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!”
The potatoes have been peeled. Now for the turnips. The soldiers cut
slices and chew them raw while they are at work. Poor devils!
The task is done. They sweep up the peelings. How limp are their
movements! To think that they are all men between twenty and thirty years
of age. The Lenting curé told us in one of his sermons: “You have been
welcomed here as friends.” Major von Stengel hit the mark more aptly one
Sunday. Apropos of the fact that all through the week, from matins to
compline, the religious services had been diligently said, he remarked:
“Sie würden lieber etwas mehr Brot haben, als so viele christliche
Seelensorge.”[20]
But d’Arnoult has kept his principal item of news for a tit-bit. A man
named Schieder, one of the two grocers of Hepperg, house number 31,
jealous at finding that his trade rival was exclusively patronized
for the clandestine purchases made on our behalf by the soldiers of
the guard, has just written a furious letter to Commanding Officer
Major Baron von Stengel. His first complaint is that the commandant’s
boot-cleaning orderly has insulted his (the commandant’s) wife, “going
to the length of making indecent and public observations upon the
imperfections of her face and figure—conduct unworthy of the German
army and the German name.” The letter proceeds: “Further, it is an open
secret that the aforesaid orderly returns daily from the village of
Hepperg laden with a huge bundle of rolls, sticks of chocolate, boxes
of cigarettes and of cigars, not to mention butter, sausages, smoked
ham, and roast goose—conduct even more scandalous, if possible, than the
insults offered to your honoured lady, for it transforms into an abode of
bliss a national fortress where it is intended that the petulant pride of
the French should experience salutary suffering.” The worthy grocer, in
order to give vent to his spleen, had pirated all the grandiloquence he
could find in the local papers. It was extremely laughable. But d’Arnoult
and I saw another side as well as the amusing one. Were we to be cut
off from our extra supplies? The commandant had already summoned his
_Wichser_, and after administering a temperate reprimand, had forbidden
him to revisit Hepperg. Without losing his head, Georg (we, his patrons,
speak of him thus familiarly) pointed out to the _Herr Major_ that it
was necessary to go somewhere for his honour’s marketing. “You will go
to Kösching!”—“At your orders, _Herr Major_, but Kösching is an hour’s
walk!”—“Very well, you will go to Kösching for three days; Hepperg is out
of bounds for three days!”
Le Chasseur concluded by saying: “But after all, I am convinced that
the commandant will let the matter drop. This laborious letter reeks
too much of the counter. Von Stengel has no fancy to see his gentility
contaminated by association with the greasy scales of Schieder the
grocer!”
It is already ten o’clock. I shall hardly get any more work done to-day.
The “salon” is becoming a forum. My comrades are very good. They say: “I
don’t want to bother you. I’ve only just looked in to shake hands.” But
they ask for news; they give me their own; they retail the latest canard.
There is always a canard in the fort. To-day, for example, the talk
in the courtyards is that the Russians have taken Breslau. To pay the
Germans out for the famous _Paris kaput_, those of us who are least able
to speak German do not hesitate to greet the gentle Stheer, the assistant
quartermaster, with a cheerful “_Breslau kaput_.” Naturally I protest,
for the news is too utterly ridiculous. So here I am sketching a map of
the military operations. Dutrex breaks off his reading of Ibsen’s _John
Gabriel Borkmann_ to quote the latest issues of the _Münchener_. Durupt
mingles his invincible hope with the debate. It is interminable! And my
poor studies lie neglected.
I HAVE A PALLIASSE
_October 17, 1914._
When I went out at seven o’clock there was a mist. It had the same
smell, piquant and wholesome, as at Dully. The landscape was Japanese.
I could have imagined myself looking at the right-hand kakemono in the
drawing-room which gives on to the conservatory. The pretty village of
Hepperg, brought near by a curious optical illusion, was stumped out in a
long silhouette in the background, a delicate piece of filigree work seen
through the soft, silky vapour. Here and there in the foreground crows
made rich black markings. It was exquisite. There was no one else on
the parapets. I walked for some time along the northern rampart. It was
impossible to have too much of this autumn morning.
Two or three images rose to my mind. Chief of all was that of a walk in
the Bois which we made just at the last with Guite, to talk about you.
A thick mist was hovering over the lake. Invisible boats passed to and
fro. Their lanterns were like large red moons gliding softly through the
darkness. The island was illuminated; strains of music floated across to
us. We were seated near the water. Close at hand was a tree, bending over
and dipping its long locks into the lake. It recalled Hokusai’s pictures.
Next day I was to leave for Trouville.
It is strange. I had forgotten my captivity. I had forgotten the war,
the battlefields of Lorraine, Belgium, and Poland. I had forgotten the
terrible nights spent upon the bloody field of Kerprich. As I looked
at the slender steeple of Hepperg church rising above the morning
mist-wreaths, the only visions I had were those of a world at peace. The
little yellowing birches on the slopes had transported me to Dully. The
splendid purples of the oaks at la Lignière, the ruddy golden tints of
the horse-chestnut avenue, the Virginia creeper garlanding with vermilion
the windows of the house, and all the familiar noises of this corner of
earth where I have spent so many sweet and happy autumns—filled with
these visions, I looked and listened with rapture.
But little by little the sun had dispersed the mist. The slopes were
thronged with prisoners. Their groups formed bright spots of colour
in the pearly light. A sort of calm languor, of slow and melancholy
serenity, seemed to have passed from nature into their hearts and their
gestures.
The sunlight was so sweet that I had delayed upon the ramparts beyond
my usual hour. When I went indoors again I brought with me a bouquet of
autumn leaves—the leaves of your poplars.
“What on earth are you going to do with that?” cried Ancey Redbeard, whom
we tease here because he looks like a Bavarian.
Le Second stood beside him, engaging little Le Second, the designer to
Poiret, the costumier. He answered for me: