November 13, 1914.

On Sunday, Baron von Stengel went to the Palatinate to buy horses for the artillery. He returned yesterday evening, after an absence of five days, looking a little thinner, his eyes weeping from a cold in the head. The weather in the transrhenish province had been wintry. The railway service was irregular, so he was compelled to make use of an open motor. During the first snows he had to drive about the country visiting horse-dealers. He is seventy years of age.

He has just been walking up and down with us, and recounting to us the incidents of this unexpected journey. “I tired myself out to no advantage,” he said. “Horses are becoming rare with us, almost as rare as louis d’or. You have Algeria, Boulonnais, the region round Tarbes, and the splendid horse-breeding centre of Huysne. We have nothing of the kind. The question of remounts is becoming serious. It has been difficult to buy even a few horses in the Palatinate. Sorry screws, and dear at that! The peasants asked from two to three thousand marks for horses worth eight hundred at the outside.”

Our commandant is very tall and upright, with a finely cut jaw, and a round flat beard like the knights in the days of Maximilian of Austria. His manners are above criticism. His natural dignity is relieved by a genial expression of countenance.

He has the equable temper and regulated life of a sage. Precise but never punctilious, he fulfils here the duties of postmaster, money-changer, censor of correspondence, headmaster, major-domo—and does it all without irritability and without giving the impression that he is lowering himself in any way. In his bold, firm, regular, almost heraldic handwriting, he registers the arrival and departure of letters; he enters in the account-book payments we make for haberdashery; he keeps memoranda of the interminable series of money-orders. He works deliberately, making neat rows of figures, using a ruler whenever he wishes to draw a line, and taking great care not to ink his long white fingers or to make blots on the large folios of ministerial paper. There is not a speck of dust on his writing-table; everything is neatly laid out in squares, as in a French garden. Behind him, on the top of the closed wash-hand stand, a lemon, cut in two exactly equal halves, a loaf of ration bread, cut with precision, and a glass of fresh water, combine to form a picture as definite and sober as a scene of still life by Chardin. The casemate is well-lighted, vast, and in keeping with its tenant. A narrow iron bedstead, a trunk, a clothes-hanger upon which are seen a MÜtze, a long grey cape, and a sword; two deal tables standing end to end, one for himself and the other for d’Arnoult, his secretary; a small dressing-table, three chairs—this comprises all the furniture. In this formal, cold, geometrical environment sits the huge man (much too large for his table, so that his arms and legs are cramped), writing all day.

Humble work, well within the capacity of any honest “swivel-officer” of the reserve. But Baron von Stengel, bending his long back to it, infusing it with his air of refinement, stamps it with an almost hieratic character. It is possible that he would prefer to be in command of a park of artillery upon the Warthe or upon the Ypres canal. Perhaps he envies his two sons, captains in the army of Lorraine, who have just announced to him almost simultaneously the receipt of the iron cross. But this much is certain, that it is not without sadness that he recalls the last war.

He thinks of the 1870 campaign, which, as Oberleutnant, he spent at Ulm, employed, as to-day, in guarding prisoners. He thinks of his young colleagues of those days, of the interminable conversations when they were all intoxicated with the glorious news that streamed in, the news of WÖrth, Borny, Gravelotte, Metz, and Sedan. He recalls the ardency of those years, and the cheerful noise of his steps as he walked beside the Danube in the beautiful night-time. He remembers seeing in the river the reflection of the cathedral spire, graceful and ornate, a silent witness of the ancient German glories then renascent—victory, love.

He was an old man when the new call to arms came. Nevertheless he offered his services to King Louis; though a septuagenarian, he begged to be allowed to help. Hence he is at Fort Orff. To one who watches him at work, censoring our letters, doing our little banking business, fulfilling the thousand and one trifling duties of his office, it is obvious that he is performing a rite, the great rite of patriotism.

Although hungry men are seldom just, I have never heard any of the prisoners utter a single ill-natured word about the commandant. As he walks with slow gait along the parapet, every one salutes him with manifest goodwill. White-headed, wearing an ample grey cloak falling in straight folds, he looks like a patriarch of ancient days visiting his faithful tribe. He wields authority so naturally, and is so free from hauteur, that no one dreams of murmuring. He has worked the miracle of uniting in a sentiment of respect for his personality all the inhabitants of this little France of Fort Orff, this miniature of great France, the factious and ungovernable nation, the nation of eternal discontent. He is so obviously straightforward and humane that the most savage of our prisoners would protest if any one, suddenly seized by an evil whimsy, should desire to make this good old man of the great century responsible for our short commons.

The major in command at headquarters in Ingolstadt, on the other hand, who must be a jingo of the most pronounced type, is prodigal of petty vexations. He forbids tobacco, chocolate, and sugar, “articles of luxury.” He forbids the foundation of a canteen; he forbids the receipt of more than ten marks at a time, and the writing of more than one letter every ten days; he forbids pen and ink; he forbids access to the escarp and to the summit of the slopes, doubtless considering the view too beautiful for prisoners of war. He issues orders that the sentinels shall fire without challenge upon any who break his rules, and it was owing to this that Georg, being taken for a Frenchman, was shot at one evening in the gloaming. Every day a new Verboten is issued.

Amid this maze of prohibitions, our life would be a torture but for Baron von Stengel. Discreet and tactful as he is, those among us who come into close contact with him know with how much disgust, with how much suppressed annoyance, he receives these vexatious orders. He carries them out, being too good a soldier to disobey. But, too good a soldier to misuse soldiers, too much of a gentleman to treat as galley-slaves combatants seamed with wounds, holy priests, red cross men who have received their baptism of fire, he often carries out his orders in a way which is tantamount to a generous evasion.

He is an adept in the art of humanizing his agents, the Feldwebel and the soldiers of the Bavarian guard. Unfortunately these are changed every week, and every week therefore he has to begin this civilizing task anew. The men come to us white hot from reading the newspapers, in savage mood—“duty, duty.” For two days the fort is an inferno. Then everything returns to order—not German order, but our own. Their zeal is mitigated when they take note of the way in which the commandant treats us. Our hail-fellow-well-met air, our good-humoured cheek, do the rest. The soldiers are tamed. Soon they cease to guard us; they contemplate us, and take part in our life. There they stand, with fixed bayonets, somewhat nonplussed and puzzled, almost timid, abashed as it were, hardly knowing, when we dig them in the ribs, whether we are fond of them or are making fun of them. At bottom they feel themselves to be our inferiors, less lively and less intelligent. They all have much the same idea as fat Max, the canteen keeper, who secretly breaks the pumps whenever a fresh levy is being made, in order to render himself more indispensable here than at the front. In view of the activity of our comrades, their carvings in wood and in stone, the tin rings they make, the horsehair watch-chains, the stools, tables, and cupboards which they knock together out of bits of planking filched from the workyards at Ingolstadt, this mighty beer-drinker is unable to control his astonishment. He waves his great arms, exclaiming:

“These Frenchmen, what workers! I’ve always maintained, Herr Gott Sakrament, that every one of them has a devil in his inside.”

M. von Stengel is of much the same way of thinking as Max.

Little as he seems to notice, wishing, as he does, to avoid having to allot punishment, hardly anything happens in the fort without his being aware of it. Nothing licit or illicit escapes his keen gaze, and what he does not see he divines. Nevertheless, with the roguish indulgence of a grand seigneur, he is careful to avoid any display of anger. I am confident that he derives a good deal of secret enjoyment from the contemplation of the network of customs, subterfuges, and evasions, whose threads are interwoven behind the iron grating of German regulations. He watches with amusement the supple boldness with which prudent advances are made, the care with which direct conflict with authority is avoided, and the ingenuity with which the regulations are taken in the flank, circumvented, or ignored. He admires the stratagems by means of which this miniature France, prisoned in a foreign fortress, is enabled to reintegrate the life of the homeland. He does not fail to recognize that these breaches of discipline serve, even more clearly than the ingenuity with which the breaches are effected, to manifest the hardihood of his prisoners, and to prove their possession of an individuality at once gentle and intractable.

This German, at any rate, does not regard the French as “monkeys.” He is not misled by their superficial levity, their suppleness, their apparent scepticism—shining armour with which they protect their ego, a vivacious and rebellious ego, which resists everything, which always gets even, is ever elastic, artful, or frank, as circumstances prescribe, but immalleable, incapable of being passive, obstinately itself. The commandant is impressed with the fact that the Frenchman is what he is and remains what he is, jealous of his privacy, greatly prizing his own humour, tastes, and ideas. It may be that M. von Stengel considers that we are excessively individualized, that whilst we often seem to treat grave matters as trifles, the least onslaught upon our intimate personality arouses in us an excess of fury, a revolt which may go so far as to compromise the collective interest. But it is certain that he knows us and accepts us as we are. He imposes no constraint, and has no desire to refashion us after the Teuton model. It is even possible that he regards with secret approval the delicate compost of national merits and peculiarities. In any case, in his relations with us he is extremely careful to do everything he can to blunt the sharp, harassing, and painful angles of Germanic discipline.

Nevertheless this man, so sensible, moderate, and well-bred, does not possess a perfectly unified character. One recognizes in him both the German and the natural man. The former enunciates cynical maxims to the latter, insisting, for example, upon the value of war for war’s sake. The latter listens, but shies at the idea. It is as if, while enjoying the refined sweetness of a French morning, he should suddenly be disturbed by the horrid bellowing of all the war-horns of the Huns. The dicta of this brutal philosophy rack his ears. But, being good-mannered, he hearkens. His brother seems to him a thick-skinned fellow, coarse-blooded, grim, and savage-hearted. However, he makes no protest. His brother reiterates his statements, repeats his massive assertions loudly and unceasingly, and insists upon agreement. He has to pay for being well-mannered, for hating scenes, for disliking to give pain. From very kindness of heart, from love of peace, from very sensitiveness, he assumes a barbaric mask. The good brother! It goes much against the grain, but he gives an apparent assent.

It is thanks to a series of such sacrifices, invariably one-sided, that the German and the natural man seem, in Baron von Stengel, to live on harmonious terms.

His natural man is good and just. Making no parade of humanitarian convictions, he practises humaneness.

It is touching to watch this grand old man, lofty of stature, with a solid prognathous chin, irreproachably dressed, when he stops to speak to a soldier suffering from despondency. “Fous Êtes triste?” he asks in his slow and broken French, gently pulling the man by the ear. The prisoner does not misunderstand; he knows that though the major can read French he is unable to speak it, and that in this laconic phrase he desires to condense an entire friendly conversation.

A few days ago, having learned that a loaf of bread priced at thirty pfennig had been sold at one mark fifty pfennig to a prisoner by a soldier of the guard, he was greatly enraged, and in the presence of Durupt, who was helping him to write up the register of money orders, he exclaimed, “There is but one price for bread, and I shall proceed with the utmost rigour against anyone, be he French or German, who asks a higher price. It is disgraceful to rob prisoners in this way!” The joke is that officially we are not supposed to buy anything at all.

The day before yesterday there was a fall of sleet. The men were loitering up and down the corridors. In front of the Kommandantur there was a great clatter of hobnailed shoes, and the noise was reinforced by light songs, laughter, and chatter. The commandant was reading our eleven hundred letters. Two days earlier he had sent them to Ingolstadt. Headquarters, cantankerous as usual, had returned them, under some pretext, to be re-read. This was something calculated to put the gentlest of men out of humour. Scrupulously obedient to orders, he was now for the second time reading these poor papers, badly written in pencil, insipid, and all exactly alike. On the other side of the door, the procession of prisoners passed and repassed unceasingly. The clatter of nails on the cement got on his nerves. “Oh, the noise, the noise!” he said, as if speaking to himself. D’Arnoult was there and rose from his seat, intending to ask the comrades to be a little quieter. The commandant stopped him, saying, “No, monsieur d’Arnoult, do not go out. Mein Zimmer ist doch nur eine Kanzlei—after all, my room is only an office!” And once more he immersed himself in his reading.

Withal, in the major’s innermost being, the natural man invariably acts and governs. The other, the German, merely utters professions of faith.

Out walking, just now, we had paused for a moment, dazzled by the beauty of the evening. We were on the strip of greyish-white pasture which arches along the edge of the pine wood, and looked like the woolly back of a sheep. Before us, seemingly at our very feet, the Danubian plain, with its gentle undulations, stretched away through the iridescent haze. The sun had just set. A breeze was blowing from the west, chasing before it golden mist-wreaths. The branches and faded foliage of the oaks, dry and nipped by the frost, rustled in the chill wind; the pine needles, interlaced with gossamer, reddened by many sunsets, whispered and murmured. We were a silent company, Baron von Stengel, Major Langlois, MM. Jeandidier, CavaillÉ, Loebre, Romant, Bouvat, my friend Laloux, and myself. The vastness of the prospect, the silence of the fields, the fading of the light, the shivering of the undergrowth in the twilight, the strange sensation of being suddenly plunged into the heart of winter—all these influences combined to keep us mute.

What a waste of time! I thought. Already three months in prison. Three months lost beyond recall. And the baron had just said to me, “England is intractable. I hardly think you will get away before next autumn.” More than a year lived through for nothing, suffered for nothing. A whole year cut out from the short span of our days. I was prey to a cold, hard sadness. Then, my thoughts turned to you.… All at once a song rose from the road. The recruits quartered at Hepperg were returning to quarters, marching with that slow and heavy German pace which will never be a match for our French step.

They were singing the famous

with which all the Feldgrau, before going to the front, have made the quiet Bavarian taverns ring, sitting over their great tankards, each holding the beloved one’s hand. I was familiar with the strains. The little sergeant of whom I have previously written to you had made his men sing it to me one evening in the guardroom, and had copied out the text for me:

“What are you thinking about, my dear enemy?” said von Stengel all at once with a smile.—“Herr Kommandant,” I replied, in an access of dull rage, “dieser Krieg wird die grosse Schande Europas sein!”[26]

Slowly, to suit the baron, we descended the incline, soft beneath our feet, the turf torn, and littered with fragments of shell; here and there grew handsome stone-pines with twisted trunks. Being unable to run, I was shivering in my summer clothing. We took the road beside the hop-garden, and as we walked the baron gave me his views upon the war.

In truth, all he did was to repeat the words of Harnack, Lujo Brentano, Troeltsch, Willamovitz-Moellendorff, and the hundred representatives of German Kultur. As I listened, I seemed to be re-reading the articles which these writers were now publishing in the war editions of the Internationale Monatsschrift:

“Germany has never desired anything but peace; William is the peace emperor; Sir Edward Grey is the villain of the drama; English commercialism led to the war; Germany was suddenly seized by the throat and had to defend herself; she is engaged in a life and death struggle.…

“Ueber welches Volk wird einst das Tribunal der Weltgeschichte den Urteilsspruch ‘Schuldig’ fallen? Eins ist gewiss! Deutschland kann dem Urteilsspruch mit reinem Gewissen entgegen sehen.”[27]

I had no interest in all this. If the major had been a man of my own age, I should have bluntly begged him to spare me these phrases of the good bourgeois who has just been reading the newspapers. I should have said to him: “In actual fact, our respective countries are at war. Let us leave it to our grandchildren, should they have a fancy for writing history, to ascertain who is responsible for this butchery. But as far as I am myself concerned, be good enough to consider me a man of sound intelligence, and don’t attempt to befool me with your political myths. I agree that these myths have their uses, and that they are necessary for the soldier. To him one must lie perforce. Above all, in our democratic epoch, the violent man does wisely to wear sheep’s clothing, and to give himself the air of defending civilization and humanity, for otherwise the citizen would never be willing to play the part of soldier. If needs must, the citizen will allow himself to be killed for the sake of principles, or in defence of hearth and home, but never for the interest of the Hapsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, or a business corporation. Agreed, the aggressor must lie.

“But we are not now on a public platform; we are not composing a proclamation. Do not let us deceive ourselves, nor soil our minds with a superfluous falsehood.”

But to this old man I said nothing of the sort. I listened patiently. The wind bit my ears, and my body seemed a vast Siberia. As I walked, I looked at the birches, each one of which was known to me individually. Their delicate ramifications, now leafless, hung like horses’ manes. But the youngest trees, those whose tresses were not yet grown, so that their branches pointed directly upwards like the twigs of an ill-made besom, still retained some sparse foliage. In the icy wind, the white of their stems standing out against the greenish-black of the acacias in the ditch had a somewhat funereal air.

“War,” said von Stengel, “is an essential condition of social life. Without war, the human race would become anÆmic, would slip back into barbarism, ignorance, and hebetude. Even though man loves peace, he must also be a great fighter before the Lord, ein Streiter vor dem Herrn. Do not imagine that wars are the work of a few men; the ferment works in the very heart of the race, and when this happens the maintenance of peace becomes impossible. The friction is so great, the heat generated is so intense, that the flames burst forth spontaneously. Then patience is out of place, and it is necessary to unsheathe the sword. Blood, much blood, must flow to appease the fierce angers and to restore men to their customary calm.”

It was the German in Baron von Stengel, not the man, who spoke, enunciating the doctrine that war is necessary, that war is a natural function of social life.

“For the rest,” he added, humanizing to the best of his ability the myth formulated by the German, for now the natural man was resuming sway, “once war has broken out, it is the duty of us all to do our best to diminish its horrors. Men differ widely, and yet, through contact with upright and noble characters, even the worst of human beings, even those of malignant and dark nature, come to learn the value of peace, of good understanding, and acquire the faculty of enduring with equanimity.”

Thus talking, we reached the great iron gate, adorned with the Bavarian lions. I rang. The gate was opened, the baron drew aside to allow his “boarders” to pass in, and these in turn signalled to him to take precedence.

The commandant major, Baron Stefan von Stengel, very erect, head held high, passed through the gateway. The guard, fully armed, stood at attention, lined up in two rows. Upon an order from the Feldwebel, “Hurrah fÜr den Major,” twenty recruits shouted with a single voice. Night had fallen. All the windows of the fort, which had been invisible as long as we were outside the walls, were now seen to be lighted up, and the red of the bricks was manifest in the starlight. We crossed the drawbridge. “Now that the snows have come,” said the commandant, pointing to the ditch, “we could make a good skating-rink there.” He saluted, and withdrew into his casemate.

As a matter of fact, I have not entirely lost my time here, since I have succeeded in classifying adequately in the social hierarchy such a man as Baron von Stengel, who is neither hero nor genius, who has no ambition to display supernatural virtues, but who is simply a man with pleasant manners, refined, well-bred, free from all stiffness, easy to get on with, a truly civilized being.

You, my friends, have spoiled me. It is owing to you that I had always remained ignorant how restricted is the genus of “decent folk.” The war has changed my views in this respect. Hardened, simplified, freer in relation to external conditions, as adaptable as any one could wish—when the campaign is over I shall be somewhat less confiding than of yore towards my kind. Now that I sample them in the mass, elbowing them unceasingly morning, noon, and night throughout the entire day of twenty-four hours, listening to them as they talk, chatter, grumble, quarrel, and snore, looking on at them while they enjoy themselves, complain, play, eat, bargain, pull out the personal stop, pass judgments, take things at their ease; now that I no longer contemplate them through the prism of my doctrines and of my leniency, but look at them as they really are, all the scenery of civil life removed, all social trappings stripped off—there are certain categories of mind which I understand better than before. I understand better, for example, hermits, misanthropes, jansenists, and all pessimists, pagan as well as Christian, all those who can see nothing in man but the primitive beast, and those who never cease talking of original sin. How greatly now do I prize good manners, the veneer of culture, the mask of decency. These are but externals, things which do not give expression to man’s intimate nature. They even aim at veiling that nature. But precisely because they exercise this occlusive and embellishing function, they seem to me august. The sight of the real arouses an appetite for fiction, creates a necessity for art and for dreams. Are these lies? Yes, they are lies, poor lies! What matter? Must we live in hell by deliberate choice? It cannot be asserted that such illusions make a paradise of our ill-conditioned and sordid world; but at least they mitigate the stench to some extent, neutralize its offensiveness, and render the bestial hustle a thought less aggressive.

My nose is still uneasy with the memory of the carrion odour from the battlefields of Moncourt, Lagarde, and Kerprich. It was here that I learned the value of shroud, coffin, quicklime, and tomb. Now that I have come to know men better, I know also that the trifling restraints and delicate veils of conventional good manners are absolutely essential.