will tell you about a shot of which my old comrade Kaiser was especially proud. An Alsatian like myself. I always gave him his orders in German. I don’t know if he’s still alive. I have not seen him since August 25th, when we were under machine gun fire in Bertrichamps wood.

“In my section we had one odd sort of beast who was always in a blue funk. I kept him by my side as I led my section. The captain says to me: ‘Foch, see if you can’t stop this machine gun which is worrying us.’ Off we go, and soon the bullets are flying thickly. I meet an old territorial. He has his handkerchief pressed to a bleeding wound. I want to dress it for him. ‘No, no,’ he says, ‘don’t bother about me. Go ahead with your brave fellows!’ All at once my trembler falls down, crying out:

“‘Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!’

“‘Are you wounded?’

“‘No, a sprain!’

“‘Don’t you try to gammon me; up with you!’ He gets up; he can walk all right. ‘You see,’ I tell him, ‘I beat God Himself. I’ve cured you in half a tick.’ But now, at two hundred yards, I see the German section with the machine gun. I fire, once, twice; I pick off two of them. Then, close at hand, on the right, appears a bunch of Germans. The devil! I call Kaiser, who is acting as my orderly. A Boche advances on him. ‘Look out!’ I cry. The Boche shoulders his rifle and fires. Down goes Kaiser. The Boche advances, but Kaiser is only shamming dead. Suddenly he rises on his knee. Bram! Head over heels goes the other, and Kaiser hurls himself on the Boche. ‘I’ve got him all right,’ he shouts, as pleased as Punch.

“The German squad retreats. My section sends them some parting shots. Two wounded Germans come to us, and I dress their wounds. One of them wants to kiss me, but I’m not having any.

“I say to my funker, ‘Get behind that little ridge. You will be close to me.’ I have hardly spoken when he begins to bleat: ‘Wounded! I am wounded! I’ve been shot in my behind. Let’s escape!’ Next minute, ‘Mon Dieu! hit again! Let’s escape!’ Two bullets in his behind; oh dear! He did not know what to do with himself; he had not enough hands to stop the holes. He let go of one leg in order to seize the other. We who looked on were screaming with laughter. I’ve never laughed so much in my life. And all this was under fire! Girard was laughing with the rest. Then, suddenly, ‘I am hit,’ he says; ‘lend a hand!’—‘You must wait a moment, old boy; the fire is too hot.’ The blood was pouring from his wound, making a lather like soapsuds. Two minutes later the bugle sounds ‘Cease firing.’ But they don’t want to cease firing. They simply will not stop. I have to get up and shout at them, to brandish my arms. At length they assemble around me. And here is my funker, who gets up quite easily, notwithstanding the two bullets in his behind. The firing continued from the German side, and the leaves were falling on us from the trees, for the aim was too high. We were able to withdraw with our eight wounded.

“Ah, it was a fine time, but oh, how tired I was! Had it not been for ⸺ I should have gone through the war till the last shot was fired. I no longer gave a thought to my wife or my children.”

I HAVE A TABLE

_September 23, 1914._

The useful furniture of our casemate consists of the following articles: a ewer, a dish, and a lamp. I say “the useful furniture,” for we have also an imposing iron stove, some heavy bars of iron to barricade the doors and windows, and two pieces of sheet iron about half an inch thick. But there is no table. There was one at first, but they took it away from us to furnish the chapel, where it serves as altar. As for chairs, benches, stools, there is nothing of the sort. Consequently a man who wishes to write, and who has never written except seated at a table, is not likely to feel thoroughly at home in casemate 17.

First I made myself a study out in the open, in a corner of the east court, on the steps of a little cement stairway in the slopes. I got some fine headaches there, sitting for hours in the sun without noticing it. But rainy weather having set in, it became necessary to seek shelter.

It is at this point that Dutrex intervenes in my prison life—Corporal Dutrex, of martial and elegant figure, a strange compound of the ingratiating characteristics of childhood and the energy of manhood. At Bièvre, in Belgium, when the village of Messin was burning, and when under the fire of machine guns our soldiers were effacing themselves in the furrows, Dutrex, ammunition bag on shoulder and cigarette in mouth, walked unconcernedly from one rifleman to another distributing packets of cartridges.

Arriving here with the first convoy on August 27th, his knowledge of German immediately led to his selection as interpreter to the commandant. By degrees he has become Major von Stengel’s right-hand man. I noticed the young fellow from the first. He is blond, with a long, fine moustache, with hair cut en brosse, thin, very erect. I remember that I felt a secret joy when I discovered that this simple corporal of the ⸺th occupied so important a position in the fort. It was pleasing that the German authorities should see France through the medium of this particular Frenchman. Too often have I had the misfortune to study the deficiencies of the official hierarchy, and the unanticipated revenge now taken by the natural hierarchy was agreeable to my reason.

To Dutrex, then, one wet and gloomy morning, in quest of shelter for my pen, I explained my difficulties. He knew my _Ecoutes_, and we had been friends from the first. At noon he handed me the key of the double casemate, No. 55.

With the permission of the commandant he has established a store here. From nine to ten daily, soap, slippers, brushes, blacking, string, and other little necessaries, are sold at cost price.

In this heroic place, a real ice-house, with walls of formidable thickness and screened windows, I spent a long afternoon. I fell ill at once in consequence. That very evening when I returned to No. 17 I was shaking with fever. It cost me a week on the straw. But I bear no grudge against No. 55. It secured me the exquisite luxury of a few hours’ isolation. I shall always think kindly of its strong and cold arches, of its chains for moving the garrison-guns, and of its sepulchral atmosphere, faintly perfumed with haberdashery. But I shall not renew my acquaintance with it, for I learn that the occupants of No. 70, who were being eaten alive by lice, have been transferred to 55. I commiserate them for having to make their choice between lice and rheumatism! As for Dutrex, his soap and other wares have been removed to No. 72, where the sun never enters.

I am now able to work in a warm and dry place, for yesterday, as honorary minister without portfolio, I entered what is spoken of as “the French governing body” of the fort.

Do you think these vain honours? Not at all, for they provide me with a table. To have table and lamp of one’s own, with many hours all to oneself for observation and reflection! In my view, free time is preferable to money. “Time is money,” say the English. I would rather say “Money is time.” It seems to me that the only object of working is to secure leisure. The man within us is formed by leisure. Work produces money, money produces leisure, and leisure produces more work—but this last is noble, lofty, and disinterested work, the true work of humanity. With me it is an article of faith that the true work of humanity is the work of leisure. Thank goodness I have now a little leisure and solitude.

My solitude, a very precarious one, is a kitchen. You must not laugh.

Near the door of the huge room is the region of the cooking stoves, encumbered, filled with iron and smoke, under the care of Bouquet, the “chef,” a delicate and gentle lad from Quercy. But beyond this plutonic zone you enter a spacious quadrilateral, which the cooks usually speak of as the “salon.” Two large windows looking to the south flood the place with light. It is fairly clean. The cemented floor is flushed down with water after the vegetables have been prepared, after the serving of each of the three meals, and, speaking generally, whenever there has been much coming and going. At the further end of this kitchen, between the two windows, there stands a table, a little deal table, _the_ table. M. Prudhomme would say: “This table, it is the heart of Fort Orff.” It is here, in fact, that is established, in almost continuous sitting (upon three deal stools), our ministerial council. Here we plan reforms. Here we elaborate details of organization. Here is regulated the entire internal life of the colony. It is here, finally, that by means of various stratagems we learn the news from outside.

This table, or to be precise, the left side of this table, is now mine. The deep mouth of the sink yawns just behind my stool on the floor level. As I work, my left arm touches the window-sill, on which I place my pipe, my mess-tin, my papers, and your photograph. Such is my kingdom. Here I read, write, and dream. Here thrice daily when meals are served I watch my brothers in captivity file by. Here I listen, and here I observe. Notwithstanding the buzz of talk, the trampling of those at work, and the smoke from the fire, I delight in this corner close to the cooking stoves. Upon our scanty regimen I have become as chilly as a cat. Besides, where else could I work?

Thus my life is divided between my “Fontainebleau of the slopes,” my stool in kitchen No. 22, and casemate 17. For I continue to sleep on my old heap of straw. It is nothing more than a derisory bed of dust, but I am more comfortable there than I was the first night. I am glad to say that my back is now covered with callus; my nose has become hardened; even my ears during the night are less sensitive than they were at first to the noises, now strident, now guttural, of the sleepers. At the outset, suffering from insomnia, I passed hour after hour, sickened by this frogs’ chorus. I longed to run away from it. I summoned sleep with all my might. Smile if you like, but I feel my faith in the human soul weaken when I contemplate a sleeping man whose mouth gapes and who snores like a great hog. The horrible stench which tainted the damp breeze at Moncourt, Lagarde, and Kerprich, rising from the putrefying corpses of men and beasts, was to my mind less strongly insistent of the animal relationships of man than is the slow, irregular rhythm, the dull and undignified noise, of snoring. But one gets used to everything. I have become accustomed to the snoring and to the yet more disagreeable incidents of our too intimate association. I hardly notice the foul smell of drains which permeates the passages of our ant-hill, and which made me feel positively faint on the evening of our arrival. Man is so greedy for happiness that he speedily becomes immunized against the toxin of his daily troubles. Day by day I am less keenly conscious of my miseries. At night, on my heap of dust, I often meditate upon this marvellous characteristic of our nature. Towards eleven, passing into a condition of gentle melancholy, I manage to get off to sleep between Sergeant Bertrand on one side, dreaming love dreams, and my terrible and dear Guido on the other—Guido, a prey to pessimism and insomnia, whose cigarette continues to glow in the darkness.

WE KILL THEIR HOPES

_September 26, 1914._

Things are going badly with the Germans. Our guards may keep their mouths as tightly shut as they please, and may deprive us of newspapers, but despite our isolation we feel that things are going well for France.

There was a splendid sunrise. When I went out to greet you and the dawn upon our acacia slope, the cold was dry and sharp. The air had an agreeable aroma of fresh earth. It was a pleasure to let the eyes dwell upon the play of morning light across the open country. The cord on the flagstaff, now bearing no flag, shook in the wind and made a clicking sound as it struck the wood. For a moment from underground there came the sound of the bell rung at the elevation, a gentle, calm, and mysterious sound. It was the hour when Richeris and Guido are accustomed to serve mass for one another.

In the kitchen I found Corporal Durupt at breakfast. He stood with his back to the fire, poised askew on his heron’s legs, looking, as usual, as long and thin as a hop-pole. The co-minister of Dutrex had toasted a slice of black bread sprinkled with aniseed (bread which he detests), and, rocking to and fro a little, was moistening it in his bowl. Around him the great iron cauldrons, which had been taken down from the stoves ready for the distribution, were steaming like locomotive engines. He was drinking his coffee with a thoughtful air, one which gave him a lofty, conscientious, incorruptible aspect. When he saw me his large and trusty eyes sparkled. I detected a mischievous twinkle behind his glasses.

Instantly he began: “I have _grand’chose_ to tell you.” He is an Alsatian and has phrases peculiar to himself. In his vocabulary “grand’chose” means something of extreme importance. And for Durupt there is but one thing of real importance, and that is the extermination of Prussia.

He hates Germany with a hatred which has been a cult in the Durupt family for generations. He went to school at Mülhausen. He took part with the Alsatian boys in terrible fights with the German boys. Thus, in his case, hatred of the Teuton was in the first instance a suggestion of childhood. But this hatred has become envenomed by experience and mature reflection. At an age when the heart begins to devote itself to the work of life, he was subjected to the forcible, rough, relentless constraint imposed by the foreign master. The daily experience of “Germanization” had filled his kindly nature with gall against everything German.

“At Paris,” he says sometimes, “in the restaurants, in the post-offices, wherever I could, I plagued the life out of all the Boches who came my way!” On the banks of the Brusche, and especially at Saulxures, where the two sides were firing at one another haphazard in the fog, he killed furiously. Now, being a prisoner of war, and having neither rifle nor bayonet, he devotes himself to the endeavour to sow discouragement among the soldiers who guard us, considering that an army contaminated with discouragement is ripe for defeat.

Durupt is a thoroughly upright man. His everyday judgments and his ordinary actions recall the evangel of ’48 and the solid bourgeois virtues. He belongs to that undistinguished élite which forms the real backbone of every nation, the élite consisting of those who know how to speak the truth and to live for truth. Above all, he belongs to that France unknown to foreigners (although in it is concealed the secret of our marvellous resurrections), to that moral France which lies ever hidden beneath Gallic and frivolous France, producing, as times change, a St. Louis, a Calvin, a Saint-Cyran, a Pascal, a Lamennais, or a Fallot, men of a single colour, with consciences of iron, terrible to themselves, obedient to the point of heroism, and often scrupulous to the point of disease. Those I have named are generals of the army in which Durupt serves as a private.

He has a great love and admiration for his brother, Jacques Durupt, Goude’s antagonist at Brest in the last parliamentary elections, and, during the heroic times of Marc Sangnier, leader of the Sillonist left in association with Gacmaling and Archambault.

Durupt himself lived on the confines of the Sillonist movement. Like all the readers of _Démocratie_ and _Nouvelle Journée_, he has the republic and the Christian faith in his blood.

I esteem our “co-triumvir.” I find him a trifle too meticulous for my taste. He shows little interest in the witty and graceful sides of life. He has a tendency to emphasis, and is a little inclined to act the judge. He is fond of giving an exemplary flavour to his actions, and at times plumes himself somewhat when speaking of what he does. But his heart is as clear as crystal, utterly void alike of hypocrisy and malice. His whole life, at home and abroad, even in its most trifling details, is upright, controlled, deliberate.

A certain sympathetic pleasure attended my gradual discovery in this Catholic of the merits and defects characteristic of the Scottish puritan and of the French radical. Moral, practical, ardently patriotic, ingrained with the civic spirit, something of a preacher, without any change in his modes of thought or his personal habits he might well be regarded as a perfect disciple of Christophe Dieterlen, Fallot, or Frommel, and even of Charles Wagner, Paul Doumergue, or Wilfred Monod, the file-leaders in France of reformed Catholicism.

Everywhere, fortunately, men remain men. Protestants have the Catholic spirit and Catholics have the Protestant spirit. Individual psychology laughs at doctrinal oppositions. Throughout the entire human race, temperaments and characters develop, underground, their indestructible stratifications, regardless of the walls built on the surface by the leaders of men, walls which these leaders, with their imperious will, imagine to be durable.

Durupt devotes to the indulgence of his national hatred the whole of that conscience which his Christianity (quasi-jansenist in type) has produced in him. He hates as a duty. He injures as a duty. How can he injure the Germans now that he is at their mercy? By demoralizing their men! Having an excellent knowledge of German, he has made it his mission at Fort Orff to prove by a + b to our successive relays of guards—Landwehr men on their way to the frontier, or men wounded in the first onslaught and now returning cured to the firing-line—that Germany is beaten in advance.

He arrived here on August 30th, three days after Dutrex, and the whole of Germany in the fort, from the commissariat captain down to the last _Gemeiner_ (the commandant, whose conduct towards us has throughout been a model of courtesy, always excepted), set to work forthwith to din into his ears, “Paris _kaput_”—literally translated, “Paris pulverized.” For a whole fortnight this was the refrain. When the quartermaster, an ill-natured beast, stupid and uncouth, came down to the kitchens, his way of saying good-day was to laugh maliciously as he announced a new _kaput_: Verdun _kaput_; Rheims _kaput_; Manonviller _kaput_! Even the _Verpflegsoffizier_, Captain Friedrich Wilhelm Weidner, of the Prinz Ludwig regiment, a Nuremberg merchant with a lofty air, very erect, much mustachioed, with frank blue eyes, did not disdain, from time to time, to unfold ostentatiously among the stoves, under the noses of Dutrex and Durupt, copies of the _Nürnberger Zeitung_ and the _Münchener Neueste Nachrichten_ with headlines screaming victory.