November 27, 1914.

A prey to depression, we are smoking in the “Salle du Jeu de Paume.” Laloux and Badoy, otherwise known as Badozus, are playing an interminable game of chess; d’Arnoult is reading Victor Hugo’s Histoire d’un crime; Noverraz is dozing over Balzac’s Chouans; Sergeant Scherrer, tall and thin, with cold eye and Mephistophelian head, is playing draughts with MassÉ, a non-commissioned officer of artillery. Seated upon the drawers of the drug cupboard, they are crowded round the solitary lamp. The table is of deal, oblong in shape, one that can be used as an operating-table. Their heads are in shadow. Elbow to elbow and forehead to forehead, the six men are silent. The circle of light is hazy with blue whorls rising from their pipes.

Standing in the embrasure of the window, I am smoking my own Bavarian pipe. There is not a sound in the room, nor in the passages, nor on the bridge close to our windows. Depression must reign supreme throughout the casemates, depression which paralyses mind and body.

How intense is the tedium, uncertainty, and anxiety! No letter for a whole fortnight. Yet she must be writing to me. And LÉonce, my dear young brother. I wonder if it is as cold in the trenches at Ypres as it is in Bavaria. Shrapnel, bullets, sudden death. Shall I ever see him again? Is he still alive? Manech, the amiable corporal of No. 13, forty-two of whose Breton relatives have been engaged on the land front or at sea, has already lost six of them. The fighting priest, Gautin, has learned that the body of his brother lies rotting on the banks of the Marne. Sergeant Boullanger is mourning his father. Since we have begun to receive letters, almost every one is in mourning. Can it be that my own melancholy is a presentiment? When will it end, this sinister interlude in the book of peace, our book, our true book, the book of humanity?

Noverraz has fallen asleep over the Chouans; d’Arnoult, “le Chasseur,” has closed Histoire d’un crime. He stretches and yawns. The others, huddled together, move their pieces without saying a word.

It is cold. All our thoughts ooze despondency. This brute of a major at headquarters who, meanly, by way of reprisal, has been detaining our letters at Ingolstadt for the last fortnight! Why cannot I throw off my troubles? This evening I am like a child, like a neglected schoolboy who has ceased to hear from his mother.

France, Paris, a blazing wood-fire in my study; Douchka and Katia asleep on the hearthrug. She is there!

No, I am in Bavaria. I am a prisoner. I am at Fort Orff, at the edge of the Swabian forest, among gloomy villages where I know no one, where they believe that we are slaughtering their sons with dum-dum bullets, and that we were the aggressors. A Franconian blackguard is the man who feeds me. Then there is a little good-for-nothing schoolmaster from Hof, a pedant stuffed with German idealism, who appeals to honour and humanity in season and out of season, who, having caught flagrante delicto a weaver of watch-chains snatching a few hairs from a horse’s tail, gives him three days’ close arrest, saying gravely, “A most inhumane act”—and it is this whipper-snapper, this round-shouldered and short-sighted impotent beast, who is my Feldwebel, “my superior officer”! He is a mean creature. Knowing that I am on good terms with von Stengel, he begged Dutrex to present me. Dutrex did so, saying: “Hier ist unser Schriftsteller [This is our author]”—“I am much honoured, monsieur; I have read an article on you in the NÜrnberger Zeitung.” He bowed and scraped again and again. He stood there, his ugly little moustache bristling with smiles, looking as great a booby as if he had been before the commandant. The quartermaster is a bad lot, but the Feldwebel is grotesque. And I am dependent upon the caprices of such men! I am a thing in the hands of these contemptible fellows, these hypocrites, who loudly voice their patriotism and boast of the German virtues, while they are shamming rheumatism and heart-weakness to avoid being sent to the fighting-line. Sometimes I am seized with a longing to spit out my contempt in their very faces. Before Baron von Stengel one feels like a man; a noble master ennobles those subject to his orders. But before these subordinates all human nobility withers, wretched instruments who treat us as instruments in turn. Empowered to dominate and to humiliate us, to abuse us as much as they please, their favours are even worse than their severities; it is the brutal landowner in Latium amusing himself with a GrÆculus; it is the Donaubauer, the fat Danubian peasant, caressing his dog. I prefer their hatred.

The good Badoy, with his huge round head, his snub nose, his little curly beard, his large fatherly eyes, bends forward over the board, humps his back, and clenches his fists between his short legs, saying:

“When will it come to an end?”

“Which, the game or the imprisonment?” asks Laloux quietly, as he takes Badoy’s queen.

“How can you ask?” Then, as if speaking to himself: “Oh! my wife and my three little ones, when shall I see them again? Still no letters! It’s terrible.”

From my corner in the window I contemplate the circle of smoke and of light, and I look at these six men packed together, chilly and sad. I dare not open my lips. My depression is turning to gall. I am not far, this evening, from understanding certain scenes in the casemates which had astonished me, when taciturn men became suddenly exasperated, and, for a single word, hurled themselves on one another, fighting like horses without oats in a stable. Poor caged beasts! The others, at least, those in Flanders and in France, have room to move. They have an object for action. After the stagnation of the trenches they can assuage their anger in the fury of the assault. But as for us, heavy with wrath, we are confined within thick walls; we can but swing our frozen and idle arms; we are cut off from all news; we are the prey of dreams and of hunger. Outside the screened window, the ditch, the counterscarp, and the grating; outside the grating, a Bavarian bayonet marches to and fro.

What can account for this state of nerves which I am unable to control? The hour for the arrival of the postman has passed. I have been waiting all day. It has passed. There is nothing. I ought to be able to find a reason. Why am I outwardly so hard and inwardly near to weeping? Suddenly there come great silent waves of memory. I hear her singing. She is dressed in green. The dark perfume of her golden hair enwraps me. The melody of CÉsar Franck’s Procession rises athwart my fever; it is broad, sweet, richer and more peaceful than a field of ripe wheat upon a warm evening. It sings within me; it assumes the cadence of my breathing. I am stifling. I live, I love, and I am loved; and yet I am thrust out from life as if I were in the tomb.

Elbow to elbow and forehead to forehead, the six men at the table are silent. I look down upon the circle of light and the smoke of the pipes. Not a sound is to be heard. Buried in the mound, surrounded by meadows and woods, the fort is as cold and mute, as remote, desolate, and dead, as a soldier’s grave in the corner of a field.