Lieb’ Vaterland, magst ruhig sein,Fest steht und treu die Wacht am Rhein![18]
Lieb’ Vaterland, magst ruhig sein,Fest steht und treu die Wacht am Rhein![18]
Lieb’ Vaterland, magst ruhig sein,Fest steht und treu die Wacht am Rhein![18]
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 vigorouslythat fragments reached my ears notwithstanding the distance. The wordHeimat, home, came again and again, like a refrain. Then they intoned the national anthem:
Heil dir im Siegerkranz,Herrscher des Vaterlands![19]
Heil dir im Siegerkranz,Herrscher des Vaterlands![19]
Heil dir im Siegerkranz,Herrscher des Vaterlands![19]
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 founda 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 yourGeliebte?”
“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, theTheresientag.
“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 theTheresientagand 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 mayhope 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 theTheresientag! 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 undercanvas, 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-cleaningorderly 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 hisWichser, 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 theHerr Majorthat 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 famousParis 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’sJohn Gabriel Borkmannto quote the latest issues of theMünchener. Durupt mingles his invincible hope with the debate. It is interminable! And my poor studies lie neglected.
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:
“Riou, at length you will help me to get even with this wretch of an Ancey. He makes fun of me because I pick flowers. There will be two of us now to scrub his German hide for him!”
I filled my pipe and was about to set to work, when Ploss, the German quartermaster, commonly as rough as a bulldog, came in and seized me by the arm, saying:
“I have a palliasse for you. Come at once.”
He had just said the same thing to Dutrex. We hastened upstairs behind him, and followed him into a windowless storeroom, the only entrance to which was from the crypt beneath the great paved passage. Here, in the darkness, I groped for the heap of straw, and finding it, I unfastened a truss and began to stuff the sack of ticking. The material felt strong and hard as leather. I pricked my fingers with the thistles in the straw. “Whatever you do, stuff the corners well,” said my co-minister, thoroughly enjoying his good luck. He stuffed with the dexterity of a man who had never had anything else to do all his life. The quartermaster, evidently coming to the conclusion after a moment that I was a very awkward hand, shoved me to one side, cursing in his Franconianpatois in a way intended to show me that he was furiously angry. Then to see him at the stuffing! I have been told that his trade is that of mason. He worked even faster than Dutrex. At length, “Das ist fertig”—“There you are!” he cried, giving a vigorous smack to the belly of my sack. Then, unceremoniously, he pushed his gift on to my shoulder, this great sack, tight and paunchy as heart could wish.
The acquisition of the palliasse is a revolution in my life. I was sufficiently delighted, on entering the storeroom, at the thought that I had said farewell to my wretched bedding. A restless sleeper, I always awaken with my back on the floor, stiff and aching, burrowing in the black chaff, having scratched up my dust like a fowl. I was uneasy at the approach of winter. How should I be able to endure the Swabian frosts upon this moving mattress? I should mention that it was obviously diminishing in size, and that in proportion as the few intact straws disappeared from the heap, the bedding of one of my good companions in the casemate seemed to undergo a commensurate increase. Quite exceptional virtue would have been required to enable him to resist the temptation. I was occupied all day at my table in No. 22, so that my little piece of property was left utterly defenceless.
Nevertheless, in the busy obscurity of the storeroom my joy resembled that which we take in forbidden fruit. Though lively, it was not wholly unalloyed. It is impossible to accept a great favour,even if the acceptance does not involve any injury to another, without a certain perturbation in one’s sense of equality. My energy at the work was diminished by a shadow of remorse.
But Dutrex, gay as a blackbird, stuffing his palliasse with the fury of an assault, said to me: “Old chap, we are to sleep in No. 22 from to-night onwards!” This suited me very well. I should never have been bold enough to plant my palliasse, all new and tight as it was, among the humble litters in the casemate. As soon as I accepted the Teuton’s offer (and what could I do but accept it?), my precarious tenure in No. 17 was broken. In any case, I had become almost a stranger there. Since my installation at the ministerial table, except for a daily visit to my friends Guido, Bertrand, and Boude, I never crossed the threshold until bedtime.
All the same, my palliasse and my change of lodging induced feelings of sorrow as well as joy. I might say to myself as often as I pleased that the quartermaster, a surly Franconian who detests the French, had done me this kindness solely through inspiration from above (his only superior here is the commandant); that a refusal in such conditions would have been mere rudeness; that one need not be so fastidious as to decline an offer involving the enjoyment of a sleeping apartment with but one companion, and involving also, during the winter nights, the company of the still warm stoves; that, for the rest, it was the act of wisdom to terminateat the first opportunity, and when it could be done without shock or violence, certain chance associations devoid of all charm. Reasons for accepting the palliasse and the accompanying train of benefits surged abundantly in my mind without setting my conscience at rest.
Not in vain does a man drink in the gospel with his mother’s milk; not in vain does he from childhood onwards have instilled into him by accomplished parents the dogmas of the republic. Be it worth what it may, the motto of France is to me an article of faith. I fail to act up to my principles in this respect, but the failure makes me unhappy. Inequality, especially inequality that redounds to my own advantage, does injury to some profound fibre of my being. The enjoyment of material comfort produces periodical fits of remorse. The logic of my heart would have me a Franciscan. Yet God knows that my whole being and all my senses clamour for joy and loathe the ugliness of poverty!
But I keep my palliasse. The bulk of my effects had already been removed to the kitchen in No. 22. Maître Lambert, usher at the law-court of N., for whom I have secured employment in the kitchen as one of the assistant cooks, went to fetch for me what remained at No. 17. He found that my flask had disappeared. He forgot my nightcap, which Guido has just brought me. Now, therefore, I have everything here—all my baggage, personal property and national property, republican goods and royal goods.
October 21, 1914.
Yesterday was a great day! Perhaps the greatest of my imprisonment, if I except that of my first “teube.”[21]Oh, that first teube! After I had worn my clothes continuously for so many days and nights, the clandestine undressing at early dawn, beside the sink in Dutrex’s kitchen; the forbidden and unhoped-for sensation, to be, as if at home, naked beneath the steaming water; the lather of soap everywhere, on the hair, the neck, the chest, the arms, the legs, the feet; the douche with the aid of a bailer; the dry rub! At length to have a clean skin and clean linen! Then to stride up to the slopes in the delightful morning solitude, repeating as it were involuntarily: “I am clean; what a luxury! I am in their hands; but I have managed to get clean. They ration our water, and I have had water. I am a prisoner; but I have secretly divested myself of my coating of filth, a burden almost as heavy as that of hunger! I am by no means wholly wretched!”
It was a month since my last bath, at Tonnoy, about a week before we were taken prisoner. We had had a long and rough journey, from Chaouilley, at the foot of the hill celebrated by Barrès, to the Moselle. The dirt of three interminable nights in a cattle truck, in which we were herded pell-mell; the dust of the complicated movement towards the front; the stiffness of the opening march, the sweat and the fatigue—I had got rid of it all in the river. It was a beautiful evening, bright and warm. The sun was setting. The Moselle flowed rapidly among the islets of shingle and the sandbanks. Groups of men, officers and soldiers, men newly called up and reservists, indiscriminately mingled, naked as worms, the fat, the tall, and the short, the pot-bellied and the thin, fringed the bank with a strip of flesh-coloured humanity. We looked like a colony of Mormons.
After leaving the water, I challenged Soulier at ducks and drakes. Do you recall, little Darry, how we played ducks and drakes on the shore at Dully? I got the better of Soulier. One of my flat stones, skimming the water briskly, flying across the brown river, made its way right over the stream to strike the rocks on the other side.
When I think the matter over, this delightful bathe remains my most agreeable souvenir of Lorraine. I grieve to have to admit (notwithstanding Barrès, whose style would ennoble the most worthless materials) that all the villages we passed through, from Mont Sion to the frontier, and above all the village of Tonnoy, left onme an impression of penurious and squalid melancholy, of ugliness and filth.
Yes, yesterday evening was epic.
The morning had passed as usual: an early walk; then work until dinner-time. There was nothing to foreshadow a storm. I had been for a stroll after dinner with Dutrex, Durupt, and Foch. A typical Bavarian day: a moist sky softening the harsh outlines of the landscape; a half light, uncertain and dreamy, as if longing for the rich azure of Piedmont and Provence; a piercing little wind which, even in the sunshine, continues to suggest melting snow and cold, almost a bise, whose very caresses sting.
For the last few days I had been working hard. My faculties were blunted. I had a vague inclination to idle. I was suffering a little from boredom, a state of mind by which, happily, I am rarely afflicted. I was discouraged. I wanted a rest, and yet lacked energy to make up my mind to lay aside my work.
As I was returning to my task, I encountered little Brissot. Lately he has taken to wearing the Bavarian cap, a sort of Phrygian cap which I have made the fashion at Fort Orff. Mine is green—you know whose colour green is. Brissot’s is blue, and this tint sets off admirably his energetic blond countenance. Seeing that I was a little out of sorts, and not so cheerful as usual, he prevented me from going down.
“Abandon your kitchen for a while,” he said. “It reeks of sulphur, drains, burned fat, and vegetable refuse. You are getting mildewed amid the steam. Thefires draw badly, and when I pay you a visit there your eyes are watering from the smoke. Besides, you have slaved quite enough this week under cover of your famous notice. You can be quite easy in your mind, you will have more than enough time to finish your studies. The Russian generals will secure you months and months for reflection. If that does not suffice, our diplomatists will see to it that you have an extension of time. This evening you must put aside your philosophies and your histories. We will go the round of the slopes together. The weather is fine. We will have a talk with my little friend across the ditch; you can’t think how sorry she is for us. Here is one, at any rate, who is utterly unconcerned as to questions of state. What does she care about French, Germans, English, Belgians, Russians? She knows men only. Her heart has skipped several centuries, and without an effort has attained the era of thoroughgoing internationalism. I can assure you that if she had to choose between ahübscher Franzoseand aböser Deutscher,[22]there would be no hesitation.”
Brissot is light-hearted, firm, bold, definite, gently peremptory, perfectly self-reliant; he is a surprising compound of boy and of leader, of artist and tradesman, endowed with a lively will; how can any one who is in the dumps resist Brissot? I accompany him to the parapet. Positively she is there, a sort of Munich Flora, short and plump, with great black eyes, whom he calls his “bonne amie,” walking upon the footpath of theglacis, accompanied by three bare-headed village girls and a troop of children. “Damn the escort!” says myhübscher Franzosein an aside. The conversation is opened; it is as innocent as the arched forehead and rounded cheeks of the three slatterns. One of them is in high spirits to know that her affianced is safe. He has been made prisoner, and she has just received her first letter, dated from Gap. She asks if I am betrothed, if the ring I wear (Véron, the corporal in the engineers, cast it for me a few days back out of one of the metal buttons of the coat of a chausseur à pied) is an engagement ring, and why it is made of silver. Brissot takes the initiative in the reply, saying with an air of disgust that it is not silver but platinum, a metal far more costly than gold. She is astonished. She has never heard of platinum.
The conversation continues, agreeably stupid. Then the children ask for French pfennigs. “You shall have some if you will give us a newspaper in exchange.” The answer is not new to them; of course they have one ready. They roll it round a stone and throw it across the great ditch. The paper is four days old, but we throw back some sous which fall behind them some way down the glacis. Children and slatterns rush greedily to pick them up. Brissot, profiting by this moment of freedom, says to his Flora of the great eyes: “Come again to-morrow, and without your companions, who are not worthy of you!”
“My dear fellow,” I say to him, “I leave you to your love affairs. Farewell.”
The splendid reds of autumn flame on the great oaks along the border of the pine-wood—a strategic wood, designed to mask the west battery. The parapets are packed with soldiers, fine blue-and-red spots upon a dull yellowish-green ground. Some, chisel in hand, silently bent over their work, are carving pebbles. Others are wearing out their finger-nails and wearing down the corner stones in polishing tablets of white chalk destined for employment as ex votos. The cries of men playing at ball and at prisoner’s base resound from the ramparts. At the foot of a slope adorned with a clump of birches, men are busily engaged in cooking their extra provender. There is a circle round each improvized kitchen: some dry and break up the small branches rifled from the trees of the fort; some tend the refractory fire, for the wood will not flame; some agitate the contents of the mess-tins—fragments of stolen meat, choice morsels of vegetable peelings, coffee dregs begged from the kitchen, potatoes pocketed when the dinner was being prepared, edible snails found on the grass on rainy mornings and kept fasting in an old cigar-box, cheese-rind, plum mushrooms, wild chicory. Soldier-priests walk up and down reading their breviaries. On one of the slopes, a crowd surrounds Le Second, who is displaying his latest cubist composition; at the “kitchen windows” a number of poor devils whose stomachs are empty are patiently sniffing the thin odours that rise from the cooking-pots. Here and there are to be seen the dealers, their wares hidden beneath their coats,passing from group to group, and offering for sale at three or four times its value a cigarette, a lump of sugar, or a stick of chocolate. The blue-and-red ants have all emerged from the subterranean galleries of their ant-hill. On this October afternoon they produce a sad impression of mingled gaiety and wretchedness.
Yet amid this chaos I seem also to have before my eyes the picture of a city, a city of very ancient days. Characteristics of civic order are plainly manifest. A semblance of social life declares itself. Broken to pieces a few months ago by the sudden call to arms, flattened out and pulverized by the forces of hunger and tedium, the world that existed before the mobilization begins to reconstitute itself. By a sort of spontaneous generation, the eternal society rises anew from the void, with its groups of leaders and of poets, of traders and of artisans, with its classes of profiteers and of exploited, of originators and of simple executants. It is reborn, but in a less intricate form, with plainer contrasts, accentuated to caricature. Here, temperament, initiative, and energy have replaced tradition. There are no privileged positions. Social functions are not acquired as a right, but are seized. There is free competition. We all start from scratch. Each man takes his place in the natural hierarchy by the sole right of conquest. He can retain it only by cunning, force, or the power of genius, and at the price of a persistent victory.
Hence there have been strange changes of fortune.A man who arrived without a farthing, sold for sixpence a cigar he had been given, bought chocolate with the sixpence, resold it at 1,000 per cent., and, continually bargaining, always turning over his money with increased profit, has succeeded in this way in amassing a capital. I have several times come across this brilliant trader on the slopes at nightfall, when he believed himself alone. Leaning forward on his hands, he was contemplating his greasy handkerchief stretched out on the grass, covered with little piles of silver. Another, who was scullion in a drinking-booth, has taken to writing poems; at the Saturday concerts in No. 7 he sings them to well-known airs, amid universal applause. A man named Tarbouriech, a farmer from the Agen district, has made himself graving tools and carves pebbles for French and Bavarian customers. He gets a mark for each carving, and can thus from time to time buy himself a supplementary loaf. He is a real decorative artist, a good sculptor, and he did not know it.
As I lounge in the last rays of sunshine, I admire the spontaneous manifestation of creative energy. I am astonished at the superabundance of talents in so restricted a group. Yet there is a sadness in the sight of this poor primitive city which has set itself to sprout upon the levelled bed of servile equality.
Everything betrays the stimulus of hunger. Hunger is here the universal mother of artistic, commercial, and industrial inventions; it even induces devotion to the collectivity, for the performance of a public servicecommonly secures an extra ration. Work or starve, such is the rule. Each one makes his plans, exercises his ingenuity, does the best for himself. The aim is simple: not to die of hunger, to keep oneself going, if possible to improve in appearance and to grow fat. Some, too, having filled their stomachs, try to line their pockets. The strong try to get the better of the weak; the cunning, of the stupid; those who know a little German, of those who know none at all. Hence arises extreme inequality, tangible, crying inequality, shown by the cheeks, the eyes, the gait—the inequality between those who are hungry and those who are fed. Here is one running upstairs, happy, and lively as a cricket, for he has eaten his fill. Unashamedly he overtakes and passes a poor devil, a man quite well off in civil life, but who has had a visit from the body stripper when lying in a swoon on the field of battle; he makes his way up with great difficulty, breathless, shaky, clinging to the banister, finding the flight of stairs interminable.
Sad thoughts assail me as I walk. This battle without rifles or artillery, exempt from immediate risk of death, baser than war because it is more hypocritical, more crafty, and carried on under the Christian ægis—is it not life itself? Is not life immoral in its very essence?
For, after all, one must live. First of all, one must live. Now, here it is clear that there is not enough food to go round. What then? Then the field is open for the craftiest and the boldest. Let us suppose that thereare twenty bold men among the thousand prisoners. From the lean corpse of our cow they have cut their large share, the lion’s share; now it is the turn of the little jackals to divide up what remains. Let us suppose that one of these “lions” has a conscience. Let us suppose that his mind is influenced by the morality of the gospels or by socialist ideas. Is he to sacrifice his average share, the share requisite to keep him in good health, because the others, nine hundred and eighty in the thousand, have nothing but a famine ration, and can have nothing else, whatever he may do? Ought he to make up his mind, as an act of goodwill, and knowing that the general regimen will be no whit bettered, to accept malnutrition for himself, to accept the permanent ruin of his health? Christ, where are your beatitudes? Will the determinism of the body ever be overcome? Will your reign, your city of justice, ever be established upon this dreary planet? But if the world continues, and if the general supply of goods should happen to become as greatly restricted as it is within the limits of our fortress, I shall be sorry for the city of the just. Let the twenty “lions,” from virtuous motives, tie up their jaws, let us suppose that there are one thousand ascetics in place of nine hundred and eighty, the stew will be little thicker.
The electric bell, its jarring note issuing from all the doorways, breaks in upon these grey reflections, as much the outcome, perhaps, of personal discouragement as of the realities of the situation. It is fiveo’clock. In a twinkling the ants disappear into the under ways.
In kitchen No. 22, Dutrex, Durupt, and the three cooks are standing round the vice. Half a gruyère cheese is fixed in it. This is the entire dinner; each one of our four hundred and eighty men, those fed from the first of the three kitchens, will have to be satisfied this evening with the four hundred and eightieth part of this half cheese. Devèse is usually responsible for the serious task of cutting up the cheese. He is an expert, being accustomed every day in Paris to serve out large quantities of ham, saveloy, and galantine. Unfortunately our cook-butcher is confined to bed in the hospital casemate with a sore throat. Dutrex has therefore asked little Lambert, Maître Lambert, Lambert the Good, to do the cutting up.
The great kitchen knife passes busily through the hard, white curd. The usher of Saint-Joseph-de-Tinée holds the knife in both hands and presses on it with all his weight. Beads of perspiration are standing on his besmirched forehead; his goggle eyes dilate; the ruddy skin of his face, downy with sparse golden hairs, is deeply wrinkled. He sweats as only a thoroughly good fellow, a man who puts all his will into his work, can sweat. Bouquet and Pailloux look on indifferently. Durupt, who becomes absorbed in the most trifling matters as if they were affairs of state, gravely counts the slices and arranges them on the right-hand corner of the kitchen table in piles of ten. Dutrex hasassumed his service manner. He stands stiffly upright at the left corner; his moustache is brushed away from his lips, his eye is severe, he holds his check-list. “Lambert, cut more equal slices!”
“Corporal Dutrex, I am doing my best, as you see; it is very difficult.”
“I know it. Durupt, you will give an extra piece to the rooms whose share is obviously too small.”
Seated at my table, I contemplate this Rembrandtesque scene. The melancholy lamp, its chimney broken, is smoking among the pale faces and the piled up slices. The cheese is being contaminated by the foul air of the dark casemate, in which all the stoves have gone out. The light of the dying day still pierces the window bars, its tender blues and reds fading slowly away. Through the closed door comes the impatient, angry, and menacing sound of shuffling feet. The men waiting there know that it is “cheese evening.” They detest this meal. It is cold and hard to digest, less filling than a ladleful of hot semolina or vermicelli, and makes extravagant demands upon their bread.
The distribution does not take long. When there is soup and meat, our four hundred and eighty men come individually to receive their rations, passing in a continuous stream, first in front of the cauldron to get the soup, and then in front of the vice for the portion of meat. The procession lasts an hour, as at a great funeral. “The holy water!” say the jokers, stretching out their basins. “The handful of earth!” extending their hands for the three ounces of cow-flesh.But on cheese nights there is no procession. The twenty-three headmen of the rooms supplied from No. 22 bring bowls, and when these are charged the headmen go off to distribute the contents in their respective casemates.
At six everything is finished. Heaving a sigh of relief, the cooks clear the table and draw up the two benches and the three stools. All of them, cooks and ministers, are about to swallow their allotted rations. These look very small, especially to Lambert, who has been sweating blood and water.
There is a knock at the door. “Confound it!” says Dutrex; “some more fellows to bother us! We never have a moment’s peace.” Then, “Who is there?” he shouts in a forbidding tone. Two ingratiating voices make answer, those of little Corporal Véron and of Boisdin, a sergeant of engineers, long as a lamp-post. “It’s us!” Dutrex opens the door, and the two non-commissioned officers of room No. 3 display their bowl, wherein are heaped, not neat slices à la Devèse, but fragments of every possible shape, square and rectangular, thin and thick, with no rind or all rind, tapering, pyramidal, and concave.
“Dutrex, old fellow,” says Véron, “we’re sorry to bother you, but our men are on strike. They’re not having any of these leavings. Now, just look at this piece.” He points out a well cut slice. “This is what the ‘poilus’ are receiving from kitchen No. 53.”
“My good chap,” Dutrex answers quietly, “what do you expect me to do? I give what is given me. Iknow that Sarrazin’s kitchen is specially favoured—it is the kitchen of the Germans. For the hundred and fifty-two men it has to supply, which includes himself and the twenty-four Bavarians of the guard, the quartermaster delivers almost as much as for us who are four hundred and eighty. Go and make your complaint to him. He’ll give you a reception. You will find out how amiable he is. For my part, I have given up trying to argue with this tête de Boche, who is as obstinate as a hundred Spanish mules rolled into one, and who detests the French. It is true that the contents of your dish do not look very grand. As you see, I have had to get on without Devèse. His substitute is quite a novice. Besides, your room was the last served, and naturally you got the remnants. But I assure you that your full allowance is there. Durupt allotted each ration in little heaps with his usual conscientiousness. If your men don’t like it, well, let’s settle the matter among ourselves. You’d better go and consult our own medical officers. I can do no more.”
Five minutes later the door opens. “Attention!” It is the surgeon-in-chief, Monsieur Langlois, the major with four stripes, who came here yesterday from fort No. 8 with three colleagues, so that, with our two other medical officers, MM. Cavaillé and Lœbre, we have now six doctors. He is short and fat; his hair is pepper and salt, with more salt than pepper; his gestures are lively; his head resembles that of Poincaré; his eyes sparkle mischievously. He takes from thehands of Véron the allowance of No. 3. “You are nineteen?” he asks. He quietly repeats the work of Durupt. Upon the table, encumbered with our hunks of bread and our rations of gruyère, he arranges the bowlful of “leavings” in nineteen small heaps, being careful to make them as equal as possible. He then says: “Do you know that your room No. 3 is specially favoured? I have seen what has been allotted to the other rooms. I assure you, sergeant, that yours is one of the best served. Call your men.” The men of No. 3 are waiting outside, and, judging from the noise which comes through the door, it would seem that there are others in the corridor besides the men of No. 3.
“Men of No. 3, enter,” orders Dutrex. The nineteen defile in front of the table and M. Langlois points out to each man his own little heap. When they have withdrawn, Dutrex, in the presence of Boisdin and Véron, tells the surgeon-in-chief about Devèse’s illness and the misdeeds of the quartermaster; how he favours kitchen No. 53 because it is the kitchen of the Germans; and how he takes a large “squeeze” from the supplies. “M. le Major, I was in the guardroom yesterday. By chance I came across his store-book, and I found that he had entered thirty kilogrammes of rice when he had certainly not distributed more than twelve kilos at the outside. It is just the same with coffee, sugar, milk, and meat. I am absolutely certain that he is a cheat!”
M. Langlois listens. He listens attentively. He has no wish to assert himself prematurely. He is not hereto play the officer. He is a friend, an elder brother, frank and simple. He looks behind words, and endeavours to grasp the secret essence of the soldier who is speaking to him. He must be a man of intelligence, good and just.
“We will discuss the matter again,” he says as he leaves. “Meanwhile, keep a record of the quantities delivered to you. If you can manage it, make a steelyard. For my part, I will sound the commandant. I believe him to be well disposed. Perhaps he will be willing to listen to a courteously worded complaint against his quartermaster. But if we make a complaint we must be extremely careful that we have strong evidence to back it up. And when all is said and done, I am under no illusions as to my power with the German authorities. We are at war. All the conventions have been violated. Notwithstanding the armlet I wear, I am a prisoner just like the rest of you.”
The kitchen staff sits down a second time. Every one is enchanted with the surgeon-in-chief.
In the passages there is an unusual movement. Ordinarily, when supper is over, most of the men lie down upon their straw. The roll-call finds them nearly all asleep. During these two hours there is no life in the fort, except in the kitchens and in the consulting room, which are, after a fashion, clubs where the few intellectuals assemble to enjoy their tobacco in company, to read the paper, or to drink the beer which the most diplomatic among the circle has secured ata high price from the guardroom—all these actions being utterly contrary to regulations.
It sometimes happens, however, that in their casemates the Bretons of the 19th and the 118th of the line, suffering from home-sickness, are day-dreaming as they lie motionless on their couches. If, now, one of them begins to hum softly to himself, his comrades, silent men for the most part, will little by little take up the strain. Most of them have clear, tender, somewhat bleating voices. They drag at the end of the verses. The movement is heavy and lachrymose. It sounds like the desolate psalmody of a religion of despair unillumined by a single gleam of hope. Or again, in rooms No. 16 and No. 17, two fragments translated from Provence, one hears on certain evenings, voiced with a glad pulsation,Magali,Galanto Chatouno, and other love-songs of old Languedoc, that country of leisure and passion. The round coming to call the roll stops sometimes outside the door to listen for a moment to these graceful melodies, so different from the GermanChoraland the GermanLied. But the thick crypts and walls muffle these concerts. The fort is not disturbed by them. Even the nearest casemate will only become aware at intervals, and remotely, of the sound of melody. The long corridors, to which the sun never penetrates, are already as quiet, as mournfully quiet, as they are during the heaviest hours before the dawn.
The unusual activity in the passages astonishes the cooks. The conversation outside becomes livelier, andrises to the intensity of a real tumult. It draws nearer. It is at the door of No. 22. Now come blows on the door, shouts and execrations. “Resign, resign! Fritters! Legs of mutton!” Some of the rioters positively bellow with indignation. The blows on the door become more violent. “Come out, if you dare!”
This goes on for quite two minutes. The slender repast is finished. It is time to fetch some coal. Pailloux and Bouquet, the head cook, take up the coal-box, open the door, and say firmly: “Make way for us, by thunder!” They pass out. But through the door, which is left ajar, fists are shaken, and vociferations rain in. “Food snatchers!” Durupt, shrugging his shoulders, shuts the door in the shouters’ faces. The demonstration becomes still more lively. The noise must be heard a long way off, for suddenly there comes a terrible growling, raucous and determined: “Zurück mit dem Pöbel!”[23]In an instant the crowd, numbering about fifty, disperses like a flight of sparrows. A single man, Georg, the commandant’s boot-polisher, has broken the back of the riot. He disappears. The corridors relapse into silence, the mournful silence of a cellar.…
We are invited to No. 41, to visit Juramy and Roy, chasseurs alpins, together with Foch, d’Arnoult, and Brissot. We go out. A man of the guard, with fixed bayonet, slowly walks by the kitchen. He smiles and greets us.
“Grüss Gott!”
“Gute Nacht!”
On the staircases and in the upper corridors the “ministers” encounter glances of anger and surprise. At No. 41 the comrades, seated upon the twin straw piles of Roy and Juramy, receive them with marked friendliness.
“Well!” says Sergeant Foch, the sturdiest soldier in the fort, chief of the second kitchen, “so it’s your turn this time. You have had your revolt! It seems to have been better organized than mine. But it means nothing. We business men, Brissot and I, know all about the caprices of the crowd. Suddenly, without knowing why, it rages against friends or against foes, haphazard. These good fellows are governed by pure instinct. In my opinion this particular revolt has been mainly the work of the exploiters whose usurious traffic was relentlessly suppressed by Dutrex and Durupt. It’s bad policy to be savage with the strong and gentle with the weak, for the strong avenge themselves. Now they are posing as defenders of the collective stomach. If you only knew all that they are saying, and all that they are leading others to say! I’ve had my eye on them for a long time. This evening they really believed they were going to do something—that to-morrow they would usurp your places. They were already licking their chops. It was a case of trust against trust. I shall laugh if the trust of virtue proves, for once in a way, victorious.”
Dutrex is taciturn.
“Before the roll is called,” he says, “I shall hand in my resignation to M. Langlois.”
“That’s right,” says Brissot approvingly. “Otherwise you will seem to be clinging to a fat position.”
“What are you thinking about?” protests Durupt. “You will seem to justify the enemy; you will accept defeat. The sharp practitioners who, under pretext of serving their comrades, were buying for sixpence from the guard commodities worth about twopence, and selling them at a profit of a shilling, thus realizing as much as a pound a day—these fellows whom you saw through, who would have liked to blarney you, but whom you summoned to the table, whom you shook as one shakes a plum-tree, whom you threatened with the cells (some of them even non-commissioned officers), whom you treated in that cutting way which you know how to assume—these sneak-thieves, who are almost as repulsive as the body strippers, do you want with your own hand to put them in your place in the kitchen? I don’t understand you. I stand firm. If there be a trust of virtue, I promise you it shall checkmate the trust of the lick-cheeses.”
“Meanwhile,” says Foch light-heartedly, “let us drink. Here’s a big jug of beer which I brought from the guardroom under my coat. For your sake I made myself look like a woman in the family way! What, old Riou, are you still in the dumps? Haven’t you got a thirst this evening?”
“My dear Foch, I admit that I do not feel myself to be designed for the government of men. One whowishes to rule men must make up his mind to despise them and to come to terms with their rascality. Now (you will laugh), I respect them. I am even rather fond of them. And it is my weakness to wish them to be fond of me. These hostile cries, these angry glances, which we have just had to endure—I find them difficult of digestion.”
“Digest them as quickly as you can, you big baby! It’s a stage in your education. You need to lose a few illusions. Men are rather a poor lot. You Christians believe that men are brothers. That’s nothing but religious tosh. Men are no good. Brothers?—not a bit of it. They are venomously jealous of any one who has a straighter nose or a prettier wife than their own, of any one with greater talent or more charm. No doubt the worst of them have their good days. When the weather is fine, when their bellies are well lined, when they have done a good stroke of business, they are pleased with every one. They are all smiles. But what does that amount to? A momentary intoxication. The instant they fancy that their neighbour’s belly is fuller than their own, or that he has had better luck in business, there is very little smile about them, and don’t you forget it. It is true that some men are the salt of the earth. These are worth loving, for they are scarce. But most people pass their whole lives in being envious. When it’s their turn to become stiffs, it’s envy that finishes them off!
“If they had any sense, these fellows, I shouldn’t mind so much. But they swallow all the gossip thatcomes their way. Morning after morning a flight of canards settles upon the fort, and the prisoners spend the rest of the day in roasting them. Do you know what they are all telling one another in the casemates? They declare that the major with four stripes made a raid upon kitchen No. 22, and that he found fifty chops, seventy steaks, a leg of mutton, a lot of fritters, a store of cheese—all pinched by Durupt from the men’s rations. Whereupon the major sent you to the cells under guard of four bayonets! Now you know why these rascals looked at you with angry surprise as you passed along the passage.
“When such fellows are really famished, as they are here, seeing that they are jealous and stupid, and, above all, driven out of their senses by starvation, how can you expect them to be anything but idiots? All at once, they see red, and must instantly have a victim. But they are incapable of finding one for themselves. Always some cunning rogues among them point out the victims, indicating as if by chance the men of whom they are jealous, and whom they long to replace. Don’t take it so much to heart. In ten years from now it will all seem to you perfectly natural.”
This profession of social faith gives me no pleasure, although to-night the temptation to approve it is only too strong. What an affair! It is precisely the kitchen run by Dutrex and Durupt, men of principle, men who may be said to be scrupulous to excess, before which a noisy demonstration is made, whilst no one attempts to interfere with kitchen No. 53, notoriously privilegedby the quartermaster. How mean! And it is Frenchmen, men of intelligence, men quite capable of recognizing the real causes of things, who, inspired by envy and revenge, have directed against No. 22 the vague wrath of hungry stomachs!Fames malesuada.Yes, this is what it means, the ambition of a few turning to profit the hunger of all.
It is strange, but a clear recognition of the motives that have brought about this storm in a teacup produces in my mind a sort of philosophic disillusionment. My thoughts pass quite beyond the present affair. I find myself dreading all at once lest the great social movements, those I most admire, those I see on the horizon of history, sublime, heroic, superhuman like the Marseillaise of the Arc de Triomphe, may not resemble this trifling affair, which aimed, beneath the standard of justice, at introducing a set of rogues into the heart of the temple of their thoughts, the kitchen.
If we look at matters without prejudice, a little thing is just as significant as are many events which are regarded as grand simply because the trumpeters of a faction or of a nation have magnified their importance. Indeed, this attempted revolution concerning a piece of cheese suddenly renders all revolutions suspect to me. The little revolution seems to spoil the great revolution, and to lessen the stature of humanity. Is it possible that, in the last analysis, clamours for justice are nothing more than the growls of envy?
Dutrex left us early. I stayed in No. 41 until the roll-call. I was genuinely unhappy.
It need hardly be said that M. Langlois absolutely refused to accept any resignations.
To-day I was out walking before dawn. My thoughts were gloomy. The sun rose in a calm sky, a sky that was greenish-blue, clear, and magnificent, with a flotilla of tiny clouds, white tipped with gold, and melting away at the edges.
When I began work just now I was well content, content to be here, among the placidly gurgling cauldrons, and away from the company of men. But this sudden access of misanthropy is probably the sequel of my fit of the blues. I am “fortorffish,” as the prisoners say. The paroxysm will soon pass.
November 6, 1914.
The weather is sombre. The winter is coming on apace. On the grass, rusted by the frost, the leaves fallen from the willows have already rotted. This morning a gentle, damp wind was blowing, increasing at times to vent long sighs. The whole sky was bistre. Towards France, however, an islet of light was visible. On the Austrian side, the dawn had the ardent flushes of sunset. Skimming the ground, great flights of noisy crows were settling down on the freshly turned ploughs.
Things are going badly in the fort. Not that there is any fear of defeat. Durupt has been at pains to translate theDeutschland über allesof the German military march into a sonorousAlles über Deutschlandfilled with hope. But even Durupt, our Déroulède, is depressed. He had promised us liberty before All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, declaring it certain that we should celebrate these festivals at home. But All Saints’ Day has passed without the faintest murmur of peace. Yesterday evening the revictualling officersaid to Foch: “The war will last two years.” This prophecy has gone the round of the casemates, disseminating gloom. Every one’s patience is exhausted.
Our dietary is still further reduced. To-day we had some horrible little prunes, two years old and as hard as wood, in lieu of meat. Henceforward our five companies are to supply every day a gang of a hundred men to work five miles from here on the military hutments. Ten miles march, eight hours’ work, and to make up for this fatigue duty, a sausage of about the size of your finger. The German ganger, a tailor by trade, and a man with the finest beard you ever saw, is by no means a bad fellow. During fifteen years he has made the seat of his trousers shiny in the tailors’ workrooms of Paris. He has no hatred for the French. As he passes from group to group with his eternal, “Allons, messieurs, travaillons un peu, n’est-ce pas?”[24]he modulates his voice in such alluring intonations, that one would say he was a salesman in the rue Blanche tempting a fair customer to inspect his wares. But the customers of our tailor-ganger are proof against temptation.
Yesterday, Brissot was with the gang as interpreter. The work is going on as slowly as usual, twenty men getting in one another’s way where two would suffice, when, towards four o’clock, the chief engineer-officer, theBaurat, arrives on the scene. His tone is rough, and he makes impatient gestures. He accusesthe men of slacking, whereupon Brissot makes answer, in his cold and cutting manner: “Herr Major, what can you expect them to do when their stomachs are empty? They can’t work any harder. Look at them! Their eyelids and the wings of their nostrils are blue. Do you see that fellow in the trench? He eats every earthworm that he turns up with his spade! At home in France,Herr Major, I am an employer of labour, and I expect my men to work hard. But I pay good wages, and they get plenty to eat. Can I honestly ask these poor devils, who are starving, to do any real work?”
At this unexpected reply, the officer bridles as if he had been flicked with a switch. It is too much for him that a common soldier, a Frenchman, a prisoner, can speak so boldly to him, the greatMajor, the master. Thunderstruck, half in mind to strike the presumptuous fellow, he suddenly turns on his heel, and, cursing loudly, he flings himself into his Mercédès, spits out a command, and drives in hot haste to Fort Orff, where he issues orders that Brissot is never to accompany the gang again.
Having got wind of this affair, I sought out the eater of earthworms. He was a reservist of the 211th regiment, from Montauban. He was didactic, and explained to me that worms are no longer edible when you dig too deeply. Those more than two feet from the surface have a bitter taste. “They look all right; they are large and fat; but they are nothing but earth!” The quaint thing is that this little fellow,sturdy, hairy, and bronzed, by no means looks starved. It seems that the earthworm must be nutritious.
Nor is this the only culinary discovery inspired by the regimen of famine. When Brissot is eating his piece of Münster cheese on Tuesday and Saturday evenings, a comrade stands at gaze, rubbing his hands. At length he says: “You mustn’t squander the rind.” Brissot hands over the rind, which he has purposely cut rather thick. The man then adds: “But you mustn’t squander the paper either.”—“What will you do with this dirty, stinking piece of paper?”—“I shall boil it with some potato peelings under the birch-trees. It’s splendid seasoning. Don’t you see that it is soaked with cheese-fat?” This same prisoner, a nice lad, always good-humoured, well set up, hunts rats in the grass. His most famous dish, one he prepared a fortnight ago, was a stew of apple parings with rats. He secured the apple parings from the participants in a sort of “banquet,” a clandestine “feast” partaken of one evening by a large group of friends after an unusually liberal consignment had been received through the instrumentality of Georg.
It was dusk. Brissot and I were strolling along the slopes discussing, apropos of Bergson, the relationships between philosophy and life. I was surprised that, instead of pushing straight ahead, he turned about. I like to walk quickly, but he insisted upon pacing gently to and fro on the top of the slope looking towards Hepperg. Hands in pockets, wearing theclose-fitting tunic of the chasseurs alpins, little Brissot was scanning the horizon from time to time, when two men whom I had not noticed before, Loux, a colonial infantryman, and Vernes, a linesman of the 1910 class, a compositor onLe Journal, who were stationed at the two angles of the eastern escarp, simultaneously exclaimed: “There he is!”—“Hullo!” says Brissot, “he’s got a big load this evening.” I look. From behind the recently felled pine-trees bordering the Hepperg road appears a man carrying a box under one arm and a large sack under the other. He crosses the ploughed fields and comes straight in our direction. His progress is slow. He stumbles over the ridges. He looks utterly exhausted. From time to time he stops and deposits his two burdens on the ground. After he has reached the foot of the battery, we lose sight of him for some minutes. Then he reappears upon the advanced glacis, among the wild rose bushes. I recognize Georg Doppel, the baron’s orderly, his face grey and dripping with sweat. He is in full dress, looking very smart in the light blue Bavarian uniform with its red cuff-facings. He wears a fancy cap similar to that of hisHerr Major. But here comes the sentinel making his rounds! “Twenty-two,” call out Vernes and Loux. Brissot takes off his cap; it is a signal. Georg lies down among the bushes. The sentinel, pipe in mouth, his threadbareMützedrawn down over his eyes, walks carelessly by, looking like a country bumpkin. His rifle, hanging to the sling, knocks against his thighs. He passes on to the northern wall and disappears. Brissotputs on his cap again. “Get to the rope, quick!” says he to Loux, “and you, Vernes, to the ditch!” Georg has placed his sack and his box on the masonry of the counterscarp. He ties them to a rope and allows them to glide down into the great ditch. There Vernes receives the goods, sets them against the wall of the escarp, and ties them successively to the rope which the colonial infantryman lowers to him from the top of the wall. Two hauls, and the food is inside the fort. It is now quite dark, and Vernes and Loux hurry off to get them safely housed in No. 34, Brissot’s room.
Georg makes for the great iron gate and rings the bell. The man on guard peeps out through the judas. Recognizing the commandant’s orderly, he hastens to unbolt the gate, and respectfully draws aside, though without going quite so far as to stand to attention as he would for the major himself. The boot-polisher enters, firm of tread, head erect, giving a gentle greeting. In the most dignified manner he makes his way to No. 34. “Grüss Gott, Georg!” Conversation ensues between him and Brissot. Gold coins pass from the French purse into the German, and the boot-polisher takes his leave. “Now then, you chaps,” says Brissot, “let’s have dinner!”
To-day Brissot’s guests ate buttered eggs, herrings from the Baltic, known here as “Bismarcks,” and a great dish of stewed pippins, all washed down with the contents of a small barrel of cool beer, and cooked upon an illicit stove by Loux, the colonial infantryman, a sabot-maker from Bresse, cook-in-ordinary to Brissot.
Since this banquet, the sprightly Le Second, who in the kitchens had already nicknamed our “salon” the “navel of Fort Orff,” has taken to calling casemate No. 34 the “Capua of Fort Orff.”
The palliasse of the man who is averse to “squandering” is not far from that on which Brissot and his guests were dining, semi-recumbent in Roman fashion. The rat-hunter was watching their culinary activities. When the time came to dispose of the herrings, he ran up, saying: “Don’t squander the heads and the tails!”—“There you are, old chap.”—“That will be fine seasoning to-morrow for my rats. These fish are dripping with brine. Since the kitchens have been rationed in the matter of salt I have found it impossible to get even a pinch from the cooks.” When the diners attacked the pippins, each guest peeling a portion for the common stew, the little soldier said: “Don’t squander the parings.” Nimble and lively as a squirrel, he ran from one to another, receiving the strips of peel in his képi as they fell from the knife.
I saw him next day under the birches, beaming with delight over his stewpan. “Here’s plenty!” he said. “I have a rat, the apple peelings, and the heads and tails of the Bismarcks! Best of all, they have just turned out this straw here.”—“But the straw is contaminated. Surely you know that this is the bedding from a lousy casemate.”—“What does that matter? Fire purifies everything. It’s a devil of a business now to get any wood in the fort. Reeds, raspberry canes, the lower branches of the trees—they’ve all beenburned. Some of our fellows are attacking the timber-shores of the counterscarp and the lids of the latrines. But that is a dangerous game. I don’t want to spend a week in the clink on bread and water.”