October 8, 1914.

Yesterday the rumour was current, derived, it was said, from the guard, that we were going to be permitted to write to our families. A similar report has stirred the fort two or three times before, but has hitherto always proved false. Consequently the pessimists and all the disciples of Heraclitus and the Porch—headed by Guido—had a fine time of it in the casemates making fun of the comrades who were jubilantly commenting on the news.

On the glacis, at three o’clock, I met Sergeant Feutrier walking with Corporal Heuyer.

“Riou,” observed the sergeant, “it’s the first fine day of our imprisonment!”

“No, no, my friend,” I said, half-heartedly aping Guido’s pessimism, “it is raining.” It was, in fact, drizzling; the sopping grass spirted as we trod. But Heuyer answered:

“Don’t tease Feutrier to-day; he is too happy.”

That evening, when I was working as usual at my side of the table, I was deluged with requests: “Riou, could you lend me your pen and ink?”—“Can you spare a sheet or two of paper?” There was a regular procession of them. The mere thought, or rather the conviction, that they would be able to write home transfigured them. Home, the fireside! The loved ones, the familiar objects, the birthplace, the motherland! From this secret universe, at ordinary times deep buried beneath the surface of their minds, but suddenly exposed by the delvings of hope, there arose a powerful incense which intoxicated them all. What will they feel like at the prospect of going home, if the still dubious possibility of writing can arouse such an outburst of cheerful excitement?

Even the cooks, more practised in criticism than the other prisoners, had lost all sense of proportion. They handled their utensils with a terrible joy. Then the tumult was stilled. A gentle atmosphere of harmony hovered over the stoves. The cooks were silent and motionless.

O memories! Sweet images in which our love of life subsists and is fulfilled. Sweet images which, at night, in the gloom and fatigue of the camp, make us weep silent tears. Sweet images which, when death threatens, rise suddenly in our minds and maintain themselves, bringing benediction, the sole realities amid the void, very angels of God!

Suddenly the plutonic region burst into melody:

sang Pailloux in his boy’s voice; and our Bouquet, a son of Cahors, his heart filled with thoughts of his betrothed, intoned in a mellow bass:

The cooks, like every one else, were bewitched with thoughts of France. For France they forgot the most serious of their immediate duties. One was allowed an entrance into the secret universe of their thoughts, as if into a public place.

In the evening, when the roll-call was finished and the round was leaving with the Feldwebel and our new Bavarian sergeant, only just recovered from a wound in the foot received at LunÉville, Dutrex made eyes at me, and uttered the single word, “Oui.” I went to sleep with the certainty that the news was true.

To-day every one has spent the morning in writing his letter, the one and only letter to which we are entitled. But what a disappointment! No more than one company is to be allowed to send letters each day. We are five companies. Only one letter every five days![17]

But that melancholy barrier of silence which for a month and a half has separated us from the world has at last been broken down!

It is true that we have been ordered to say nothing about the war, and to instruct our correspondents to observe a similar restriction. This morning these Verboten have disturbed us little. Do you think any one of the prisoners, when writing his letter, had a fancy for dissertations upon strategy? His wife, his fiancÉe, his children, his mother, his whole life, were before his eyes. At length people would know that he was alive! His head was singing with voices from his own fireside. He was intoxicated—at once giddy with excitement, softened, bitter, almost mad. The most indifferent, the most torpid, seemed to have been awakened with a start. Permission to write, the act of writing, had shaken them out of their inertia.

For, fortunately, imprisonment dulls our sensibilities. At first it causes poignant suffering; and suffering, of whatever kind, sharpens the faculties. But imprisonment is above all hunger, chronic hunger. Those only who have experienced it can understand the effect which chronic hunger speedily exercises even upon an active brain. At first it induces hallucinations. With terrible realism the sufferer recalls meals eaten before the war some particular dinner, such and such a picnic. The nerves of taste and smell, exasperated by the scanty regimen, are visited by memories of odours and tastes. The man thinks of nothing but eating. Literally he is nothing but a clamorous stomach. He will lie awake the entire night thinking only of this: What can I do to-morrow morning to secure a supplementary loaf?

Little Brissot, my friend of the Alpine infantry, when we were walking a few days ago with our two French medical officers, made this unexpected confession: “Only one thing can give me pleasure now—to get food. Only one man interests me—the man who is capable of getting me food.”

This calm declaration from one so highly cultured that he will distract his mind from the cares of important business by reading James and Bergson, from one intimately acquainted with Montaigne and the Lake poets, seemed to us neither paradoxical, nor irrelevant, nor cynical.

Among those who are able, by illicit and extremely laborious methods, to procure food from outside, there are few who do not seize their opportunity.

Men will try to get a thorough chill, hoping to be sent to the infirmary, where they usually receive double rations. Yesterday two prisoners, one of them a corporal, fainted from hunger. Quite a number are so weakened by want of food that they can no longer climb the staircases leading to the courts and to the slopes. When we heard just now that in the neighbouring fort, Fort Hartmann, one of the prisoners had hanged himself, the same thought ran through all our minds: “The epidemic has begun, and will speedily spread to our own prison.”

Ultimately, however, people grow accustomed to short commons. Their activities, in some cases at least, gradually become accommodated to their regimen. In the long run, physical and mental life are reduced to nil. The man hardly suffers, and he no longer revolts.

Even in the bravest the soldier-spirit dies. Look at these men crouching on their heaps of straw hour after hour, silent and half asleep; or look at them as with hands in pockets and hanging heads they slowly make their way up the slopes; who can imagine that these are the men who fought like lions at Montcourt and Lagarde?

These sudden visions of home were requisite to restore many of our prisoners, though but for a moment, to life. But for how many of them this has also involved a revival of suffering.

“I don’t know how I shall be able to feed my three children next year unless I can get home soon. I can’t help thinking about my farm, where the harvests of corn and of grapes have been so poorly gathered, and where everything is running to waste!” The soldier who spoke thus comes from Uriage, in DauphinÉ. He stopped me when I was walking with measured steps after the seven o’clock coffee, taking my anti-rheumatic constitutional on the slopes. He drew me aside into a corner of the fortifications. Taking a letter from his pocket, he modestly asked me in a melancholy tone: “Could you tell me if that is all right, and whether you think it will be allowed to pass? Please be good enough to read it. You have my leave.” Poor comrade! It cut me to the heart to see him. He wanted to look self-possessed, to look like a man. But he had been weeping. He spoke low and quietly in order to keep the tears out of his voice. The paper shook in his hand. I read: “My dear Marguerite.…” There was nothing in the letter. “Don’t worry about me.… All is well with me.… We are very well cared for.…” These reassuring phrases were reiterated throughout the four pages, the very words repeated again and again. My master, Jean Monnier, declares that repetition is the rhetorical flower of simple minds. What a tragedy underlay the disjointed prose. This prisoner of war whose eyes shone with hunger, this hollow-cheeked man who had spent all his poor pocket-money so that he could no longer buy any smuggled goods—bread, sugar, or chocolate—wrote: “All is well with me,” “We are very well cared for.” He said it and resaid it monotonously throughout the entire letter. It was essential that his wife should have no doubt about the matter, his poor wife who had already so much trouble to bear. I should have liked to pet him like a little brother, this man already grey.

I also wrote my letter. Having too much to say, I said nothing. What are words when the heart hungers for material presence, for a touch, for a living silence? My letter was not even of the regulation length.

At eleven Guido came in, with his eternal rug round his shoulders. He planted himself in front of my table. He fixed me with his eye, the cold, distrustful eye of the mountain dweller and of the priest. Then, making up his mind to open his thin lips, he said:

“You are in a gloomy mood. You have been writing to her.”

We went out together. I felt his harsh sympathy as he strode by my side. Every one was out of doors, but there were very few groups. Each man walked by himself, rapt in his own visions. Guido remarked:

“It’s extraordinary how little noise they make, eleven hundred warriors!”