Chapter I: Have a Palliasse (4)

“Then we shall not have suffered for nothing,” said a lad from Montmédy. “I was two days in the forest with five comrades. We made holes in the trees to suck the sap. We had hallucinations. Two of them killed themselves.” Louis Ludes, a baker from Pouzolles, wounded in Morocco, and wounded again at Lunéville, the worst of wounds, a shell in the abdomen (his recovery astonished all the surgeons), exclaimed: “I too, tonnerre, I am in this victory!”

And while they were looking at the beautiful Greek with the mighty wings, Dutrex, who was reading the _Burgraves_, declaimed to us in his grating bass voice, full of cruel irony, the mendicant’s apostrophe:

Les Vandales ont pris Berlin! Ah! quel tableau!
Les païens à Dantzig! Les Mogols à Breslau!
Tout cela dans l’esprit en même temps me monte
Pêle-mêle, au hasard; mais c’est horrible!… ô honte!…
Allemagne, Allemagne, Allemagne.… Hélas![29]

DAWN

_December 8, 1914._

Half awake, I stretch out my hand to see whether Dutrex is there. His palliasse is deserted, his rug folded up. I raise myself on my elbow. All the others are still asleep, lying like long mute mummies. I draw on my shoes. At the main entrance, the sentries, hands in pockets, heads between their shoulders, are stamping their feet, their eyes white with cold. “_Guten Morgen!_”—“_Guten Morgen!_” I grope my way down the stair and along the passage. The lamps have gone out. There is a light in No. 22. I go in. Dutrex is shaving; his little mirror is perched on the vice. In front of him stands a smoky lamp. All around is darkness. Bouquet passes from one cauldron to another, singing softly and sentimentally:

La petite Française
Qui m’attend là-bas
A les yeux de braise
Le cœur de lilas.…[30]

The kitchen is full of sulphurous fumes. “What time is it?”—“Five o’clock.” Dutrex has finished shaving. I take his place before the mirror and the lamp with the broken chimney. Some one knocks at the door. A little man comes in. He wears a fatigue-cap; his head is bowed, his face is tied up in a handkerchief, he holds his left cheek with both hands. He looks at us like a whipped dog. “I’m in such pain!”—“What’s the matter?” asks Bouquet, who is tender-hearted. The poor fellow is unable to speak plainly. “I have been walking up and down the corridors for a long time. I can’t keep still. My wound is gnawing at me. It seems to be screaming there, just under the ear!”—“Poor chap, you must see Laloux, but he is still asleep. Sit down there between the stoves. There’s a stool for you. Drink a mug of coffee while you’re waiting. That’ll warm you.”—“Yes, I’m perished with cold.”

Instead of a cheek he has a great violet crevasse with lines of scar tissue radiating from it. He was struck by a bullet which passed in obliquely through the nose and on its way out shattered half the left side of the face, including the articulation of the jaw. He has an abscess forming in the internal ear, which is pretty sure to kill him. While I shave, I look at this reservist.

He arrived with the last batch of convalescent wounded. Most of them were but half cured. They were sent away from Ingolstadt to make room for refugees from Pomerania, children, women, and old men, broken down through privation. The Russian wave is washing these refugees by thousands into the southern hutments.

“Does it still hurt?”

“Not quite so much.”

“Where are you from?”

“From a village near Mans.”

“Do you think that your missus will be able to love you with that hole in your cheek and your hanging jaw?”

“I hope so.”

“Where were you in barracks?”

“At Saint-Mihiel.”

“Where did you get your wound?”

“At Marville, near Virton, in Belgium.”

“Long ago?”

“August 24th.”

“Here’s another mug of coffee for you.”

The man, Vouvard by name, puts his hand behind the ear, closes his eyes, and rocks to and fro, saying: “I don’t know what to do, it hurts so.”

The cooks come in. With great hooks they take down the boiling cauldrons. Dutrex goes out for the roll-call. Steam fills the casemate, stifling us, and I open the window. Day is breaking; tiny clouds of a pale silver tint are floating at a great altitude. Deschênes, the woodman from the forest of Argonne, catching sight of the white frost on the slope, says with conviction: “This sort of weather gives one the hump here. Think how jolly it would be to be at work. Think how there are people perishing of hunger while we are shut up here doing nothing. And when we get home we shall have to work ourselves to death to pay off the debts our wives have made while we have been away. A lot of good one gets out of war!”

Dutrex enters with a martial stride. “I say, Riou, here are the latest orders from headquarters: ‘The purveyors and the workmen employed at the fort must be accompanied by a soldier of the guard; the prisoners are forbidden to approach them. The sale of food and drink to prisoners is strictly forbidden. The commandants are responsible for seeing that these orders are carried out.’”

“Very well, the slopes are also forbidden. I will immediately go for a walk there.”

I linger on the ramparts. The sun is about to rise. The air is pure, like that of the high mountains. Beyond the huge Danubian plain I catch sight for the first time of the blue serrations of the Tyrolese Alps, crowning the delicate lines of the middle distance. To-day is the feast of the Immaculate Conception. The air is filled with the sound of bells. The deep notes of those of Ingolstadt mingle with the brighter chimes of Hepperg, Wegstetten, and Lenting. The cocks are crowing. The crows are flying at a great height, and the harmonious silence is broken from time to time by their croakings. Everything glistens. The sky is superb. The earth rejoices. The soul finds refreshment and delight in the elysian dawn.

Over there, towards the rising sun, upon the Warthe and in the Carpathian defiles, men are killing one another. In the opposite quarter, beyond the gentle undulations dotted with white farms and beyond the magnificent barrier of the Swabian Jura, men are killing one another in Alsace, in Lorraine, and in Flanders. The villages of Europe are filled with truncated limbs, wooden legs, broken lives. Poor world of men!

HE GOES AWAY

_December 13, 1914._

He leaves this evening. Every one is sad. Who will replace him? If only it is not a man belonging to the school of the _Münchener Neueste Nachrichten_,[31] which has been summoning the government to take reprisals against the French prisoners. “_Geduld genug!_” exclaimed the official journalist; “We have been patient long enough!” He demanded the head of Colonel Grey, Sir Edward Grey’s brother, and also that of Delcassé’s son, both of whom had been wounded and taken prisoner. The _Ingolstädter Zeitung_ has been even more drastic than the Munich journal.

Yesterday passed gloomily. The men of the guard, like all those who have not been at the front, were spiteful and meddlesome. The patrol refused to allow us to set foot upon the slopes, even insisting that we must remain in the mud and puddles of the lower courts. Brissot and I contended that they did not know the regulations, and that the great track half-way up which dominates the two courts was certainly within bounds. Anyhow, taking advantage of the mist, I had before sunrise walked as usual on the forbidden escarp. Then, having a slight cold, and feeling poorly, I lay down upon a pile of palliasses in the Salle du Jeu de Paume, and spent the day in re-reading _Eugénie Grandet_, which Corporal Henriot had just received from Paris.

But I was thinking more about the baron’s departure than about old Grandet. The others were playing chess. “What a fine chap he is!” exclaimed Détry. “Riou, old boy, we ought to make him a grand speech when he leaves. Did you see the farewell note he sent round the casemates? He thanks his ‘fellow-workers.’ He courteously congratulates every one. He wishes us good luck. There’s a man for you, one who has never failed to treat us as men. Nothing of the Ploss about him!”

* * * * *

Lying with my head beneath the rug, my book closed, and my eyes shut, it suddenly seemed to me that the recent weeks had been almost enjoyable. I forgot the long nights of the first month or so, when my stomach was continually gnawing, and when the memories of meals eaten before the war, their steam, their odour, were so vivid as to constitute a veritable torture of Tantalus. Forgetting home-sickness and tedium, I found myself looking back wistfully to that which in actual experience had appeared horrible.

It seemed to me that with the transfer of von Stengel a fresh imprisonment was about to begin, harassing, with no security, and inhuman; that henceforward I should be truly in prison.

An end, I said to myself, to our evening walks on the roads adjoining the fort. An end to those pleasant saunters in the twilight, a little band of five or six, almost as good as a tête-à-tête after the life of the herd. Our new master, just married, will devote his leisure to his wife. Possibly, moreover, as the baron has suggested, the recent escape of four English officers from Fort Hartmann will make the new commandant very strict.…

All at once it was borne in on me that the last few weeks had been at the same time melancholy and pleasing.…

* * * * *

Farewell to my hop-garden, in which I had gleaned dried hops wherewith to spice the insipid German tobacco. Farewell to my bushes of blackthorn and barberry, where I plucked red berries, where I cut such fine switches—_der Stock des Gelehrten_, as Stengel said. Farewell to my farm at Hepperg, my great country seat which has fallen to the female line, whose fortress-like walls, amid the straw stacks and the noisy populace of ganders, geese, hens, and guinea-fowl, spoke to me of my birthplace grieving for the two sons at the war, spoke to me of the country house haloed in memories, dozing beneath the winter sun in the light shade of the olives and the sad cypresses, blue-girdled by the shining hills of Vivarais. Farewell to the disused quarry, the silent undergrowth, filled with shafts of light and with gossamer; the carpet of dead leaves white with hoar-frost, which crackles beneath the feet. Farewell to my royal Danubian plain, where the setting sun throws into relief the huge and gentle undulations, dotted with smoking villages. Farewell to my evening skies, my grand Bavarian twilights, infinitely variable, which will remain the most splendid memory of my imprisonment.

* * * * *

I was above all grateful to Baron von Stengel for having asked me to join him in his afternoon walks with the French medical officers. As you know, I have more taste for the beauties of nature than for the doings of my kind. In thus presenting me with the freedom of the fields, my gaoler gave me the thing I like best in the world, barring your company and that of a few intimates.

He extended me this invitation one morning when I was in the throes of despondency. It was late in September. At dawn there had been an iridescent haze. On the escarp, great drops of water had formed on the birch and willow branches, and were falling thence to the ground. The weather was splendid; the sun was gradually dispersing the transparent vapours; and yet one could imagine that all nature was weeping. I was tired out. To secure oblivion, I had been working too assiduously for several days. I was at the end of my resources; the sordidness of the surroundings sickened me and hunger gnawed at my vitals. I was unutterably miserable. I had no strength to do anything but to yearn for you, to dream of flowers, of fresh springs, space, freedom. France! France! Brissot, hoping to cure me, had brought me George Sand’s _Maîtres sonneurs_, a greasy volume which had found its way here God knows how, perhaps stolen from the municipal school by a soldier quartered in the fort. Said Brissot: “It is redolent of nature; I am bringing you the very bouquet of the French countryside!” Such was my condition when the major came by. “Hallo, monsieur Riou,” he exclaimed, “you don’t look as cheerful as usual.”—“I’m home-sick, mon commandant.”—“Would you care to take a walk with me in the country this evening?”—“Should I care to!”

My memory of this first excursion is of a joy which was perfect though uneventful. The great black gate with its heraldic lions was opened by the sentry for the egress of the major and his companions; to the left lay the avenue, the thicket of acacias masking the ditch of retreat; below us, between the shivering, gold-capped birches, the gentle and unending undulations of the plain; to the right, seen obliquely, the yellow out-buildings, the tall hop-poles, the military road cut up by artillery fire, running straight in the direction of the sombre crest of the Franconian Jura, and crossing the huge chessboard of ploughed fields; further on, the little strategic wood, a magnificent growth of fir-trees, larches, and beeches, encircled by stone-pines and oaks, a sort of sacred grove, with an undergrowth of the most varied nature.

I was walking in the rear of our little company, going quietly along, avoiding conversation, filled with delight.

“Are you still sad, M. Riou?” said the baron.

“Oh, no, I am perfectly happy.”

The wide sky covering the wide landscape; the delicate lines of the horizon; the purity of the light; the brilliancy of the September tints; the fragrance of the fields; the herds of oxen; the ploughs at work, guided by boys whistling melancholy airs—it was a Virgilian scene. Poor wreckage from the battles of Lorraine that I was, this energy of nature, of peaceful and robust nature, flooded my heart with great waves of mute pleasure far more intense than the intoxication of the senses. After the blood-stained fields of Dieuze, after the fetid prison-house, after qualms, suffocation, base and monotonous wretchedness, it seemed to me that I was coming back to life.

The wood was swarming with mushrooms. My companions, especially Lœbre, were mycologists. They scattered among the undergrowth. “Here’s a real nest of _tricholoma personatum_,” cried Bouvat in sonorous tones. “Come and make sure, Lœbre.” Lœbre saunters up. The young man smiles good-naturedly. “Pooh! that’s not the lilac stem! That’s _amanita muscaria_. That’s no good to us. But you have overlooked those fine _russulæ_ behind you on the roots of the pine-trees.” “Herr Lœbre, here’s a prize!” called out M. Cavaillé, in Languedoc German. “Here are some _lactarii deliciosi_; come and look, a regular fairy-ring of them.” Their mouths watering, they all crowd round this epicure’s fare. “What a feast we shall have this evening!” Now comes Jeandidier, of Longwy in Lorraine, walking up with long, deliberate strides, carrying very carefully, as a man carries a candle in a procession, beneath his fiery beard and his long Bavarian pipe, two great parasol mushrooms, which of all the mushrooms have the longest stems, have the most delicate flavour, and are the most fragile. Bouvat bore away the spoils. Each one made his contribution of _russula cyanoxantha_, _clitocybe_, meadow agaric, and liver fungus. The baron was amused by these schoolboy antics. From time to time a covey of partridges was put up, and flew noisily away; or a hare, awakened with a start, fled in terror. Night was falling. We made our way back, skirting the glacis. I culled a bouquet of autumn leaves. We crossed a field from which the potatoes had just been lifted. A few of the tubers had been overlooked. I put them in my pocket with great care, under the baron’s very eyes. Bouquet, the head cook, made a fry of them that evening. Eight of us enjoyed them.

This morning a deputation of the comrades came to me when I was at work, to commission me to write a farewell address. It had to be very short, since the baron could spare us but a few minutes. In pencil (ink is forbidden) I quickly compose what is needed. I read it to the deputation, which approves the wording. I give a hasty polish to my shoes, and we set out for the _Kommandantur_. The baron shakes hands. We arrange ourselves in a semicircle. I am at the right wing, close to the commandant. His successor is there, a stiff-mannered little man, quite inscrutable. He wears a yager’s cap, green in colour, pulled down to the ears; the collar of his tunic stands up so as almost to hide his head, but we can see his drooping features and cold eyes. While I am speaking he stands at attention.

“Mon commandant, to every one of us your departure is a matter of personal regret. You are an enemy, but never has any one had a more courteous enemy.

“You have treated us as soldiers, with perfect frankness; we have treated you as the true gentleman that you are.

“We, the French prisoners at Fort Orff, differ upon many points. But there is one matter upon which, when we return to France, we shall all agree, namely, that Commandant Major Baron von Stengel deserved and gained the affection and admiration of those towards whom for three months he had to fill the position of gaoler.

“Accept our thanks, mon commandant. God have you in his keeping.”

With moist eyes, M. von Stengel introduces us to his successor, each one by name, detailing our qualities, our services, the incidents of our career. Stiff as ever, the _Oberleutnant_ bows to each in turn, to the infantry of the line, to the chasseurs à pied, to the chasseurs alpins, to the artillery, to the engineers, to the hussars. They are tall, handsome fellows, of the same type as the grand old von Stengel. We can hardly believe that we are in Germany. We are sincerely affected, quite free from self-consciousness. The baron speaks to us as friends. At his age, when the events that one can look forward to are numbered, everything seems of importance. This separation is painful to him. None of us can fail to recognize it; there is no pretence about his distress. He presses us by the hand. He tells me that he will have our address translated, and that he is going to send on his carriage with the luggage. “I want to take a last walk with my friends,” he said. “God guard you, my fine fellows.”

The walk, just now, was a melancholy affair. To avoid the mud on the road we strolled along the edge of the fields towards Hepperg, crowding round the baron as round a dear friend who is taking leave for ever. Great bands of red striated the dark sky. Smokelike vapours lowered over the earth. Night came on, gloomy and solemn. The baron spoke to me of Ingolstadt, whose massive steeples could be seen in the distance through the mist rising from the Danube. He told me that apart from Germelsheim in the Palatinate, this was the only fortress in Bavaria; that Tilly and Wallenstein had lived there; that the little town of twenty thousand inhabitants had been a capital in its day. When we reached the gate, he said with a smile, “I count my friends’ heads; all of them are here.” We shook hands lingeringly and in silence at the door of the _Kommandantur_.

Farewell now to the fields; farewell, even, to the footpath of the escarp. I have been warned that I shall be fired on if I am seen there. I must be content henceforward with the muddy track overlooking the poor amphitheatre of the courts, filthier than a pigsty. I still have your little acacias, leafless, lugubrious, shivering in the bitter wind.

DISAPPOINTMENT

_December 17, 1914._

Our new gaoler has introduced a fresh method of taking the roll-call. We have all to line up in two ranks in the sticky mud of the ditches, and to wait there while we are counted. This ridiculous enumeration interferes with the digestion of our poor midday meal, and serves more than any other petty formality to remind us that we are prisoners. Just now, when the gloomy ceremony was finished, I went to see the _Feldwebel_.

He is a wealthy horse-dealer from Ratisbon, cunning, short, with a receding forehead, fresh-coloured, laughing eyes, well padded with fat, a typical German Jew. Recently emerged from poverty, moderately patriotic, secretly thinking that people are very stupid to get their skins perforated for the _Vaterland_ and other fine words, he takes for his own motto in all circumstances that a living dog is better than a dead lion. He has managed to arrange that his part in the campaign shall be a safe one, played where he will be close to his faithful spouse and to his business, far from the deadly bullets. He is quite a good fellow, with no desire to play the persecutor; but since his chief dread is to be caught in a dereliction of duty and sent to the front, he is extremely strict. Twice a day, at two and at seven, we exchange language lessons. This does not merely secure me some new words of German, but also from time to time I am given a handful of nuts and two or three apples.

I hasten off to fetch my parcel. I imagine that it contains something to eat—chocolate, sausage—and I am hungry. The _Feldwebel_ giggles like a child. He takes the key of No. 72, the terrible casemate which is as damp as a drain; and, flanked by d’Arnoult and myself, he reaches the “parcels office” at the end of the gloomy passage. I walk confidently, for I have already, by clandestine methods, scrutinized your consignment, and weighed it in my hand. It was compact, as heavy as one could wish, and felt like a ten-pound box of Menier chocolate. I was cocksure. Here we are; we light the lantern. I lay the packet on the table. Keenly expectant, I cut open the oilcloth wrapping. Books! Montaigne, Voltaire. An indulgent glance from the _Feldwebel_ at this consignment. I take my leave. Brissot awaits me at the turn of the stairs. “Well?”—“Books, old chap.”—“Capital! The smallest grain of millet would have suited you better!”

Not even a letter, a little smuggled letter! How punctilious you are! Do you know that your letter of November 2nd did not come to hand till yesterday, having taken forty-four days to travel from Paris to Fort Orff?

OH, DEAR!

_February 26, 1915._

The first warm, sunny day. The grey grass of last autumn is showing in patches here and there through the melting snow; it is slightly tinged with green. The sky is blue. A huge cloud, white and shining, rolls towards the north.

Why do I feel so lightsome this morning? Is it possible that I am once more what I was before the war?

If only the end were nearing, the end of the long miseries of winter in the lousy, stinking, and chattering casemate! If an end were nearing to the sterile cackle, the disquisitions on strategy, the disputes, and the lamentations, to all that a discontented crowd exhales, through the empty hours, in the way of physical boredom and of melancholy! Oh the gnawing ache of these two months in an ant-hill encompassed by snow, filth, and bitter winds! Two months of purgatory. I know now that to live among men, nothing but men, day by day and night by night, in intimate contact, without activity, without solitude, without the company of women (that other solitude), is to live in purgatory.

Take men who have nothing in common but the flag. They differ in traditions, education, and temperament; their habits of life are fixed. They are in the full vigour of manhood. They are strong and spirited. They are familiar with violence and struggle. Throw these soldiers pell-mell into a cellar, where they hunger and are cut off from news. Subject them to meddlesome regulations. Compel them, in this wretchedness, to live always in close proximity, and far from everything which they have hitherto known as life. Doubtless they will have their good hours. At times, when their minds are filled with thoughts of those they love and of their motherland, their words and their silences will be no less pure and sweet than is a long summer twilight. Or when some newspaper, concealed in a parcel from France, has brought them tidings of victory and wafted to them all the hope of their free brothers, they will experience a sublime unison of joy. But at other times.… No, I wish to forget. After all, the heroes of the great epic are but men. Why should we expect of them, during months and months, a patience and a self-command of which many men in good society, men esteemed well-bred, are incapable when a caller stays too long?

* * * * *

Everything has changed since Baron von Stengel’s departure. The new commandant, M. Schwappach, of the department of streams and forests, possesses all the virtues of the German bureaucrat. He is active, precise, orderly, meticulous. He has also the infatuation of his caste, for he believes that the world gravitates round it. He admires and fears his chiefs, and he applies to the very letter every _Befehl_ from headquarters. Everything is now forbidden. Daily the _Feldwebel_ reads the orders to the sentries: the slopes are forbidden; without challenge, they must fire upon any one who is seen there.

* * * * *

I have suffered greatly at being thus cut off from the view to be obtained from the ramparts, and this has affected me hardly less than the short commons. The number of sentries has been tripled. We are forbidden to wear civilian clothing unless it has been dyed red. Headquarters has even compelled the chasseurs alpins and the colonial infantrymen to paint red stripes on their uniforms under the pretext that these were too much like civilian clothing. It has become impossible to get the most trifling supplement to the official rations. M. Schwappach had a _Landwehrmann_ court-martialled because he had sold some chocolate to the prisoners. The guard is terrorized. The loaf which used to last three days must now last five, so that our daily allowance of bread is 7½ oz. This would mean sheer starvation if we received nothing from France. No more coffee, no more roasted barley: roasted acorns merely. Those who get more parcels than the others have a regular train of dependents—famished men. My own dependents are chiefly soldiers from the invaded regions.

Having written a strongly worded letter which was sent back to me from Ingolstadt (I am in extremely bad odour at headquarters), I am threatened, should the offence be repeated, with being completely deprived of the right to receive or send letters. I have already been punished with three weeks of this measure.

I have had some very remarkable discussions with the commandant. These people want us to love them. They demand, filled with indignation, our reasons for not loving them. If we give them our reasons in plain terms, and support our assertions with facts and dates, lo! ten days’ prison, on bread and water!

M. von Stengel, where are you? Anyhow, we now know what German discipline is. We know it in all its purity and all its splendour. There is no longer any one to temper its severities.

THE RUSSIANS

_April 20, 1915._

The Russians whom we were dreading have arrived. For the last three months the Germans have been threatening us with them as with the plague, adding: “In the camps where the French and the Russians are together they always come to blows.”

One morning the _Oberstabsarzt_ inoculated us against cholera. Every one said: “They are coming!” The _Feldwebel_ did in fact go through the casemates, allotting five to one, ten to another, and fifteen to some. In the afternoon, groups were watching from the outer part of the slope which commands the road from Ingolstadt. There was much grumbling. Some were cursing the Germans for wishing to poison us with the deadly Asiatic disease. Some, frightened by the inoculation, were already imagining themselves black and rotten.

At six in the evening, an hour earlier than usual, the electric bell rang for the evacuation of the courts. Immediately afterwards, the forty-nine heads of rooms were summoned, were drawn up in line beyond the bridge, and were told to wait.

The gentle April twilight had already enveloped the brow of the slopes, and the lower red-brick front looking into the ditch lay hidden in the gathering darkness as if in ambuscade. French prisoners were bunched round the windows. With laughing faces they defied the commandant, stiff and dapper, doing sentry-go on the glacis. Under his very nose they began to hum the Russian national anthem. But the Russians did not come. The great black gate, buttressed between the mossy walls of the counterscarp, starred with anemone and colt’s-foot, remained obstinately shut. Impatience grew. At length the outer sentry whistled, the _Hauptmann_ went forward, and the gate opened.

The distribution of the convoy was effected in the Prussian manner. Each headman went to take delivery of his Russians outside, behind the gate, and conducted the supplementary squad to his casemate. This took half an hour. In Indian file, following their French corporal or sergeant, they went along at a quick step, but noiselessly in their supple jack-boots; they were muffled in huge grey overcoats, and their size was increased by enormous fur caps. Night fell. The dead colour of their uniforms melted away in the darkness. The silence was absolute. Pale Scythian faces, flat-nosed Tartar faces, Asiatic types with wide cheek-bones, Samoyede beards, downy and curled—all the Russias were passing. We looked on. When they had crossed the bridge the fort swallowed them.

In the interior, to the scandal of our masters, French rule prevailed. Notwithstanding the order confining us to our rooms, the “Frantsuz” crowded to the thresholds to greet the “little fathers”—“Good-day, Russkis!” they cried, regardless of the Boches; “_Germania kaput!_ The Carpathians floup!” They made roguish gestures indicating freedom.

“What monkeys!” thought the Germans, as they looked on. The truth is that no one understands so well as the French how to invent a language, to supplement words by signs and onomatopœias. They have an excellent excuse for neglecting the study of foreign languages! Does a good mime learn foreign tongues?

The Russians got on little faster in the corridors of Fort Orff than in the attack upon Lowicz, where their advance was obstructed by barbed wire. Each door was an ambush; every Frenchman an obstacle. Cigars and cakes rained upon them. And then the handshakings and the amicable clappings on the shoulder. Détry, though he is as much afraid of lice as of cholera, exchanged his képi for an imposing Siberian headdress made of sheepskin, bristling, stinking, and alive!

The little fathers had had nothing to eat since the previous day. The quartermaster served them out a morsel of cheese, but no bread. “_Germania, niet hleb_” (“There is no bread in Germany!”), said the Russians, “_Ja, nichts Brot!_” rejoined the French in their bad German; “but France _Brot_, plenty _Brot_!” Thus communicating with their friends in nigger talk, they emptied their haversacks before the hungry men.

The Germans laughed on the wrong side of their mouths. They had expected war; what they saw was love. Until nine o’clock the turmoil was incredible. Each room was treating its new recruits. The poorer rooms offered crusts of white bread baked in Saintonge or Lower Brittany. In the well-to-do quarters the men brewed chocolate and served it with rusks. Since in my room, that of the interpreters, there were no Russians, I went to No. 16, the casemate of Corporal Dumoulin, my comrade-at-arms. Dinner was finished. Seated on their palliasses doubled over, our allies were digesting the good things sent by French mothers. Near the window, a hairdresser was already dealing with the great mops of hair.

“You see,” said Dumoulin, “I want to smarten them up. But how pious and ceremonious they are. Of course we divided our food with them. They all kissed my hand. Then they took off their caps, said their prayers, and fed. After that, they got up, said their prayers again, and kissed my hand once more. But what have you got there?”

“I have no Russians, so I shall adopt yours. But unfortunately they have already dined!”

“Don’t bother about that; they will dine ten times over this evening!”

It was my turn to be embraced. Gingerbread, Easter eggs, jam, petit-beurre biscuits, dates, cigarettes—I was kissed between each course. One of the Russians, a hairy corporal, a thick-set man, with dog-like eyes, was not satisfied with my hand, but kissed me on the lips. I suppose it is the custom of the country. Some of them overwhelmed me with profound genuflexions as if I had been the white elephant.

Throughout the evening there was an intoxication of generosity. Thrifty men at ordinary times, the French now gave all they had. Il Poverello could not have done better. The huge round loaves kneaded in the family kneading-trough and baked in the village oven, the apples and nuts of the last harvest, old sausages spiced with garlic and thyme, everything, even the “surprises” secretly prepared by the maman for her boy in captivity—everything was handed over. Little Stéphanus of Saint-Denis, who has lost his hearing through a wound in the head, and who, being an orphan, would receive nothing from France were it not for you and Mme. Weiss, had only his fifth of a loaf of potato bread. He gave it. The comrades from the invaded regions, who have to live on the provisions of their “adopted brothers,” were greatly distressed that they had nothing to share out but their poverty.

But if charity was lively, gaiety was insane. The little fathers were stupefied with astonishment. They looked upon us as legendary _bariny_ (seigneurs), as Crœsuses flowing with milk and honey, as magicians proof against misfortune, able to make the desert, and even the prison pavement, blossom like the rose. What a change for them! They had been the serfs of the Boche sergeants in the Lechfeld camp, their backs were still smarting from the canings administered to revenge the loss of Przemysl, and from this they were suddenly transported to become guests at the feast of the parable! Rich and poor, beggars and lords, all were equal, all were friends, all were brothers at this primitive Christian agape, which lacked nothing, not even good cigars. Such plenty and such brotherhood turned their heads. Bewildered and mute, ignorant of our language as we were ignorant of theirs, and having no other means of showing us their gratitude, they kissed us in season and out, and they prostrated themselves before us as before their own icons.

I have spoken to you about Graby, one of the two famous comic cyclists known in Paris, and indeed throughout Europe, under the name of the Brothers Abbins. His wound is healed. He is as lithe as ever, gay, martial, a jolly fellow. “_Ein lustiger Gesell_,” the _Feldwebel_ calls him, adding, “There’s a typical Frenchman for you!” In Dumoulin’s room I am being melted almost to tears under the Russian kisses, when Graby bursts open the door, and, quite out of breath, exclaims: “Riou, old chap, my Slav poilus are making ready to dance. I invite you to the party.” He drags me off. His casemate is at the other end of the fort. On the way he explains that he has discovered a sort of interpreter, a Pole who has been in New York, and who knows a few words of English. “You’ll see, we’re going to have high jinks to-night!”

There are indeed high jinks. An assemblage of képis and fur caps beneath a huge candelabra, improvised by the hosts, and ornamented with aeroplanes and flags cut out of paper. A horrible menagerie odour fills the room. The banquet is over. Tea is being handed round in old tins. Graby, looking even more like a street arab than usual, is doing the honours, assisted by big Ménard, erect, smart, as clean shaven as a British guardsman, and with the suspicion of an English accent. Prompted by Abbins, the Pole introduces me as a French writer familiar with Russian authors.

“Friends!”

“Friends!”

“Comrades!”

“_Sayousniki!_”

“Bravo!”

“Hurrah!”

“Now,” says Graby, sketching a figure, “let us dance.”

A circle is formed. Two youths as lean as cats confront one another. At first they make a feint of sparring. They seem as if engaged in a slow and weary pyrrhic dance. The onlookers’ eyes sparkle; an indefinite measure is beaten with the hands. This lasts for two minutes. Then the rhythm becomes brisker, the partners draw themselves up to their full height and keep their arms closely pressed to their sides; they are motionless like fakirs. But with their heels they make a noise which sounds like that of distant castanets, a muted crackling in an ever-accelerating tempo. A sudden pause. The dancers squat on their hams. There follows the famous step which we have beheld at the Russian ballet, the strange dance whose savage rhythm is punctuated by the clacking of boots on the boards. At the very end, the Russians give an abrupt “Hurrah!” It is over. Graby congratulates his men by patting their cheeks, by commendatory gurgles, by the “boo, boo, boo,” and other labial interjections that mothers use to their nurslings.

More tea, more cigarettes. We ask for the Russian national anthem. You know it. It seems to me as heavy as a convict’s fetters. To relieve my ears I demand the _Marseillaise_. Boude sings the couplets and we take up the chorus. The swing of it, the decision, the thrill, as of a victorious charge, astonish the Russians. My neighbour the Pole weeps.

“You are crying?” I say to him in English.

“You can’t understand,” he makes answer. “That air represents liberty. You possess it; you don’t know the value of it. We dream of it.” His debased English was interspersed with Polish phrases which rang with a sort of Latin sweetness. “Don’t you know that we are slaves?”

“This war will free you.”

“You think so? We have fought well enough! My comrades stood firm when they were being mown down before Lowicz. Yes, we have fought fiercely for the Czar, even while feeling that his victory would serve only to make our chains heavier. Poor Poland! Poor Poland!”

The name of Poland attracts the attention of a big artilleryman with a bull neck, a flat nose, a hard and suspicious expression.

“What are you saying about Poland?” he asks me in German.

“That this war will liberate the country. You have the Czar’s promise.”

* * * * *

His fixed look, fierce and defiant, his turned-up chin, his tanned and robust visage, contrast with the noble passion of his words. Never before have I witnessed real despair, that despair which hardens the features and vulcanizes the soul, despair transformed into a motive for living.

This Pole is as tragic as one of Wyspianski’s heroes.

Around us the others are enjoying themselves like brothers reunited. Graby is begging Ménard to sing the American _Row! Row! Row!_ I long to take my companion out on to the slopes, and there, amid the silence, to let him talk at length, to listen, and to make him feel that I share his dreams, that France is the friend of every nation that yearns for freedom.

* * * * *

The Pole makes no accusations against France. She has deceived his people, but he loves her just the same. He believes in her, despite her faults, as the great champion of justice.

Ménard is singing. The French and the Russians are taking up in chorus the refrain, “Row! Row! Row!” Elbows on knees, head in hands, expression disdainful, my Pole says no more, but sits like a colossus, making the best of his impotence.

The Russians have suddenly started a new air. A tenor sings the first phrase in solo. A bass joins in. Then the other voices take up their parts. It is beautiful, with a rough, serious, wild beauty. I ask the title. _The Song of the War against Japan._ Then they give some love songs. It seems to me that all voice the same music, a powerful and melancholy, and yet simple music, with the sweet notes of infinite submission. I think of a grand Gregorian chant encompassing all the pleasures and all the wrongs of earth in an atmosphere of the eternal. The strains have a bourdon of lamentation, like that of a woman spent with suffering asking sympathy and consolation.

* * * * *

Next day the Bavarians of the guard could hardly believe their eyes. In the courts, in the ditches, everywhere, among basins and heaps of underclothing, quite a tribe of naked little fathers were glistening in the sunshine. How thin they were! To what skeletons they had been reduced by two months in Germany. Smiling, making awkward little gestures, each one of them allowed himself to be manipulated by a Frenchman, who soaped him all over, rubbed him down, pummelled him, dried him, and finally dressed him as a French infantryman. “Now, then, we must wash your duds. Come along.” And the French mamma led his great little Slav to the well, helped him to pump some water, arranged him a bench. Then both set to work and scrubbed.

In the evening, when the roll was called, the _Hauptmann_ exclaimed: “But where on earth are the Russians?”

“There they are,” answered Junot, sergeant-major of No. 46.

“But what is the meaning of this masquerade?”

“Mon commandant, their clothes are drying on the slopes, and you see they could not attend muster in a loin cloth.”

These first days were pleasant. It was good to make friends. To share without thought of the morrow, to live without calculation, to act solely as the heart dictated—it was like paradise. Yes, paradise within prison walls. We were brothers. Even the veterans of Manchuria and the Afghanistan campaigns, with all their tinsmith’s shop of commemorative medals and their grizzled heads, even the sergeants with three stripes, had become our little brothers. “You are hungry? Here is some white bread from France; here is some home-made jam; here are some apples from my orchard. Eat, Russki.” Or it would be: “You old zebra, what are you doing that for, digging the lice out of the seams of your clothes with a knife? You’re sowing them all over the place. That kind of grain sprouts. Look, this is the way. Tic! Tic! Take your thumbs to it and press the beast between the two nails. Kill, kill! It’s inhumane? Never mind. Kill away. Have no compunction.” So the Russian “zebra” sets to work to crush his live-stock. They now divest themselves of lice quite after the French manner, and no longer swarm with vermin as when they arrived. But they can still while away their long hours of leisure in parasitological investigations and in slaughter.

* * * * *

Every evening the French and the Russians walk arm in arm on the slopes. In less than no time a conventional language has sprung into being. It does not lead very far. No matter. When the mimic vocabulary is exhausted, the friends walk side by side in silence. But if a Bavarian sentry passes, the conversation is resumed, the same things being emphatically repeated; they clap one another on the back, they exchange head-gear, képi for toque, fatigue-cap for its Russian equivalent. After a few days the Russian buttons stamped with the two-headed eagle had found their way on to our coats, while the French grenade buttons were displayed upon the huge Russian earth-coloured cloaks. Tartar feet were encased in French army shoes; while red trousers were tucked into the supple boots of Ukraine leather. Early Christian communism prevailed. Every one dressed as he fancied, mixing the uniform of the two armies. For an entire week the height of the fashion in Nos. 44 and 46, aristocratic regions, was to walk out in moujiks’ blouses. Le Second, Poiret’s pupil, had work after his own heart. Little Mitka’s blouse, a brilliant grey-green, embroidered in black at the collar and wristbands, was his great triumph.

Gradually the little fathers came to understand that they must not kiss our hands, and that genuflexions were by no means to our taste. It must be admitted that they found this repugnance somewhat troublesome, the repugnance of men who make a cult of equality. They love direct demonstrations. They are nearer to the days of the Iliad than to ’89, fond of physical endearments like children and the early Greeks, and a trifle fawning. But so winsomely! Besides, they had to show us their gratitude. If instead of the forbidden gestures they made us an oration, we raised our hands to heaven, saying: “_Nye ponimayu_—I don’t understand!” What were they to do? Yesterday one of them, in despair, threw himself upon the ground, kissing my footsteps in a transport of delight. Impatiently I seized him, and dragged him to his feet rather roughly. You should have seen him, awkward, speechless, and motionless. His silence seemed to say: “Why do you forbid me to embrace you, to kiss the dust beneath your feet? Do you not care for my gratitude? And yet you are kindly. Or do you prefer our simple ‘thanks,’ our _spasiba_, to which your French jokers invariably respond by a long word which I can’t understand, saying, ‘Non, pas si bas! Plus haut!’ Do you really think that a word has any _body_ in it if it be unaccompanied by action?”

It was thus that they reasoned within themselves, timid and embarrassed, when we repelled their embraces. Then, struck with a sudden idea, they took the brooms from our hands, they seized the shoes that we were polishing, they ran to fetch water for us. In order to give body to their _spasiba_, they did all our work for us. Soon it was impossible for the Frenchmen to find any occupation for their hands. In the dark corridor leading to the great well, where the prisoners have to wait in a long queue for their turn, shouldering pitchers stamped with blue lozenges, one now saw none but Russians; in the kitchens, when the potatoes were being peeled, none but Russians; in the corner of the courts where the laundrymen install buckets and tables, none but Russians. We had to take severe measures, and to insist that France should take a hand in all the hard work.

But, amid this fine zeal, the Moslem Tartars take their ease on their palliasses, quiet and blissful. Let others perform all the arduous tasks. Christians and Jews can scour the cement floors of the casemates, shake the rugs, fold up the bedding, carry the _Kartoffelbrot_[32] from the tumbrel to the storeroom. Impassive, crushing you by the glassy immobility of their introspective gaze, indolent as mandarins (whom they resemble in their yellow tint, their wide cheek-bones, and their fine, shining moustaches), it seems as if the Prophet had furnished them with an opiate against all the accidents of life. Nothing moves them. They ask for nothing. They never share anything. They never pray. Do them a service; give them something from your own narrow resources; they take it all as a matter of course. Some of them have two or three wives. Without a sign of tenderness, they show you the portraits of these wives, fraternizing in a single photograph. Plenty, scarcity; cold, heat; a concourse, solitude; war, exile—everything is alike to them. Life breaks impotently against the bovine torpor of their fatalism.

But when the Christian Russians say their morning prayer, standing bare-headed, multiplying triple signs of the cross, kissing the Testament, and abasing themselves before the little painted icon in a glass case fixed to the wall above their palliasse, it sometimes happens that their inhuman eyes blaze. They utter a raucous cry: “Your Lord Jesus Christ, he’s no good!” Thereupon the devotees break off their Paternosters, and attack the scoffers with foot or with fist in order to avenge the insult to their deity.

In casemate 34 there are ten Frenchmen, twelve Russians, and one Jew. Thin, sickly, with a stoop, a sallow complexion, a timid and plaintive expression, this Jew is the most unobtrusive of men. He seems afraid of taking up too much room. When spoken to he is abashed and stammers. He never asks for anything. He is always content. If you merely smile at him, he looks at you humbly, with a dumb, gentle gratitude.

As he knows some German, I have been able to talk to him. He is a good little soul, peaceful and inoffensive, rather dull-witted. He contemplates the knout and the pogroms without indignation, accepting them as a farmer accepts hail. The only pleasure he knows is the negative one of being left unnoticed, of being forgotten, but this pleasure he welcomes as a wonderful act of grace. In a word, he is one of the humble of heart to whom the Rabbi rejected of the rabbis has promised the kingdom of heaven.

One day, when I was bringing him an orange, his compatriots leapt upon me from their palliasses, surrounding me and restraining me by force from approaching the Jew, pointing him out with a gesture of disgust, as if to preserve me from a horrible contagion.

“Jew! Jew!” they cried with flashing eyes.

They were all speaking at once, so that I was bewildered by their volubility and their passionate gesticulations. Desiring to clear up the difficulty, I sought an interpreter, and as soon as we returned, the cries were redoubled.

“What are they all saying?” I demanded of Issajoff, the interpreter. “Why are they holding me back like this?”

Issajoff smiled. “Here is something,” he said, “which wins me over to France! You’re astonished that these Russians prevent you giving help to a Jew, that they insist on assuring you that he is a Jew. To them it seems self-evident that as soon as you know him to be a Jew you will no longer wish to give him anything, but will treat him as a leper, a pariah, a damned soul!”

The Russians continued to scream, to look murderously at the Jew, to shake their fists at him. As for him, with his customary air of dull indifference, he remained quietly in his own corner behind the door, beside the dustbin and the spittoon, the dirtiest and dampest corner of the casemate.

Said Issajoff: “They say to him, ‘You have crucified our Lord Jesus Christ’—‘I have defiled your mother’—this is the grossest insult in our language. They also say to him, ‘You love the Germans; if you could, you would have shot us.’ They also say: ‘If you accept the Frenchman’s present, we will flay you alive!’”

Issajoff is a revolutionist—and a Jew, although he keeps this last fact to himself. Coldly and deliberately he reported to me his comrades’ words. But the vague smile which played over his large features indicated irony and contempt.

“You really find this scene surprising?” he resumed.

I contemplated these disciples of the Christ, all yapping at this poor wretch. For the first time in my life I found my Christianity a heavy burden.

I went up to Kajedan. I pressed him by the hand and gave him the orange. I wanted to give him the contents of my cigarette case, but he said he did not smoke. “Well, give them to your friends.” He did so. The Russians greedily seized the _papirosy_. They threw themselves on their palliasses, and, forgetting to avenge their God any longer, they gave themselves up to the delights of tobacco.

VASSILI

_July 1, 1915._

I am Vassili’s _barin_ (seigneur). He polishes my shoes; every morning, in the court, he brings me water for my “teube”; he picks up balls for me in our extemporized game of tennis; if I am thirsty, he runs to the well; if the cloth of my worn trousers, too skimpy for me (the government has never been able to supply me with trousers suited to my figure), gives way during an unusually vigorous movement of Swedish gymnastics, he promptly threads a needle and repairs the damage; he watches over me as one watches milk on the boil; no valet has ever served me so well. But what constrains him?