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 onomatopoeias. 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 Croesuses 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.