To the right it hurried, following the wall of the building. I pursued
it mechanically. At the corner, which I had seen from the window
upstairs, the barbed-wire fence eight feet in height began. The thing
paused, produced a key and unlocked a gate. The first three or four
feet of wire swung inward. He entered. I after him.
In a flash the gate was locked behind me, and I was following along a
wall at right angles to the first. I strode after the thing. A moment
before I had been walking in a free world: now I was again a prisoner.
The sky was still over me, the clammy morning caressed me; but walls of
wire and stone told me that my instant of freedom had departed. I was
in fact traversing a lane no wider than the gate; on my left,
barbed-wire separated me from the famous _cour_ in which _les femmes se
promenent_—a rectangle about 50 feet deep and 200 long, with a stone
wall at the further end of it and otherwise surrounded by wire;—on my
right, grey sameness of stone, the _ennui_ of the regular and the
perpendicular, the ponderous ferocity of silence….
I had taken automatically some six or eight steps in pursuit of the
fleeing spectre when, right over my head, the grey stone curdled with a
female darkness; the hard and the angular softening in a putrescent
explosion of thick wriggling laughter. I started, looked up, and
encountered a window stuffed with four savage fragments of crowding
Face: four livid, shaggy disks focussing hungrily; four pair of uncouth
eyes rapidly smouldering; eight lips shaking in a toothless and viscous
titter. Suddenly above and behind these terrors rose a single horror of
beauty—a crisp vital head, a young ivory, actual face, a night of firm,
alive, icy hair, a white, large, frightful smile.
… The thing was crying two or three paces in front of me: “Come!” The
heads had vanished as by magic.
I dived forward; followed through a little door in the wall into a room
about fifteen feet square, occupied by a small stove, a pile of wood,
and a ladder. He plunged through another even smaller door, into a
bleak rectangular place, where I was confronted on the left by a large
tin bath and on the right by ten wooden tubs, each about a yard in
diameter, set in a row against the wall. “Undress” commanded the
spectre. I did so. “Go into the first one.” I climbed into the tub.
“You shall pull the string,” the spectre said, hurriedly throwing his
cigarette into a corner. I stared upward, and discovered a string
dangling from a kind of reservoir over my head: I pulled: and was
saluted by a stabbing crash of icy water. I leaped from the tub. “Here
is your napkin. Make dry yourself”—he handed me a piece of cloth a
little bigger than a handkerchief. “Hurree.” I donned my clothes, wet
and shivering and altogether miserable. “Good. Come now!” I followed
him, through the room with the stove, into the barbed-wire lane. A
hoarse shout rose from the yard—which was filled with women, girls,
children, and a baby or two. I thought I recognised one of the four
terrors who had saluted me from the window, in a girl of 18 with a
soiled slobby body huddling beneath its dingy dress; her bony shoulders
stifled in a shawl upon which excremental hair limply spouted; a huge
empty mouth; and a red nose, sticking between the bluish cheeks that
shook with spasms of coughing. Just inside the wire a figure
reminiscent of Gré, gun on shoulder, revolver on hip, moved
monotonously.
The apparition hurried me through the gate, and along the wall into the
building, where instead of mounting the stairs he pointed down a long,
gloomy corridor with a square of light at the end of it, saying
rapidly, “Go to the promenade”—and vanished.
With the laughter of the Five still ringing in my ears, and no very
clear conception of the meaning of existence, I stumbled down the
corridor; bumping squarely into a beefy figure with a bull’s neck and
the familiar revolver who demanded furiously: “What are you doing
there? _Nom de Dieu!_”—“_Pardon. Les douches_,” I answered, quelled by
the collision.—He demanded in wrathy French “Who took you to the
douches?”—For a moment I was at a complete loss—then Fritz’s remark
about the new _baigneur_ flashed through my mind: “Ree-shar” I answered
calmly.—The bull snorted satisfactorily. “Get into the _cour_ and hurry
up about it” he ordered.—“_C’est par là?_” I inquired politely.—He
stared at me contemptuously without answering; so I took it upon myself
to use the nearest door, hoping that he would have the decency not to
shoot me. I had no sooner crossed the threshold when I found myself
once more in the welcome air; and not ten paces away I espied B.
peacefully lounging, with some thirty others, within a _cour_ about one
quarter the size of the women’s. I marched up to a little dingy gate in
the barbed-wire fence, and was hunting for the latch (as no padlock was
in evidence) when a scared voice cried loudly “_Qu’est ce que vous
faites là!_” and I found myself stupidly looking into a rifle. B.,
Fritz, Harree, Pompom, Monsieur Auguste, The Bear, and the last but not
least Count de Bragard immediately informed the trembling _planton_
that I was a _Nouveau_ who had just returned from the _douches_ to
which I had been escorted by Monsieur Reeshar, and that I should be
admitted to the _cour_ by all means. The cautious watcher of the skies
was not, however, to be fooled by any such fol-de-rol and stood his
ground. Fortunately at this point the beefy _planton_ yelled from the
doorway “Let him in,” and I was accordingly let in, to the
gratification of my friends, and against the better judgment of the
guardian of the _cour_, who muttered something about having more than
enough to do already.
I had not been mistaken as to the size of the men’s yard: it was
certainly not more than twenty yards deep and fifteen wide. By the
distinctness with which the shouts of _les femmes_ reached my ears I
perceived that the two _cours_ adjoined. They were separated by a stone
wall ten feet in height, which I had already remarked (while _en route_
to _les douches_) as forming one end of the _cour des femmes_. The
men’s _cour_ had another stone wall slightly higher than the first, and
which ran parallel to it; the two remaining sides, which were property
ends, were made by the familiar barbed-wire.
The furniture of the _cour_ was simple: in the middle of the further
end, a wooden sentry-box was placed just inside the wire; a curious
contrivance, which I discovered to be a sister to the booth upstairs,
graced the wall on the left which separated the two _cours_, while
further up on this wall a horizontal iron bar projected from the stone
at a height of seven feet and was supported at its other end by a
wooden post, the idea apparently being to give the prisoners a little
taste of gymnastics; a minute wooden shed filled the right upper corner
and served secondarily as a very partial shelter for the men and
primarily as a stable for an extraordinary water-wagon, composed of a
wooden barrel on two wheels with shafts which would not possibly
accommodate anything larger than a diminutive donkey (but in which I
myself was to walk not infrequently, as it proved); parallel to the
second stone wall, but at a safe distance from it, stretched a couple
of iron girders serving as a barbarously cold seat for any unfortunate
who could not remain on his feet the entire time; on the ground close
by the shed lay amusement devices numbers two and three—a huge iron
cannon-ball and the six-foot iron axle of a departed wagon—for testing
the strength of the prisoners and beguiling any time which might lie
heavily on their hands after they had regaled themselves with the
horizontal bar; and finally, a dozen mangy apple-trees, fighting for
their very lives in the angry soil, proclaimed to all the world that
the _cour_ itself was in reality a _verger_.
“Les pommiers sont pleins de pommes;
Allons au verger, Simone….”
A description of the _cour_ would be incomplete without an enumeration
of the manifold duties of the _planton_ in charge, which were as
follows: to prevent the men from using the horizontal bar, except for
chinning, since if you swung yourself upon it you could look over the
wall into the women’s _cour_; to see that no one threw anything over
the wall into said _cour_; to dodge the cannon-ball which had a
mysterious habit of taking advantage of the slope of the ground and
bounding along at a prodigious rate of speed straight for the
sentry-box; to watch closely anyone who inhabited the _cabinet
d’aisance_, lest he should make use of it to vault over the wall; to
see that no one stood on the girders, for a similar reason; to keep
watch over anyone who entered the shed; to see that everyone urinated
properly against the wall in the general vicinity of the cabinet; to
protect the apple-trees into which well-aimed pieces of wood and stone
were continually flying and dislodging the sacred fruit; to mind that
no one entered or exited by the gate in the upper fence without
authority; to report any signs, words, tokens, or other immoralities
exchanged by prisoners with girls sitting in the windows of the women’s
wing (it was from one of these windows that I had recently received my
salutation), also names of said girls, it being forbidden to exhibit
any part of the female person at a window while the males were on
promenade; to quell all fights and especially to prevent people from
using the wagon axle as a weapon of defense or offense; and last, to
keep an eye on the sweeper when he and his wheelbarrow made use of a
secondary gate situated in the fence at the further end, not far from
the sentry-box, to dump themselves.
Having acquainted me with the various _défendus_ which limited the
activities of a man on promenade, my friends proceeded to enliven the
otherwise somewhat tedious morning by shattering one after another all
rules and regulations. Fritz, having chinned himself fifteen times,
suddenly appeared astride of the bar, evoking a reprimand; Pompom
bowled the _planton_ with the cannon-ball, apologising in profuse and
vile French; Harree the Hollander tossed the wagon-axle lightly half
the length of the _cour_, missing The Bear by an inch; The Bear bided
his time and cleverly hurled a large stick into one of the holy trees,
bringing to the ground a withered apple for which at least twenty
people fought for several minutes; and so on. The most open gestures
were indulged in for the benefit of several girls who had braved the
official wrath and were enjoying the morning at their windows. The
girders were used as a race-track. The beams supporting the shed-roof
were shinned. The water-wagon was dislocated from its proper position.
The cabinet and urinal were misused. The gate was continually admitting
and emitting persons who said they were thirsty, and must get a drink
at a tub of water which stood around the corner. A letter was
surreptitiously thrown over the wall into the _cour des femmes_.
The _planton_ who suffered all these indignities was a solemn youth
with wise eyes situated very far apart in a mealy expressionless
ellipse of face, to the lower end of which clung a piece of down,
exactly like a feather sticking to an egg. The rest of him was fairly
normal with the exception of his hands, which were not mates; the left
being considerably larger, and made of wood.
I was at first somewhat startled by this eccentricity; but soon learned
that with the exception of two or three, who formed the _Surveillant’s_
permanent staff and of whom the beefy one was a shining example, all
the _plantons_ were supposed to be unhealthy; they were indeed the
disabled whom _le gouvernement français_ sent from time to time to La
Ferté and similar institutions for a little outing, and as soon as they
had recovered their health under these salubrious influences they were
shipped back to do their bit for world-safety, democracy, freedom,
etc., in the trenches. I also learned that, of all the ways of
attaining _cabinot_, by far the simplest was to apply to a _planton_,
particularly to a permanent _planton_, say the beefy one (who was
reputed to be peculiarly touchy on this point) the term _embusqué_.
This method never failed. To its efficacy many of the men and more of
the girls (by whom the _plantons_, owing to their habit of taking
advantage of the weaker sex at every opportunity, were even more
despised) attested by not infrequent spasms of consumptive coughing,
which could be plainly heard from the further end of one _cour_ to the
other.
In a little over two hours I learned an astonishing lot about La Ferté
itself: it was a co-educational receiving station whither were sent
from various parts of France (a) males suspected of espionage and (b)
females of a well-known type found in the zone of the armies. It was
pointed out to me that the task of finding such members of the human
race was _pas difficile:_ in the case of the men, any foreigner would
do provided his country was neutral (e.g. Holland); as for the girls,
inasmuch as the armies of the Allies were continually retreating, the
_zone des armées_ (particularly in the case of Belgium) was always
including new cities, whose _petites femmes_ became automatically
subject to arrest. It was not to be supposed that all the women of La
Ferté were _putains_: there were a large number of respectable women,
the wives of prisoners, who met their husbands at specified times on
the floor below the men’s quarters, whither man and woman were duly and
separately conducted by _plantons_. In this case no charges had been
preferred against the women; they were voluntary prisoners, who had
preferred to freedom this living in proximity to their husbands. Many
of them had children; some babies. In addition there were certain
_femmes honnêtes_ whose nationality, as in the case of the men, had
cost them their liberty; Marguerite the washerwoman, for example, was a
German.
La Ferté Macé was not properly speaking a prison, but a Porte or
Detention Camp: that is to say, persons sent to it were held for a
Commission, composed of an official, a lawyer, and a captain of
_gendarmes_, which inspected the Camp and passed upon each case in turn
for the purpose of determining the guiltiness of the suspected party.
If the latter were found guilty by the Commission, he or she was sent
off to a regular prison camp for the duration of the war; if not
guilty, he or she was (in theory) set free. The Commission came to La
Ferté once every three months. It should be added that there were
prisoners who had passed the Commission, two, three, four, and even
five times, without any appreciable result; there were _prisonnierès_
who had remained in La Ferté a year, and even eighteen months.
The authorities at La Ferté consisted of the _Directeur_, or general
overlord, the _Surveillant_, who had the _plantons_ (orderlies) under
him and was responsible to the _Directeur_ for the administration of
the camp, and the _Gestionnaire_ (who kept the accounts). As assistant,
the _Surveillant_ had a mail clerk who acted as translator on occasion.
Twice a week the camp was visited by a regular French army doctor
(_médecin major_) who was supposed to prescribe in severe cases and to
give the women venereal inspection at regular intervals. The daily
routine of attending to minor ailments and injuries was in the hands of
Monsieur Ree-shar (Richard), who knew probably less about medicine than
any man living and was an ordinary prisoner like all of us, but whose
impeccable conduct merited cosy quarters. A sweeper was appointed from
time to time by the _Surveillant_, acting for the _Directeur_, from the
inhabitants of La Ferté; as was also a cook’s assistant. The regular
cook was a fixture, and a Boche like the other fixtures, Marguerite and
Richard. This fact might seem curious were it not that the manner,
appearance and actions of the _Directeur_ himself proved beyond a
shadow of a doubt that he was all which the term Boche could possibly
imply.
“He’s a son-of-a-bitch,” B. said heartily. “They took me up to him when
I came two days ago. As soon as he saw me he bellowed: ‘_Imbécile et
inchrétien!_’; then he called me a great lot of other things, including
Shame of my country, Traitor to the sacred cause of Liberty,
Contemptible coward and Vile sneaking spy. When he got all through I
said ‘I don’t understand French.’ You should have seen him then.”
Separation of the sexes was enforced, not, it is true, with success,
but with a commendable ferocity. The punishments for both men and girls
were dry bread and _cabinot_.
“What on earth is _cabinot?_” I demanded.
There were various _cabinots_: each sex had its regular _cabinot_, and
there were certain extra ones. B. knew all about them from Harree and
Pompom, who spent nearly all their time in the _cabinot_. They were
rooms about nine feet square and six feet high. There was no light and
no floor, and the ground (three were on the ground floor) was always
wet and often a good many inches under water. The occupant on entering
was searched for tobacco, deprived of his or her mattress and blanket,
and invited to sleep on the ground on some planks. One didn’t need to
write a letter to a member of the opposite sex to get _cabinot_, or
even to call a _planton embusqué_—there was a woman, a foreigner, who,
instead of sending a letter to her embassy through the bureau (where
all letters were read by the mail clerk to make sure that they said
nothing disagreeable about the authorities or conditions of La Ferté)
tried to smuggle it outside, and got twenty-eight days of _cabinot_.
She had previously written three times, handing the letters to the
_Surveillant_, as per regulations, and had received no reply. Fritz,
who had no idea why he was arrested and was crazy to get in touch with
his embassy, had likewise written several letters, taking the utmost
care to state the facts only and always handing them in; but he had
never received a word in return. The obvious inference was that letters
from a foreigner to his embassy were duly accepted by the _Surveillant_
(Warden), but rarely, if ever, left La Ferté.
B. and I were conversing merrily à propos the God-sent miracle of our
escape from Vingt-et-Un, when a benign-faced personage of about fifty
with sparse greyish hair and a Benjamin Franklin expression appeared on
the other side of the fence, from the direction of the door through
which I had passed after bumping the beefy bull. “_Planton_” it cried
heavily to the wooden-handed one, “Two men to go get water.” Harree and
Pompom were already at the gate with the archaic water-wagon, the
former pushing from behind and the latter in the shafts. The guardian
of the _cour_ walked up and opened the gate for them, after
ascertaining that another _planton_ was waiting at the corner of the
building to escort them on their mission. A little way from the _cour_,
the stone wall (which formed one of its boundaries and which ran
parallel to the other stone wall dividing the two _cours_) met the
prison building; and here was a huge double door, twice padlocked,
through which the waterseekers passed on to the street. There was a
sort of hydrant up the street a few hundred yards, I was told. The cook
(Benjamin F., that is) required from three to six wagonfuls of water
twice a day, and in reward for the labour involved in its capture was
in the habit of giving a cup of coffee to the captors. I resolved that
I would seek water at the earliest opportunity.
Harree and Pompom had completed their third and final trip and returned
from the kitchen, smacking their lips and wiping their mouths with the
backs of their hands. I was gazing airily into the muddy sky, when a
roar issued from the door-way:
“_Montez les hommes!_” or “Send the men up!”
It was the beefy-necked. We filed from the _cour_, through the door,
past a little window which I was told belonged to the kitchen, down the
clammy corridor, up the three flights of stairs, to the door of The
Enormous Room. Padlocks were unlocked, chains rattled, and the door
thrown open. We entered. The Enormous Room received us in silence. The
door was slammed and locked behind us by the _planton_, whom we could
hear descending the gnarled and filthy stairs.
In the course of a half-hour, which time, as I was informed, intervened
between the just-ended morning promenade and the noon meal which was
the next thing on the program, I gleaned considerable information
concerning the daily schedule of La Ferté. A typical day was divided by
planton-cries as follows:
“_Café_,” “_Corvée d’eau_,” “_Nettoyage de Chambre_,” “_Montez les
Hommes_,” “_A la soupe les hommes_.”
The most terrible cry of all, and which was not included in the regular
program of planton-cries, consisted of the words:
“_Aux douches les hommes_”—when all, sick, dead and dying not excepted,
descended to the baths. Although _les douches_ came only once in 15
days, such was the terror they inspired that it was necessary for the
_planton_ to hunt under mattresses for people who would have preferred
death itself.
Upon remarking that _corvée d’eau_ must be excessively disagreeable, I
was informed that it had its bright side, viz., that in going to and
from the sewer one could easily exchange a furtive signal with the
women who always took pains to be at their windows at that moment.
Influenced perhaps by this, Harree and Pompom were in the habit of
doing their friends’ _corvées_ for a consideration. The girls, I was
further instructed, had their _corvée_ (as well as their meals) just
after the men; and the miraculous stupidity of the _plantons_ had been
known to result in the coincidence of the two.
At this point somebody asked me how I had enjoyed my shower?
I was replying in terms of unmeasured opprobrium when I was interrupted
by that gruesome clanking and rattling which announced the opening of
the door. A moment later it was thrown wide, and the beefy-neck stood
in the doorway, a huge bunch of keys in his paw, and shouted:
“_A la soupe les hommes._”
The cry was lost in a tremendous confusion, a reckless
thither-and-hithering of humanity, everyone trying to be at the door,
spoon in hand, before his neighbour. B. said calmly, extracting his own
spoon from beneath his mattress on which we were seated: “They’ll give
you yours downstairs and when you get it you want to hide it or it’ll
be pinched”—and in company with Monsieur Bragard, who had refused the
morning promenade, and whose gentility would not permit him to hurry
when it was a question of such a low craving as hunger, we joined the
dancing roaring throng at the door. I was not too famished myself to be
unimpressed by the instantaneous change which had come over The
Enormous Room’s occupants. Never did Circe herself cast upon men so
bestial an enchantment. Among these faces convulsed with utter
animalism I scarcely recognised my various acquaintances. The
transformation produced by the _planton’s_ shout was not merely
amazing; it was uncanny, and not a little thrilling. These eyes
bubbling with lust, obscene grins sprouting from contorted lips, bodies
unclenching and clenching in unctuous gestures of complete savagery,
convinced me by a certain insane beauty. Before the arbiter of their
destinies some thirty creatures, hideous and authentic, poised,
cohering in a sole chaos of desire; a fluent and numerous cluster of
vital inhumanity. As I contemplated this ferocious and uncouth miracle,
this beautiful manifestation of the sinister alchemy of hunger, I felt
that the last vestige of individualism was about utterly to disappear,
wholly abolished in a gambolling and wallowing throb.
The beefy-neck bellowed:
“Are you all here?”
A shrill roar of language answered. He looked contemptuously around
him, upon the thirty clamouring faces each of which wanted to eat
him—puttees, revolver and all. Then he cried:
“_Allez, descendez._”
Squirming, jostling, fighting, roaring, we poured slowly through the
doorway. Ridiculously. Horribly. I felt like a glorious microbe in huge
absurd din irrevocably swathed. B. was beside me. A little ahead
Monsieur Auguste’s voice protested. Count Bragard brought up the rear.
When we reached the corridor nearly all the breath was knocked out of
me. The corridor being wider than the stairs allowed me to inhale and
look around. B. was yelling in my ear:
“Look at the Hollanders and the Belgians! They’re always ahead when it
comes to food!”
Sure enough: John the Bathman, Harree and Pompom were leading this
extraordinary procession. Fritz was right behind them, however, and
pressing the leaders hard. I heard Monsieur Auguste crying in his
child’s voice:
“If every-body goes slow-er we will ar-rive soon-er. You mustn’t act
like that!”
Then suddenly the roar ceased. The mêlée integrated. We were marching
in orderly ranks. B. said:
“The Surveillant!”
At the end of the corridor, opposite the kitchen window, there was a
flight of stairs. On the third stair from the bottom stood (teetering a
little slowly back and forth, his lean hands joined behind him and
twitching regularly, a kepi tilted forward on his cadaverous head so
that its visor almost hid the weak eyes sunkenly peering from under
droopy eyebrows, his pompous rooster-like body immaculately attired in
a shiny uniform, his puttees sleeked, his cross polished)—The Fencer.
There was a renovated look about him which made me laugh. Also his pose
was ludicrously suggestive of Napoleon reviewing the armies of France.
Our column’s first rank moved by him. I expected it to continue ahead
through the door and into the open air, as I had myself done in going
from _les douches_ to _le cour;_ but it turned a sharp right and then
sharp left, and I perceived a short hall, almost hidden by the stairs.
In a moment I had passed The Fencer myself and entered the hall. In
another moment I was in a room, pretty nearly square, filled with rows
of pillars. On turning into the hall the column had come almost to a
standstill. I saw that the reason for this slowing-down lay in the fact
that on entering the room every man in turn passed a table and received
a piece of bread from the chef. When B. and I came opposite the table
the dispenser of bread smiled pleasantly and nodded to B., then
selected a large hunk and pushed it rapidly into B.’s hands with an air
of doing something which he shouldn’t. B. introduced me, whereupon the
smile and selection was repeated.
“He thinks I’m a German,” B. explained in a whisper, “and that you are
a German too.” Then aloud, to the cook: “My friend here needs a spoon.
He just got here this morning and they haven’t given him one.”
The excellent person at the bread table hereupon said to me: “You shall
go to the window and say I tell you to ask for spoon and you will catch
one spoon”—and I broke through the waiting line, approached the
kitchen-window, and demanded of a roguish face within:
“A spoon, please.”
The roguish face, which had been singing in a high faint voice to
itself, replied critically but not unkindly:
“You’re a new one?”