tranquil possession of myself, induces a peaceful, strong, and simple
happiness which neither the society of my fellows, nor meditation, nor
prayer can ever furnish. At one time this calm, as of Eden, used to
terrify me. It seemed to me impious. When, as a youth, I loitered among
the wild oak-groves which form scattered oases amid the limestone mazes
of Païolive in Vivarais, it seemed to me that their shade was stifling
my faith, that the seated giants of white stone, amid which the Ardèche
has hollowed its precipitous channel, were swallowing my Christian
dogmas, and that my Eliacin-like fervours were evaporating into the
torrid sky, passing upward with the furnace breath which rises in summer
from this formidable landscape.
Since then, however, I have learned to feel no doubt regarding the
primacy of man vis-à-vis the grandeur of inanimate things.
No, my delight in natural scenery is by no means pantheistic. I believe
too firmly in the hierarchy of creation, and I am too strongly imbued
with the Christian conception that man is a person, as it were a son of
God, an absolute individuality, inviolable, raised above life and death,
to be able to lose my sense of personal identity in the contemplation of
rocks, fields, and woodlands. It is simply that I love fresh air and open
spaces; I love the lineaments of nature, which are more beautiful than
the doings of men; I love the society of the meadows and of the trees, a
society which is less importunate and talkative than that of my fellows,
and which never fails to restore me to myself. Perhaps, moreover, I
tend instinctively to idolize colour and light, seeing that God has
concentrated in my eyes, above all, the power of sensuous appreciation.
This morning I was interested in watching the gambols of an ermine which
had just captured a small black mammal. Supple, slim, and snake-like,
it sat up from time to time to look around. It was hard to distinguish,
despite its black tail-tip, from the surrounding snow, though this had a
bluish tint in contrast with the ermine’s fur, in which there were subtle
shades of green. I stood motionless on the footpath, wrapped in the soft
cloak which Mme. Paul Weiss has just sent me. The little beast advanced
fearlessly towards me, joyously shaking the prey that it carried in its
jaws. Did it take me for a tree?
I move my barberry switch. The ermine stops. Sitting up, it looks at
me for a long time. How pretty it is, slender and graceful! I think of
Musette, a black English greyhound, with perfect points, which won the
first prize at Lyons, and was the delight of my eyes for three years.
Dear Musette! We were always together. The first time we were parted she
died. Madeleine, my favourite little sister, was charged with giving me
the news. She wrote me a letter of eight pages. I still recall her great
childish handwriting. Her kind heart had inspired the most touching
precautions, and suggested the use of angelic phraseology. “We have
buried her,” she wrote in conclusion, “in that corner of the garden you
are so fond of, beneath the oleanders.”
I continue to look at the ermine, but the animal is doubtless ready for
breakfast. Evading the danger, it descends the slope, gains the traverse,
and runs restlessly to and fro. I trouble it. Most probably I am between
it and its earth. I go.
As I make my way on to the escarp I meet Noverraz, the Parisian, the
hero of the look-out episode. He is taking a constitutional in the snow.
His waxen skin, pinched by the cold, has red patches on it. His ears and
the tip of his nose are scarlet.
“Where have you been?” he inquires.
“Beyond the slopes. I must have walked quite a league this morning. It
was glorious!”
“Take care, old chap, if you value a whole skin.”
“Bah!”
“My dear fellow, this is what happened to me on Thursday morning. It must
have been about half-past eight. I am taking a walk with my chums of
casemate 23. There is a regular London fog. All at once, at the bottom
of the west court, we hear the jabber of Boche. I imagine that it is the
disciplinary company breaking stones, as usual, in front of the battery.
Durand, however, clambers up the slope. After peering over the edge, he
makes signs to us to join him. On the road that runs by the ditch are
two sections, standing at ease in columns of fours. Their officer is on
horseback, wearing a huge grey cloak. He is making a speech to his men.
My attention is riveted by the word _Frankreich_. I scramble a little
higher. Stretched at full length, my head just above the edge, among the
grass, I listen with all my ears: ‘Get this firmly fixed in your minds,’
says the captain, ‘for we must not fail to learn all we can from these
French rascals [_diese Lumpen von Franzosen_]. Let me repeat: they climb
into the trees; they install their machine guns among the branches;
they wait there in absolute silence. The German scouts have examined
the ground only. Our men pass by. Then comes a sound like thunder! We
are mowed down from behind by a rain of bullets. Such are the tricks of
these monkeys! Well, let us meet ruse by ruse, stratagem by stratagem.
Listen carefully. You are at the front. You dig your trench, the
admirable German trench. You settle yourself there comfortably. You are
invulnerable. Thence, quite at your ease and without danger, you can fire
at the French lines. Is this all? No. In advance of your real trench,
eighty or a hundred yards away, you hastily dig another trench. You fill
it with dummies. It is quite easy—any old rags of clothing will do. These
pigs of Frenchmen [_diese Sauleute_, _dieses Schweinvolk_] can fire at
this as long as they please. Then, when the assault comes, when they
rush into this hole thinking that they’ve got you, you have an admirable
target, at short range, and you can quietly exterminate them.’
“Such are the officer’s words. At this moment one of his men asks a
question, and I take the opportunity of changing my position, so that
I am exposed down to the waist. The captain catches sight of me. After
glaring at me for a moment, he demands a rifle, shoulders it, and fires.
Nothing happens; the breech is empty. We do not budge. The captain is
furious. ‘Give me a cartridge!’ He loads the rifle and shoulders it once
more. My comrades and I are about to take cover behind the slope when the
shot is fired. It must be a blank cartridge, for we hear no whistle of
a bullet. The Boches burst out laughing. Corporal Durand, standing erect
with folded arms, gazes at them mockingly. He intends to stay there. ‘My
good man,’ I exclaim, ‘hurry up and get down!’ The captain is asking for
another cartridge. ‘This time,’ I say, ‘it will probably be a bullet!’
“There you have it. This is exactly what happened. I did not lose a word
or a gesture. You had better be careful. With your mania for ranging the
outer regions of the fort, you will get your skin perforated one fine
morning.”
A BLACK MOOD
_November 27, 1914._
A prey to depression, we are smoking in the “Salle du Jeu de Paume.”
Laloux and Badoy, otherwise known as Badozus, are playing an interminable
game of chess; d’Arnoult is reading Victor Hugo’s _Histoire d’un crime_;
Noverraz is dozing over Balzac’s _Chouans_; Sergeant Scherrer, tall and
thin, with cold eye and Mephistophelian head, is playing draughts with
Massé, a non-commissioned officer of artillery. Seated upon the drawers
of the drug cupboard, they are crowded round the solitary lamp. The table
is of deal, oblong in shape, one that can be used as an operating-table.
Their heads are in shadow. Elbow to elbow and forehead to forehead, the
six men are silent. The circle of light is hazy with blue whorls rising
from their pipes.
Standing in the embrasure of the window, I am smoking my own Bavarian
pipe. There is not a sound in the room, nor in the passages, nor on the
bridge close to our windows. Depression must reign supreme throughout the
casemates, depression which paralyses mind and body.
How intense is the tedium, uncertainty, and anxiety! No letter for a
whole fortnight. Yet she must be writing to me. And Léonce, my dear young
brother. I wonder if it is as cold in the trenches at Ypres as it is in
Bavaria. Shrapnel, bullets, sudden death. Shall I ever see him again?
Is he still alive? Manech, the amiable corporal of No. 13, forty-two of
whose Breton relatives have been engaged on the land front or at sea,
has already lost six of them. The fighting priest, Gautin, has learned
that the body of his brother lies rotting on the banks of the Marne.
Sergeant Boullanger is mourning his father. Since we have begun to
receive letters, almost every one is in mourning. Can it be that my own
melancholy is a presentiment? When will it end, this sinister interlude
in the book of peace, our book, our true book, the book of humanity?
Noverraz has fallen asleep over the _Chouans_; d’Arnoult, “le Chasseur,”
has closed _Histoire d’un crime_. He stretches and yawns. The others,
huddled together, move their pieces without saying a word.
It is cold. All our thoughts ooze despondency. This brute of a major at
headquarters who, meanly, by way of reprisal, has been detaining our
letters at Ingolstadt for the last fortnight! Why cannot I throw off my
troubles? This evening I am like a child, like a neglected schoolboy who
has ceased to hear from his mother.
France, Paris, a blazing wood-fire in my study; Douchka and Katia asleep
on the hearthrug. She is there!
No, I am in Bavaria. I am a prisoner. I am at Fort Orff, at the edge of
the Swabian forest, among gloomy villages where I know no one, where
they believe that we are slaughtering their sons with dum-dum bullets,
and that we were the aggressors. A Franconian blackguard is the man who
feeds me. Then there is a little good-for-nothing schoolmaster from Hof,
a pedant stuffed with German idealism, who appeals to honour and humanity
in season and out of season, who, having caught _flagrante delicto_ a
weaver of watch-chains snatching a few hairs from a horse’s tail, gives
him three days’ close arrest, saying gravely, “A most inhumane act”—and
it is this whipper-snapper, this round-shouldered and short-sighted
impotent beast, who is my _Feldwebel_, “my superior officer”! He is a
mean creature. Knowing that I am on good terms with von Stengel, he
begged Dutrex to present me. Dutrex did so, saying: “_Hier ist unser
Schriftsteller_ [This is our author]”—“I am much honoured, monsieur;
I have read an article on you in the _Nürnberger Zeitung_.” He bowed
and scraped again and again. He stood there, his ugly little moustache
bristling with smiles, looking as great a booby as if he had been before
the commandant. The quartermaster is a bad lot, but the _Feldwebel_ is
grotesque. And I am dependent upon the caprices of such men! I am a
thing in the hands of these contemptible fellows, these hypocrites, who
loudly voice their patriotism and boast of the German virtues, while
they are shamming rheumatism and heart-weakness to avoid being sent to
the fighting-line. Sometimes I am seized with a longing to spit out my
contempt in their very faces. Before Baron von Stengel one feels like
a man; a noble master ennobles those subject to his orders. But before
these subordinates all human nobility withers, wretched instruments who
treat us as instruments in turn. Empowered to dominate and to humiliate
us, to abuse us as much as they please, their favours are even worse than
their severities; it is the brutal landowner in Latium amusing himself
with a Græculus; it is the _Donaubauer_, the fat Danubian peasant,
caressing his dog. I prefer their hatred.
* * * * *
The good Badoy, with his huge round head, his snub nose, his little curly
beard, his large fatherly eyes, bends forward over the board, humps his
back, and clenches his fists between his short legs, saying:
“When will it come to an end?”
“Which, the game or the imprisonment?” asks Laloux quietly, as he takes
Badoy’s queen.
“How can you ask?” Then, as if speaking to himself: “Oh! my wife and my
three little ones, when shall I see them again? Still no letters! It’s
terrible.”
From my corner in the window I contemplate the circle of smoke and of
light, and I look at these six men packed together, chilly and sad. I
dare not open my lips. My depression is turning to gall. I am not far,
this evening, from understanding certain scenes in the casemates which
had astonished me, when taciturn men became suddenly exasperated, and,
for a single word, hurled themselves on one another, fighting like horses
without oats in a stable. Poor caged beasts! The others, at least, those
in Flanders and in France, have room to move. They have an object for
action. After the stagnation of the trenches they can assuage their
anger in the fury of the assault. But as for us, heavy with wrath, we
are confined within thick walls; we can but swing our frozen and idle
arms; we are cut off from all news; we are the prey of dreams and of
hunger. Outside the screened window, the ditch, the counterscarp, and the
grating; outside the grating, a Bavarian bayonet marches to and fro.
What can account for this state of nerves which I am unable to control?
The hour for the arrival of the postman has passed. I have been waiting
all day. It has passed. There is nothing. I ought to be able to find
a reason. Why am I outwardly so hard and inwardly near to weeping?
Suddenly there come great silent waves of memory. I hear her singing.
She is dressed in green. The dark perfume of her golden hair enwraps me.
The melody of César Franck’s _Procession_ rises athwart my fever; it is
broad, sweet, richer and more peaceful than a field of ripe wheat upon a
warm evening. It sings within me; it assumes the cadence of my breathing.
I am stifling. I live, I love, and I am loved; and yet I am thrust out
from life as if I were in the tomb.
Elbow to elbow and forehead to forehead, the six men at the table are
silent. I look down upon the circle of light and the smoke of the pipes.
Not a sound is to be heard. Buried in the mound, surrounded by meadows
and woods, the fort is as cold and mute, as remote, desolate, and dead,
as a soldier’s grave in the corner of a field.
A FRANCONIAN QUARTERMASTER
_December 4, 1914._
The “Salle du Jeu de Paume” was born, if I may use the expression, from a
conjunction of coups d’état.
Day by day the quartermaster became more exasperated at the happiness
of five Frenchmen. In accordance with the good German rules, they ought
to have been sleeping upon the damp cement in the basement, which is
really a dungeon. But since we have had palliasses, the house-surgeon,
the apothecary, and their friends—Laloux, Badoy, Scherrer, Massé, and
Noverraz—have been sleeping in the consulting-room, where they are
masters. This first-floor casemate, adjoining the _Kommandantur_, is
dry, has a boarded floor and a southern aspect. Every evening they made
their beds side by side and slept the sleep of the just. M. von Stengel
good-naturedly closed his eyes. The Bavarian guard, grateful for the
castor oil and the cuppings of Laloux, did likewise. But Ploss, the
reservist quartermaster, a Franconian stonemason who speaks of himself
as a “sculptor in the building trade,” was scandalized. He is a patriot,
a flaming patriot—except where his own skin is concerned. Called to the
front a few weeks ago, he went to weep upon the commandant’s bosom. The
weeping gained its end, and he is still at Fort Orff.
Frenchmen sleeping dry, with plenty of room! Five Frenchmen bedded in a
spacious casemate! Frenchmen passing night and day in the next room to
the _Kommandantur_! Ploss’ soul was desolate.
One morning he went to see Baron von Stengel, and declared that the
casemate of the guard, which adjoins on the west the commandant’s
casemate, was too small, and that it was essential to use the
consulting-room as an overflow. The consulting-room, divided in two by a
wooden partition, could serve as a sort of office for the _Feldwebel_ and
for himself, the quartermaster; thus the faithful _Landwehrleute_ would
have the delight of guarding their dear _Herr Major_ on both sides. The
argument was irresistible. The _Herr Major_ acquiesced. Intoxicated with
delight, Ploss promptly went up and down the fort announcing the news
everywhere, to the guard, to the interpreters, and to the banished men.
Prouder even than M. de Morny after the 2nd of December, he luxuriated in
his coup d’état.
The door of the room occupied by the six French medical officers opens
into the same corridor as the _Kommandantur_, but on the other side of
the main entrance. Laloux and his companions promptly go to knock at
the door. They explain the situation. Next minute, M. Langlois, in full
dress, wearing gloves, emerges. He descends upon M. von Stengel. He has
the most pressing need of a consulting-room, spacious, airy, and sunny!
He is crafty, and as persistent as he is diplomatic. The baron agrees to
let him have No. 46, the next room to the French officers. An obstinate
defender of our rights, he demands in addition that the members of his
staff, who give their services to French and Germans alike, shall have
permission to sleep in their workroom. Permission is granted. He returns.
Our exiles, whistling and singing joyously, hasten to remove their
palliasses. Ploss watches them sourly; his coup d’état has missed fire.
These French monkeys, they always fall on their feet! But what sort of a
_Herr Major_ is this, who can refuse them nothing?
Downstairs, in kitchen No. 22, another turn of fortune’s wheel! The major
from the Ingolstadt headquarters, who is but a Ploss with a commission,
has been inspecting the fort, and has caught sight of the twin palliasses
of Dutrex and Riou. Placed against the wall opposite the stoves, they
have been an offence to him. “Clear out, messieurs!” What are we to
do? Our places have been filled in our old casemates. We, too, visit
M. Langlois. Hitting two birds with one stone, he includes us, as well
as Durupt, the money-changer, d’Arnoult, the secretary, and Détry, the
dentist, in his request to M. von Stengel. Thus the entire pharmaceutical
staff and the whole French bureaucracy of Fort Orff are assigned to the
consulting-room.
This happened ten days ago. Since then the victims of the two coups
d’état have furnished their quarters. They have adorned their windows
with half curtains and have divided their casemate in two with a hanging
of flowered lutestring. During the day they arrange their ten palliasses
in two piles and cover them with rugs, so that in hours of despondency
they have two imposing couches—thrones, as it were. At the very end of
the room are the two tables, the one known as the “operating-table,” and
the little table whose heavy drawers contain iodine, cupping-glasses,
and blue ointment. At their request, Le Second has designed for them
shades “à la ballet russe” for their two lamps. On the shelves they
have arranged the vermicelli boxes which they use as lockers. The men
of room 26, a centre of artistic life, have made them some additional
shelves. An old herring-box plays the part of flower-vase, filled at this
moment with silver thistles and a spray of barberry, magnificently red.
Ploss can’t get over it! His own “büro” is a melancholy place. The old
consulting-room, formerly spruce and gay, has become a mere empty loft
since he took possession. _Herr Gott Sakrament!_ Hang these Frenchmen!
After dinner the medical officers, especially MM. Langlois, Romant, and
Bouvat, come to No. 46. We draw back the curtains. We stretch a string
across the room to serve as net, and for an hour we give ourselves up to
the joys of chamber-tennis, using our hands as rackets. It is for this
reason that the new consulting-room has received the imposing name of
Salle du Jeu de Paume. Sometimes, also, it is designated “la chambre des
huiles,” _das Oelenzimmer_.
Poor Ploss. He cannot get the better of these Frenchmen. He would like
to see them yielding, to see them cringe beneath his rod, to see them
thoroughly miserable. And yet, whatever he can do, despite their hunger
and their fits of the blues, they are cheerful. They sing, they decorate
their prison. They are always finding new devices. If they have no
tools, they make some. They work unceasingly in wood and stone. All the
casemates have tables now, stools, chairs, lockers, water-kegs, draughts,
and chessmen. Guiton d’Ancenis and Robert le Bordelais are neither smiths
nor carpenters, and yet No. 26 is well furnished. They had no spoons;
they “forged” some out of old “bully-beef” tins. They had no forks, but
they have cut some from the birches on the slopes. To economize matches,
they have made a float-light. To save their fingers from the heat of the
boiling soup when it is poured into their bowls, they have fashioned
wickerwork saucers. Almost all of them had been compelled to give up
their knives; lengths of iron cask-hoop, patiently hammered straight and
sharpened, have supplied the lack. Their windows are decorated with tiny
pine-trees, planted in herring-boxes. They hope to take them home and
grow them in France.
Do what he could, Ploss has not been able to stamp out this creative
fervour. He knows it, and it infuriates him. Oh, if he had but been
commandant! How he would have hunted down without mercy all those
concerned in the underground traffic, in the great commercial
enterprises by which our illicit supply of provisions has been
gradually centralized. There are two such enterprises, and thanks to
the competition between them we have for some weeks been securing, at
stable and almost reasonable prices, supplementary rations of inestimable
value. With what joy he would compel Marin and Brissard to shut up
shop, two men who, with a chance armamentarium, have in kitchen No. 42
established a flourishing foundry of tin rings. And Crussol, who puts the
finishing touches to the stones which are prepared for him by a whole
squad of drillers and escutcheoners, and who has secured a reputation and
customers even among the officers at the Ingolstadt headquarters. How
promptly would he be dislodged from his niche in the northern parapet,
where he works all day in any weather, squatting and mute like a second
Paphnuce.
But, thank goodness, though Ploss can restrict as much as he pleases the
meagre governmental rations (and he does not fail to make use of his
opportunities in this respect), his jurisdiction does not pass beyond the
limits of the storerooms and the kitchens. Throughout the rest of the
fort the major reigns supreme, and his regime is so strictly courteous
that even the most ill-conditioned among the non-commissioned officers of
the guard think twice before ordering any of us strict arrest on bread
and water.
Ploss is disheartened. Ploss is wounded. Ploss is sad. Ploss envies Fort
A3, a German league from Fort Orff. Here a mere non-commissioned officer
is in command. The fort is in truth little more than a redoubt. Two
hundred and fifty Frenchmen of the 6th corps are packed into the place.
Their only exercise ground consists of muddy and dark passages, a narrow
ditch, and a tiny platform of about a hundred square feet. There is no
upper story. In front of the windows, fifty yards away, are the iron gate
and the precipitous slope. Eternal twilight reigns within. The governor
is like a narrow-minded usher, a jealous and timid despot, trembling
before orders from headquarters and terrible to the prisoners. If only
Ploss were _Vize-Feldwebel_ of Fort A3!
I know this little fort. My friend Cambessédès, house-surgeon from Paris,
a doctor serving in M. Langlois’ group of stretcher-bearers, has been
sent there from Fort 8 as medical officer, accompanied by M. Valois, a
prosector from Montpellier. In a note, clandestine, of course, he let us
know his whereabouts. Kindly, as usual, Baron von Stengel allowed the
medical officers and me to pay them a visit. Thus it came to pass that
last Sunday, escorted by a _Gefreiter_ and a soldier with fixed bayonet,
we walked from Orff to Wegstetten. It was thawing. Tiny blue rivulets
flowing through the pastures and along the furrows of the ploughs
reflected the quiet sky. We met groups returning from vespers: women,
children, and old men, peaceful folk who nodded to us as they passed.