French prejudice, but I came to doubt the reality of German liberalism,
and to regard as isolated and uprooted exceptions those young men in
whose company I had recently breathed the pure air of democracy.
No, I said to myself at this time, the German nation sets no value
upon civil liberty; its Protestantism is mere window-dressing; its
Reformation, in contradistinction to that of Calvin, was solely the work
of its princes (_cujus regio hujus religio_); if there were any logic in
events, the Germans ought to be Roman Catholics, whilst we ought to be
members of the reformed church and modernists; Catholicism flourishes,
and socialism is so successful, in Germany, only because both the one and
the other correspond to a general need for regimentation and tutelage,
furnishing an equivalent for military discipline to all those who come
forth from barrack life. I noted, in fact, that German socialism had
nothing in common with our own; that it did not represent the proletariat
at all; that it was a sort of sub-bourgeoisie, comfortable, well-off,
placid, and lacking that revolutionary fervour which arises from an
outraged conscience; that it constituted a bureaucracy, a hierarchy, a
church based upon Marxist dogma; and that it owed its unbroken unity to
the complete absence of thought and passion among its members.
At such times it seemed to me that the Prussian army was precisely suited
to the German nation, desirous, not of self-respect, but of material
well-being, friendly to that which controlled it, a people loving to be
led. Yes, I said, such a nation needs such an army. And how fond the
people is of the army. The bourgeois look upon it with fatuous affection.
The kinglets of the empire are all eager to Prussianize themselves within
the framework of this army; they all long to secure high command for
themselves, if possible to become army inspectors, considering that the
red band confers as much distinction as their crowns. I even went so
far as to tax with duplicity the liberals of the great commercial and
manufacturing world, comparing them to some territorial chief, who in
outward aspect was pious and good-mannered, but who in an out-of-the-way
court of his castle kept a number of hungry bears, prepared to loose
them, as a final argument, upon any one who ventured to annoy him.
At Dresden I had received a letter from M. Lichtwark, containing the
following phrase: “The two finest types of modern man are the English
gentleman and the German officer.” It is too plain, I exclaimed, Germany
worships her army; Germany worships herself in her army; the army is
Germany; the army dominates the entire country, just as the colossal
figure of stone which commemorates the iron chancellor dominates with its
huge symbolic sword the port of Hamburg and the forest of masts in the
Elbe!
This doubt concerning the future of my young liberals returned
periodically to sadden me. It was like an intermittent fever.
Was it possible to believe that they had the remotest chances of success,
the Teuton Vergniauds who thought of renewing, after the lapse of a
century, the adventure of the constituent assembly? Had they any clear
idea of the terrible power of absolutism incarnate in the junkers and
in the Prussian officers? These had no resemblance whatever to our
eighteenth-century seigneurs, light-hearted, winning, generous, and
philosophic—such men as Noailles, d’Aiguillon, and Montmorency, who
spontaneously despoiled themselves on the 4th of August. I foresaw that
it would be crushed without pity, this liberal impulse, so fragile even
in its strength, the instant it transcended the sphere of art and letters.
“Give us ten years,” the Munich socialist frequently said. “By that time
the crown prince of Bavaria, who is a liberal, will have become king;
the Prussian electoral system, the Bastille of the autocracy, will have
been destroyed. But if we fail in Prussia, we shall have done with legal
methods, and our watchword will be _Vive la Révolution_! For the death of
William II will mean the regime of the sabre.”
“Ten years,” I rejoined, “is a long time in an epoch of tense and
threatening rivalries. Are you not afraid that before this period comes
to an end fear of democracy, ambition, and economic needs may force your
government to declare war against us?
“You will all be famous soldiers of the Kaiser, should that happen,
you good liberals and socialists. You imagine yourselves opposed to
militarism. But, without knowing it, you are its best resource, its great
accomplice. You are such ardent patriots. You have so fanatical a belief
in the destiny of Germany. How trifling is the difference between you and
the pangermanists. You desire hegemony without war; they desire it at
all costs, even if they have to fight for it. What does this distinction
matter? It will be so easy, when the right moment comes, to befool
you. It will be so easy for the wolf to appear in sheep’s clothing; to
masquerade as a victim; to pretend that Germany has been invaded; to
give to a war of aggression and conquest the sacred aspect of a war of
national defence!
“Let us suppose that, through ill-luck, the war ends in a German success.
Good-bye, then, to your dreams, to European idealism, to democratic
dogmas. Great will be the discomfiture of your Tugendbund. The days of
the Holy Alliance will return. When peace comes under these conditions
your ‘borns,’ on their manorial estates, will luxuriate in the pious
certitude that they are essentially different from the ‘not-borns,’ and
that God has predestined them to be masters and leaders of men, just as,
in the beginning, He created the white elephant and the royal tiger.
Then, perhaps, in our defeat, we shall regretfully recall Sembat’s
formula, _Faites un roi, sinon faites la paix_; then we shall hail
Maurras as a prophet; inspired with a sense of renewed virtue, we shall
mock at the civic dream which was our chief glory; and we shall fill
the world, again become feudal, with the clamour of our repentance. A
fine spectacle indeed would be such a repudiation by France of the great
vision of fraternal justice with which she intoxicated the nations. What
will you do in those days, you German democrats, when the mother of all
democracy is vanquished, when the only disinterested champion of your
ideal has perished at your hands?
“But you may rest easy in your minds, for we have no intention of dying.
We have agreed to three years’ military service. We should agree, if
needs must, to four years or to five. And do not, for this reason, accuse
us of militarism. Our militarism is the militarism of Valmy. Full well
do you know that we have no hidden thoughts of aggression or oppression.
When we consented to the increase of our army, it was doubtless with a
sincere desire to witness the overthrow of the barbarism of the kaisers
and the crown princes, but we have never ceased to be faithful to the
revolutionary watchword: ‘Let us vote for war upon the tyrants and for
peace with the peoples!’”
* * * * *
The socialist of Munich, Wichert, the president of the _Freistudenten_,
Moritz von Bethmann—how far away does it all seem now. They have killed;
we have killed. Their glances full of youth and intelligence, which,
when I was a free traveller, I received frankly, face to face, man to
man; our conversations; our blossoming friendship; our common hope; the
ideal, dear to Nietzsche, of the “good European”—what fragile things you
are, beautiful creations of the mind!
Shivering on the cement floor of the casemate during the first night of
my imprisonment here, I was continually haunted by the faces of my German
friends. They did not smile at me as of old. Their eyes flashed. They
glared at me like hawks. They pierced me; they wounded me. I was sad,
sick at heart. How difficult it is to endure hatred. I seemed to hear
bells ringing in my empty head. And always I seemed to see my friends’
eyes, strangely transformed, harsh, greedy eyes burning with ambition,
cruel, the eyes of treasure-hunters, such as one sees on the friezes of
Susa in the beast faces of the Assyrian kings with long perfumed beards.
Here I squat in a corner of this crypt, hungry, thirsty, stupefied,
my brain inert, lacking energy to do anything, looking on at my own
adventures as if they were those of a stranger. Images of my experiences
in the campaign, in which I seemed to have suffered fatigues beyond the
limits of the credible, pass idly and almost indifferently through my
mind. Already I seem to regard these experiences with indifference, like
those military descriptions in Cæsar or Sallust, which no longer stir any
one’s emotions. I am aware of nothing but my body. It seems strange to
a man who believed himself to live upon ideas, to be reduced to become
nothing but a stomach. I thought of Rabelais this morning, of Gargantua
surrendering himself to his pleasures, of Frère Jean des Entommeures
“wetting his whistle.” My imagination wallowed in the sensuous delights,
in the gigantic satisfactions of appetite, with which the four books
abound. One needs to be positively starving to appreciate to the full the
groaning boards of the monk of Chinon.
* * * * *
Our division had been sacrificed beforehand. Charged, I imagine, to
protect the retreat, it had held firm. How, and for how long? A private
in modern warfare knows nothing. This much, at least, is certain, that
the division was wiped out. The battle moved away from us. The sound of
the cannonade became more remote. Suddenly there ensued an intense calm.
Of the horrible struggle, with the noise of which my ears were still
ringing, there remained no sign beyond the abominable stench of the
bodies now beginning to putrefy in the fallows and the vineyards beside
the forest of Bride, and from time to time, rising from the deserted
hollows, the prolonged and lamentable cries of the wounded who had been
abandoned.
At Kerprich, in the district of Dieuze, in annexed Lorraine, I passed my
first week of captivity.
What a week! Among the rear-guard of the German army which flowed on like
a river, dropping with sleep and weariness, again and again aimed at by
the patrols, by day and by night I carted human flesh. Dead, and more
dead, dead men of all sorts, those who had been killed instantly in the
heat of action, those who had bled to death from their wounds, men who,
after being wounded, had been finished off by the scouts, had been shot
at close range when they were asking for water or were endeavouring to
keep themselves alive by eating lucerne; then there were the half dead,
men shot through the head, men whose chests had been riddled; men shot
through the groin. When I looked at these disfigured and groaning masses
of flesh, it seemed to me as if my nerves were being scraped. The rest
of the wounded found their way in unaided, running, limping, dragging
themselves along, helping themselves with a stick, crawling on all fours.
It was appalling. I saw an infantryman who had been shot through the
chest and who had walked alone for a league, holding a white flag. He had
lost almost all the blood in his body. I do not know by what miraculous
strength of will he kept going. When he reached the field hospital he
said: “I waited four days for some one to come. I am thirsty. I feel
better, but I am thirsty.” He smiled. He was beautiful, this young man,
like a waxen St. Sebastian. Then, without a word more, he fell dead.
I had been assigned to the tent where those most dangerously wounded were
brought. There were about forty of them, upon a thin layer of straw,
and some even on the bare ground. The place swarmed with flies, and it
stank of dejecta and of dead bodies. When the sun was high, the heat was
stifling. In the evening, the patients’ teeth chattered with cold. Some
of them were lads of the 20th corps, men with the colours when the war
broke out, all Parisians, of simple and engaging courage, and able to
take an interest in their bedfellows. There were men from Provence, the
pain of whose wounds forced tears from their eyes, and who confided to me
their amours as they might have done to a sister. When the pain was at
its worst, they all cried out: “Maman!” It was heartrending.
I tended them. By day and by night, a thousand times I ministered to
their needs. There were but two basins for seven hundred and twenty
wounded. I made part of a shell serve me for a third. I watched the
dying; I gave what consolation I could; I buried the dead. Always guarded
by two Pomeranian soldiers, I went through the village begging soup for
the poor lads. The inhabitants were utterly terrorized. Some of the
women, one of them lame and one but a girl of twelve, astonished me by
their persistent kindness. Under the eyes of the Germans as they were,
the ardour they displayed, simply Christian in character, was truly
heroic. Often, however, I had to make up for the lack of rations by a gay
speech, overflowing with hope. Continually it was necessary to remake
the straw pillows under the heads of the wounded, to rearrange their
bedding, to help them to move. Always, beneath the low canvas roof, was
to be heard the same orchestra of cries, hollow sighs, death rattles,
and lamentations. Occasionally, during the long, cold night, lacking
strength to carry the body of some comrade who had just died all the way
across the meadow to the burial pit, dropping the dead man, I would fall
beside him and go to sleep there.
On the 20th, when our field hospital was already in fair order, a
Prussian captain came by with his company. He stopped, commandeered the
horse of our surgeon-in-chief, M. Bergé, and promptly mounted it. Then,
in grating and sonorous French, he called out: “Fear nothing, wounded. I
know that in your newspapers—I read them, the _Figaro_, the _Temps_—they
term us barbarians. We are not barbarians. For my part, I bear a French
name; I am the descendant of French refugees. My name is Charles de
Beaulieu. I swear to you that you will be well cared for in Germany.
Germany respects the red cross.”
At noon on the 28th, having sent away those fit for transport and also
those unfit, having performed a last amputation, and having buried
the rest of the dead, we set out, with empty stomachs. What was our
destination? The innocents, of whom I was one, had no doubt that we
should be sent back to France by way of Switzerland. The others, those
who had seen the wounded being finished off, especially the wounded
officers, declared: “The German military authorities are unrelenting,
even though the rankers are good fellows. The patrols who finished off
the officers and some of the sergeant-majors were acting on strict
orders. If they had been inspired by personal ill-feeling, do you think
it likely that they would give coffee and brandy to the wounded as they
do often enough? Would they stop to tend them? It is the high command
which is responsible for this base practice. Do you think those who set
so little store upon the lives of the wounded will respect the red cross?”
Thus it was that, while we were on our way to Dieuze, carefully escorted,
the members of our little troop were debating the question: “Are we
merely detained for a time, or are we prisoners?” At Dieuze we were
marched round the town. This was not necessary in order to reach the
railway station, and our capture hardly seemed to afford adequate ground
for a triumphal procession. But it was evidently considered desirable to
show us off to the inhabitants, who made no sign.
A week earlier, when we had entered Dieuze as conquerors, the shopkeepers
had filled our pockets with chocolate and sweetmeats; the publicans had
given us free drinks. “Above all,” said the people of Dieuze in plain
terms, “take care that they never set foot here again!” Wishing for a
French-German dictionary, I begged a townsman to get me one. “I don’t use
the article,” he said; “I know no German.” He called his daughter and
she brought me her own dictionary. “Pay yourself,” I said, offering her
my purse. “Oh, monsieur,” she answered, “I could not take money from a
French soldier!” On the sideboard there stood a goblet, and she filled it
for me with Moselle.
Throughout the little Lorraine town there was the lively commotion of a
feast day. The army and the populace were exchanging cheerful brotherly
greetings. This delight at seeing one another again seemed so natural.
Night fell. The weather was clear and warm. The noise of firing reached
us from the vine-clad hills. The regiments were drawn up in line of
battle in the streets. A hundred yards from the houses, behind the
stooks, a French battery was shooting towards Vargaville. Having walked
out to this battery, I enjoyed the only sight of beauty I had during my
campaign.
In the calm air, the smoke plumes of the German shrapnel looked like
fireworks. Near by, one of our regiments, spread out like a fan, was
advancing through the oats. The men had spent the night in the barracks
of the light horse. Further on, in the stubble and the green fields,
under a rain of shells, the Alpinists were at work with their rifles,
in cheerful mood. In good order they mounted the northern slope of the
smiling basin between Dieuze and Vargaville. It looked like one of Van
der Meulen’s pictures. The sun was setting. The perfumed air was filled
with shafts of light. After each discharge, the song of the birds and
the humming of the insects was audible. Then, the limbers having been
attached, the battery went off at the trot to another position.
On the 28th, on the contrary, Dieuze was like a city of the dead. No one
appeared at the windows. Huge flags, celebrating the fall of Manonviller,
had been hoisted by German orders. There was a gloomy silence, like
that of a deserted inn, like that of Paris at four in the morning; but
instead of the carts of the market gardeners and of the dustmen, there
were heaps of empty knapsacks, broken rifles, rags soiled with blood and
clay, which had been carted in from the battlefield. We marched quickly,
keeping the French step, so that our guards were out of breath. Grey-clad
regiments passed us without a word. When our progress was arrested by a
number of forage wagons filled with wounded, a tall Prussian colonel,
on horseback, wearing an eyeglass, accosted us in French, saying: “Fous
n’afez pas honte, fous la témocratie française, d’être les alliés des
Russes, ces Parpares?”[7] Not one of us made answer. We did not even
look at him. He sat there motionless. However, showing him my armlet, I
inquired, “Are we detained, or are we prisoners?”
“Prisoners! You fire on our field hospitals!”
“Allow me to say, monsieur, that I do not believe it.” Then we resumed
our march.
The station; the long wait; the block of carts filled with wounded; a
light cavalryman on foot, with bandaged head, advancing towards us,
hatred in his eyes, threatening us with his revolver; the search of
our knapsacks; the confiscation of our maps, knives, forks, razors,
punches—everything which could be used for cutting or piercing. Then we
entrained.
I am so foolish as to believe in the good faith of humanity. It seemed to
me incredible that a civilized nation would not respect the red cross.
“Unquestionably,” I said, “they will send us to Switzerland.”—“We shall
see,” answered Riffard, “whether our journey leads us southwards.” Were
we going south? This was the great question in dispute. Every one looked
at his watch and examined the position of the sun. Since the railway
line made zigzags, running sometimes to the south and sometimes to the
north, we became divided into two camps, the “southerners” and the
“northerners,” the light of heart and the foreboders of evil. At times
the dispute between the two factions waxed lively.
After a run northward, the train passed through Bensdorf, and at
nightfall we found ourselves in the great station of Strasburg. There
we were ordered to get out. We were shut up in a room on the landing,
below the level of the railway, giving on the street. Through the grated
door the passers-by gazed in on us. I was kept awake by the cold and my
recent memories of the town. After some hours came the order _Vorwärts_,
and a fresh entrainment. What was our destination? The first glimmer
of dawn showed us the green hills of Alsace covered with plum-trees.
Alas, we were going northward. Saargemünd. Rhenish Prussia. Saarbrück.
Oh, Saarbrück! What a reception we had from the women of Saarbrück! My
ears still tingle with their execrations. Then came the Palatinate, then
Philippsburg. Good-bye to hope! I did not see the Rhine, for we crossed
it in the middle of the night, and I was sleeping on the floor between
the seats.
It was obvious when we awoke that we were going down hill. We crossed
the duchy of Baden, traversed Würtemberg by way of Stuttgart and the
Swabian Jura, with its green valleys, its woods, and its sparkling
rivulets; at length, after crossing monotonous plains, at the bottom of a
hill we reached Ulm, nestling on the Danube beneath its graceful Gothic
cathedral. Our halt was made at Neu-Ulm, the first town we came to in
Bavaria, and a town which I shall never forget, for it was there that we
made the second meal of our journey. It consisted of a bowl of vermicelli
soup in which a gobbet of meat was swimming. The previous day, at
Zweibrücken (otherwise known as Deux-Ponts), we had been given a slice of
_Leberwurst_. This pittance seemed heavenly to us, for we were starving
after a three days’ fast. Be blessed among all the towns of Germany,
Neu-Ulm and Zweibrücken!
For the third time since our departure from Dieuze night fell. The train
continued its journey, and its direction was now south-south-east. The
southern faction was on the increase, and the wind was setting in the
direction of hope. In the course of an animated discussion, rendered
lively by hunger and by the doubts which Guido expressed as to the
likeliness of our liberation, I fell asleep. At two o’clock in the
morning the train stopped. I did not wake up. Abbé Guido, tough and
rugged like the mountain district in which he toiled, one of those
peasant priests who wed the church with fanatical asperity, just as they
would have wedded their land, Guido was not asleep. He was sitting all
of a heap in the corner of the carriage, wearing his képi wrong side
before, smoking cigarettes. From time to time the sardonic fold of his
lips was rendered yet more bitter by a sigh as he said: “Ah! vidasse!
qué vidasse!”[8] He must have given vent to the apostrophe, which showed
his utter weariness of life, twenty times at least, when, morning having
come, I awakened to the sound of this malediction.
It was an oppressive day. The sun was fierce; the sky leaden, without
soul, without life. In the carriage it was stifling.
“Where are we?”
“At Ingolstadt.”
Ingolstadt! The “forty propositions,” Luther, Father Eck, the celebrated
attempt to unite the two churches, the great “disputations” of the
sixteenth century. But the sight of the bayonets of the Bavarian guard on
the platform dispersed my train of reminiscences.
My stomach was complaining loudly. We were told that the stop was for
six hours. The sergeant of the guard assured us that we were to be sent
to Switzerland. Then a medical officer, thick-lipped and hook-nosed,
with small, laughing eyes, a man who waddled continually with a sort
of conceited good-nature, passed through the carriage, and said in a
nasal accent: “Pas te malades? Pas te fièvres tes gôlônies?”[9] This
Judaico-Swabian French revived our spirits. But the gnawing in our
stomachs continued. Would they not give us a slice of _Wurst_ or a plate
of soup with a gobbet of meat in it? But they brought us nothing. The six
hours had passed. The midday heat made the blood boil in our veins.
It happened but yesterday, and yet it has aged me by a century. I say
it without hatred, without the shadow of a desire for vengeance. Under
the ancien régime the crowd was amenable without restriction to talliage
and to the corvée; now that it reigns, the crowd is gullible without
restriction; it is nothing better than an unstable puff of vapour at the
mercy of the winds. My heart is filled with pity for the crowd.