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.
These were their happy days. The gateway leading to the open was black
on Sundays with a gaping crowd: townsfolk in their Sunday best, wearing
cocks’ feathers in their green felt hats; rich farmers’ wives trying
to look comfortable in hats; swarms of children, for the most part
bare-footed; peasants in ill-fitting ready-made clothes; pathetic village
dames, clad as in Dürer’s pictures, the head covered with a kerchief,
a black fichu over the shoulders, a wadded corsage to fill out their
figures. All these idlers, looking poverty stricken when compared with
those of like class in France, would spend hour after hour staring at
the “pantalons rouges,” occasionally shouting through the bars their
eternal “Paris _kaput_,” the cry which had been reiterated from Dieuze to
Strasburg, from Stuttgart to Ingolstadt, and with which our ears had been
ringing since our capture.
This foolish jubilation exasperated Durupt. He kept quiet about it for
some days. At length, however, having recovered his spirits, he threw
himself heart and soul into the task of keeping up our hopes.
“It is absolutely impossible that we can be beaten,” he would say to the
preachers of evil. “Agreed, their advance guards are at Rheims, Meaux,
and Compiègne. But does this mean that Paris has been taken? What about
the naval guns with which the Government has filled the forts? Make your
minds easy; they will lose much time and much blood before they will
plant their standard on the Place de la Concorde! Let us suppose the
worst. Let us suppose that Paris has fallen. Does that finish the matter?
Remember Chanzy’s plan. In his view, the strategic bastion of France is
not Paris but the Massif Central, the Auvergne and Cévennes mountains.
Let them make their way, then, to Clermont-Ferrand and Aurillac! Besides,
we are not fighting single-handed. The Russian waterspout is getting
ready, and will soon break over them; it will make short work of their
five poor army corps. Its waters will dash on to Berlin. The floods will
chase their navy out of the Kiel Canal, will force it into the North
Sea—where the English dreadnoughts are awaiting it, and will swallow it
at one gulp!”
The least enthusiastic among the prisoners were enraptured at these
speeches. Sometimes a voice would be heard saying, “Even so, we shall be
here till the spring!” To which Durupt would peremptorily reply: “All
Saints’ Day will find us at home! I know Germany as I know the palm of my
hand. The country is penniless. Moreover, it is not with France alone,
this time, that Germany has to do; she has to fight France, Belgium,
England, and Russia—that ocean of humanity. You must be mad, I tell you,
if you do not feel that Germany is going to be wiped out!”
In these surroundings, Durupt is the man with a duty, a mission. Though
he is a prisoner, every hour is fully occupied, each moment has its
allotted task. His life is governed by a single rule: “Every day in which
we fail to enlarge our own hopes and to spread discouragement among the
Germans is a day lost.” Consequently, the essential matter for him is to
secure news.
The instant he has finished his supervision of the distribution of our
meals and his work in casemate 16, off he goes on the hunt. He accosts
Max, the canteen-keeper, the mightiest beer-drinker on the Upper Danube,
a light-hearted soldier, florid, paunchy, so rough that he laughs when
he tells you that in the Vosges a French shrapnel has just taken off
his brother’s arm, and yet, though rough, a good fellow. It is from him
that Durupt learns the gossip in the _Wirtschaften_ of Hepperg, Lenting,
Kösching, Wegstätten, Oberhaumstadt—in a word, in all the village taverns
within reach of the fort, both on the hills and in the plain. Having
finished with Max, he proceeds to pump the guard.