Part 8

In the evening, when the roll-call was finished and the round was leaving with the _Feldwebel_ and our new Bavarian sergeant, only just recovered from a wound in the foot received at Lunéville, Dutrex made eyes at me, and uttered the single word, “Oui.” I went to sleep with the certainty that the news was true.

To-day every one has spent the morning in writing _his_ letter, the one and only letter to which we are entitled. But what a disappointment! No more than one company is to be allowed to send letters each day. We are five companies. Only one letter every five days![17]

But that melancholy barrier of silence which for a month and a half has separated us from the world has at last been broken down!

It is true that we have been ordered to say nothing about the war, and to instruct our correspondents to observe a similar restriction. This morning these _Verboten_ have disturbed us little. Do you think any one of the prisoners, when writing his letter, had a fancy for dissertations upon strategy? His wife, his fiancée, his children, his mother, his whole life, were before his eyes. At length people would know that he was alive! His head was singing with voices from his own fireside. He was intoxicated—at once giddy with excitement, softened, bitter, almost mad. The most indifferent, the most torpid, seemed to have been awakened with a start. Permission to write, the act of writing, had shaken them out of their inertia.

For, fortunately, imprisonment dulls our sensibilities. At first it causes poignant suffering; and suffering, of whatever kind, sharpens the faculties. But imprisonment is above all hunger, chronic hunger. Those only who have experienced it can understand the effect which chronic hunger speedily exercises even upon an active brain. At first it induces hallucinations. With terrible realism the sufferer recalls meals eaten before the war some particular dinner, such and such a picnic. The nerves of taste and smell, exasperated by the scanty regimen, are visited by memories of odours and tastes. The man thinks of nothing but eating. Literally he is nothing but a clamorous stomach. He will lie awake the entire night thinking only of this: What can I do to-morrow morning to secure a supplementary loaf?

Little Brissot, my friend of the Alpine infantry, when we were walking a few days ago with our two French medical officers, made this unexpected confession: “Only one thing can give me pleasure now—to get food. Only one man interests me—the man who is capable of getting me food.”

This calm declaration from one so highly cultured that he will distract his mind from the cares of important business by reading James and Bergson, from one intimately acquainted with Montaigne and the Lake poets, seemed to us neither paradoxical, nor irrelevant, nor cynical.

Among those who are able, by illicit and extremely laborious methods, to procure food from outside, there are few who do not seize their opportunity.

Men will try to get a thorough chill, hoping to be sent to the infirmary, where they usually receive double rations. Yesterday two prisoners, one of them a corporal, fainted from hunger. Quite a number are so weakened by want of food that they can no longer climb the staircases leading to the courts and to the slopes. When we heard just now that in the neighbouring fort, Fort Hartmann, one of the prisoners had hanged himself, the same thought ran through all our minds: “The epidemic has begun, and will speedily spread to our own prison.”

Ultimately, however, people grow accustomed to short commons. Their activities, in some cases at least, gradually become accommodated to their regimen. In the long run, physical and mental life are reduced to nil. The man hardly suffers, and he no longer revolts.

Even in the bravest the soldier-spirit dies. Look at these men crouching on their heaps of straw hour after hour, silent and half asleep; or look at them as with hands in pockets and hanging heads they slowly make their way up the slopes; who can imagine that these are the men who fought like lions at Montcourt and Lagarde?

These sudden visions of home were requisite to restore many of our prisoners, though but for a moment, to life. But for how many of them this has also involved a revival of suffering.

“I don’t know how I shall be able to feed my three children next year unless I can get home soon. I can’t help thinking about my farm, where the harvests of corn and of grapes have been so poorly gathered, and where everything is running to waste!” The soldier who spoke thus comes from Uriage, in Dauphiné. He stopped me when I was walking with measured steps after the seven o’clock coffee, taking my anti-rheumatic constitutional on the slopes. He drew me aside into a corner of the fortifications. Taking a letter from his pocket, he modestly asked me in a melancholy tone: “Could you tell me if that is all right, and whether you think it will be allowed to pass? Please be good enough to read it. You have my leave.” Poor comrade! It cut me to the heart to see him. He wanted to look self-possessed, to look like a man. But he had been weeping. He spoke low and quietly in order to keep the tears out of his voice. The paper shook in his hand. I read: “My dear Marguerite.…” There was nothing in the letter. “Don’t worry about me.… All is well with me.… We are very well cared for.…” These reassuring phrases were reiterated throughout the four pages, the very words repeated again and again. My master, Jean Monnier, declares that repetition is the rhetorical flower of simple minds. What a tragedy underlay the disjointed prose. This prisoner of war whose eyes shone with hunger, this hollow-cheeked man who had spent all his poor pocket-money so that he could no longer buy any smuggled goods—bread, sugar, or chocolate—wrote: “All is well with me,” “We are very well cared for.” He said it and resaid it monotonously throughout the entire letter. It was essential that his wife should have no doubt about the matter, his poor wife who had already so much trouble to bear. I should have liked to pet him like a little brother, this man already grey.

I also wrote _my_ letter. Having too much to say, I said nothing. What are words when the heart hungers for material presence, for a touch, for a living silence? My letter was not even of the regulation length.

At eleven Guido came in, with his eternal rug round his shoulders. He planted himself in front of my table. He fixed me with his eye, the cold, distrustful eye of the mountain dweller and of the priest. Then, making up his mind to open his thin lips, he said:

“You are in a gloomy mood. You have been writing to _her_.”

We went out together. I felt his harsh sympathy as he strode by my side. Every one was out of doors, but there were very few groups. Each man walked by himself, rapt in his own visions. Guido remarked:

“It’s extraordinary how little noise they make, eleven hundred warriors!”

STILL SHORT COMMONS

_October 15, 1914._

The happiest moment in the day is in the early morning, when I leave the sleeping casemate. On the staircases, the lamps are flickering to extinction. The passages, always dark, are filled with the stench from the latrines and with what is sometimes termed a “poor smell.” I make a hasty toilet in the kitchen; take my half-pint of coffee from one of the steaming cauldrons; gulp it down without straining it, Turkish fashion; don my coat and my green cap; mount the stairs leading to the upper courts. At length I am out of doors.

Dawn, fresh air, solitude!

This morning I was in a frisky mood. Life seemed good. The cold was biting. The white frost endowed the simplest objects with a Christmas purity. I walked smartly along the broad path which surmounts the escarp. When we arrived at the fort, this path, like the other parapets, was covered with moss and turf; but now, through our continual walking on it, the grass has been worn away. It has become a road.

Though I am a sociable creature, and delight in company, I find it extraordinarily pleasurable to be alone. I need long hours all to myself. In Paris, at Dully, at Lablachère, I never weary of my workroom, where I see no one before luncheon. The mornings are always too short. I don’t know if I ought to regard it as an obsession, but here, when I have been walking for an hour immersed in thoughts and memories, in solitary enjoyment of the quiet northward landscape of fields and forests, my first encounter with a man causes me real discomfort. I cannot be agreeable before midday.

First of all, I made my clandestine and customary visit to your acacias. They grow at the highest point of our domain. A look-out is hidden here. I had long been familiar with a kind of large metal hood which interrupts the long grass for a moment, and projects barely a span above the surface of the soil. Yet had it not been for a recent adventure of two of the prisoners, Noverraz and Laloux, I should never have dreamed that this was a strategic eye, the eye of the fort.

Last Wednesday the men of the heavy artillery were engaged in their final practice before leaving for the Russian front. The idea was that Fort Orff was being attacked by an enemy hidden in Kösching wood, and suddenly appearing to the north of the fort. The object of the defence was to check the onslaught. Stationed to the southward, between Orff and Ingolstadt, near Lenting, the gunners were firing over us, the line of fire almost touching the parapets of the fort. It need hardly be said that, by special order, all access to the parapets had been forbidden from nine till three, while the manœuvres were in progress. The guns thundered; the weather was fine; how dull it seemed, even to men whose legs were weakened from hunger, to be penned in the casemates! At ten o’clock the Protestant service was held. Crowds attended it, so that it was necessary to open both wings of the door, and thus to include in the chapel a gloomy passage which leads up to it. But what was there to do after service? The few who are usually energetic enough to play at prisoners’ base, leapfrog, or some other lively game, in the east court, were itching to be out. The ration snatchers, those who, in the dark corridors, armed with a sharp knife, surreptitiously hack a steak from the passing joint, and those who, when the vegetables are being prepared, filch a turnip or a potato, longed for their open-air kitchens, hastily installed during the intervals between the rounds. The carvers and polishers, who sell pebbles fashioned into képis or into spiked helmets, or simply decorated with the Bavarian arms, sighed for the pleasures of their trade. The whole fortress was heavily uneasy. But who would care to take the risk of going out? The orders issued that morning had been peremptory.

But the cannonade continued, and my friends Noverraz and Laloux, being non-combatants (one is a musician and the other a doctor of medicine), were naturally lovers of military displays. Unable to endure any longer the pharmaceutical aroma of the consulting room, they abandoned the place to Badoy, who, left alone, gave himself up to a profound fit of home-sickness.

Beneath the sombre arches our adventurers go to and fro, exploring the ant-hill. All at once, having entered an unknown region, they discover a narrow staircase. They mount it. It leads to a revolving cupola. What luck! Through the peep-hole in the armoured wall it is possible for them to examine the whole of our northern horizon, right up to the wood. Upon the ploughs, the meadows, and the clover fields, the heavy projectiles from the 21-centimetre guns are falling incessantly. The earth shakes under their impact. Plumes of white smoke, like those emitted by burning straw, rise from the soil. Sometimes, in the clear atmosphere, they can distinguish the actual flight of the projectiles. But the imaginary columns of the assault are drawing nearer. The fire of percussion shells ceases; crackling shrapnel shells take their place. They pass from twenty to fifty yards above the glacis, great balls of dense smoke, from which are emitted in all directions smaller balls, a rain of satellites, which fly to pieces in their turn with the rattling noise of bullets.

Our two red cross men are absorbed in this scene, which lies almost at their feet, when the German quartermaster comes in. Red with wrath, swearing like a cabdriver, he seizes them by the arm, hurls them down the iron stairway, and installs himself in their place. Crestfallen, but at bottom thoroughly well pleased at having enjoyed the sight, they return to the consulting-room to rejoin Badoy and his home-sickness.

This little exploit filled the whole fort with glee.

* * * * *

From the look-out this morning, or let us say from your acacias, the country was exquisitely beautiful. The position of the valleys was indicated by diaphanous bands of blue vapour. They rose softly as far as the border of the pines and vanished there. Birds flew through the silent air, shining in the sunlight. I heard the ploughmen crying “_hue_” to their horses. Beyond the oak coppice which adjoins the glacis on the Wegstetten side, a great herd of oxen was grazing.

All at once a company of Bavarian soldiers appeared upon the military road from behind the eastern redoubt. The men, recruits of the 1914 class, clad in blue tunic, and drill trousers tucked into their boots, bore no arms. They sang loudly as they marched, scanning the rhythm:

Lieb’ Vaterland, magst ruhig sein, Fest steht und treu die Wacht am Rhein![18]

Half way up the incline, between the forest and the fort, they halted. The captain, without dismounting, made them a speech. From a distance it sounded like barking. He stressed his syllables so vigorously that fragments reached my ears notwithstanding the distance. The word _Heimat_, home, came again and again, like a refrain. Then they intoned the national anthem:

Heil dir im Siegerkranz, Herrscher des Vaterlands![19]

They began to manœuvre. The company broke into two parts. One section took up a position in the bushes in front of the wood. The other section went back along the road as far as the glacis, to the oak coppice. The men stood there for a moment. A fat sergeant, the only one wearing the grey-blue uniform of active service, signed to them to fire at me. I could clearly make out his head, set upon a short, thick neck like that of a pig. He made gestures to signify his hostility. I shrugged my shoulders. Then his section, turning away from me, advanced in open formation across the ploughed fields, making as though to attack the men in the bushes.

I ran down the steep slope. A footpath I am fond of runs along it half way up. Were it not for the high wall of the escarp rising parallel with the grassy counterscarp, it would be possible to believe oneself in a peaceable valley in the open country. Here and there, beside the footpath, a few trees are growing—a young oak, stunted and gnarled, some dwarf poplars, a raspberry bush, a hawthorn. Across the ditch, capping the masonry and hiding the view of the plain, is the grassy covering of the first glacis, thickly set with wild rose-trees reddened with hips and haws, and displaying at intervals the silver and golden tints of beautiful little birches. Beyond the two slopes there is nothing to be seen, nothing but the sky. This morning the blue was of a tender liquid tint. At a great altitude tiny clouds were visible, blushing in the dawn.

I never go along this footpath without thinking of my friends de Bavier. I picture myself pacing the steep banks of the Dullive beneath the great dome of the trees. I sit upon my favourite bench. I look at the cool moss on the wheels of the abandoned watermill. Beneath the shifting shade of the beeches and the alders, I listen to the gurgle of the water as it flows over the stones.

This morning I seemed to be in a land of faery. Beneath every dwarf poplar the footpath and the turf were carpeted with yellow leaves, speckled with black, already decaying, and exhaling a penetrating odour of mouldering vegetation. It seemed to me that all the life of my holidays, all the faithful and pure friendship which, since adolescence, has never ceased to surround me at Dully, all the faces and the voices of this beloved house, were coming to me with the autumn vapours, rising from among the first masses of dead leaves.

* * * * *

At seven o’clock I was seated at my table. I found a note from the sergeant of our Bavarian guard, the man who was wounded at Lunéville. It was his farewell.

Yesterday evening he had called me into the guardroom.

“Where are you going?” I asked, when he told me that he was leaving. “Are they sending you to the front?”

“I think so. I am recalled to Kösching to join my regiment.”

“How far is Kösching?”

“About a league. The recruits are billeted there.”

“Does your wound still hurt you?”

“Yes, at night.”

He had given me his chair, and was sitting upon the wood of the smaller platform. He was a young fellow of twenty-five, with regular features, blue eyes, and fair hair cut very short. A fine, downy growth on his rosy cheeks made him look younger. I know little about him. He told me that he lived near Munich, forty kilometres from here. One day when he saw me at work, your photograph made him break his reserve for a moment.

“Is that your _Geliebte_?”

“Yes.”

“For my part, I also was about to be betrothed. But the war has dashed my hopes.”

He said no more. I lacked courage to question him. I understood from the first that this handsome fellow, born for happiness, harboured a secret grief.

Yesterday evening we were for the most part silent. Through the loopholes came the last rays of the setting sun, lighting up the orderly row of rifles in the arm-rack. In the shadow, on the great platform which filled half the room, two Landwehr men were sleeping. My friend Foch, the infantry sergeant, seated on a broached cask, was draining mugs of beer amid a noisy circle of Bavarians. In our corner a pensive peace reigned. My host was preparing me a slice of bread spread with minced meat. I sipped my beer slowly, after the French manner. Then he drew from his haversack a long and thin cigar, pierced by a straw. Handing it to me, he said: “Smoke that, for you like strong tobacco. It is an Austrian cigar, sent me from home.” We said hardly anything more. He speaks but little French, and my German is not very good. All that we knew was that we were happy to be there together.

He has gone now. In four or five days he will be under fire once more.

This is the feast day of the Queen of Bavaria, the _Theresientag_.

“Did you hear the bells?” asked Durupt, when I entered the kitchen. “The sound came from every quarter this morning. It gave me an uneasy feeling. As I passed through Coblenz they were ringing madly for Manonviller.”

When remounting the slopes I had indeed heard the bells, and had noted with surprise that the blue-and-white Bavarian standard was floating over the fort; but meeting Guido outside room 32, I learned from him that it was the _Theresientag_ and I was therefore able to reassure Durupt. The vegetables were now being prepared.

“No more news, no more papers, no more enthusiasm—it suggests the deluge!” says Labassan, a light-hearted fellow, all goitre and paunch, ever playing the fool, nicknamed l’Asticot (the maggot). He peels his potato with inimitable gestures which set the whole circle in fits.

Among them is Bonin, a Parisian, of the 31st of the line, the 31st half-brigade of Valmy, my regiment. On August 24th, at Longuyon in Meurthe-et-Moselle, he was wounded in the face, a bullet passing in at one cheek and out at the other. I am very fond of this little workman of the Marais quarter; his clear and quiet eyes radiate patriotism and good sense.

“Give me a match,” says Loupe, who wears the long white cap of the German “Michael,” its tassel dangling over his ear. With deliberation he lights his great china pipe, adorned with a view of Ingolstadt. Then, having rolled a spill of paper, he asks: “Who wants a light?” He goes the round of the circle, offering his burning spill. “‘_Et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt_,’” he quotes. “Freely translated, ‘Matches are scarce!’” For Loupe is lettered.

“Ah, my poilus,” says a homely fellow of the 26th, a man sturdy as an oak, “it is plain enough that, with all these Maccabees about, the crows will have a fat time of it. They’ll breed like rabbits! But we may hope that after a while there will come the season of the lean kine. When there’s no more human food, they’ll be forced to eat one another.”

“Don’t you worry about the crows,” rejoins a red cross man from Rheims. “It is we who are starving. Some of our men here actually turn over the kitchen refuse to find food!”

Our rations are indeed dwindling. This morning the quartermaster delivered to the kitchen staff so scanty an allowance of coffee and roasted barley that it hardly served to darken the water in our eight cauldrons. On Sunday each man had to be content with 1⅓ oz. of semolina at midday, and with ⅔ oz. of vermicelli in the evening. And what are we to think of this heap of potatoes on the ground at my feet? Is it intended to feed five hundred men, or one section merely? And to-day is the _Theresientag_! Really, matters begin to look serious. It is hardly an exaggeration to say “We are starving!” Who is responsible? Who has made up his mind to turn the fort into a hunger camp? It is certainly not the commandant, a thorough gentleman, kind-hearted, courteous, and just. Who then? Perhaps the quartermaster, an ill-bred Upper Franconian, cross-grained, obstinate as a mule, but whom I should have thought too stupid to be a cheat, is feathering his nest by giving us short allowance. Or is it possible that the ultra-orthodox Monsieur de Hertling, philosopher and prime minister of Bavaria, has made up his mind to starve the prisoners of “the infidel and perverse nation”?

Enter Marie and d’Arnoult. The former, cleared unceremoniously out of the kitchen because his traffic in articles of food became too notorious, is brandishing the censer from the chapel. The requiem mass is about to be said, and on this occasion the old curé of Lenting is to officiate, assisted by nine of our comrades, soldier-priests. The extemporized sacristan has no tongs; crouching before the stove, he is endeavouring with finger and thumb to remove the hot coals destined a few minutes hence to burn incense before the flesh and blood of Christ.

D’Arnoult, of the 6th mounted chasseurs (known in the fort simply as “le Chasseur”), is Major von Stengel’s secretary. He takes his seat by my side. Having read the papers, he is able to inform me that in France the 15th class is to be called up on November 2nd. He relates that the Russians seem inclined to repeat with the Germans the tactics successfully employed against Napoleon: to entice them far into the interior, where they will perish of cold and hunger; to harass them unceasingly by threatened attacks; to break up their forces into incoherent fragments, and then to overwhelm these isolated detachments in detail amid the snows.

The men at work on the vegetables were listening.

“We are likely, then, to stay here for some time,” said one of them.

“Never mind,” says Bonin; “we are better off than we should be at Augsburg. In the Ingolstadt hospital I had a talk with some of the men from the Lechfeld camp. There, I gathered, the prisoners sleep under canvas, mixed higgledy-piggledy with the wounded who are awaiting removal to hospital. There are no plates. They feed by sections, out of a trough. No meat. Nothing but turnips and red cabbage. Not very pleasant, this starvation camp, during the cold winter rains. They would regard our fortress as the lap of luxury!”