September 26, 1914.

Things are going badly with the Germans. Our guards may keep their mouths as tightly shut as they please, and may deprive us of newspapers, but despite our isolation we feel that things are going well for France.

There was a splendid sunrise. When I went out to greet you and the dawn upon our acacia slope, the cold was dry and sharp. The air had an agreeable aroma of fresh earth. It was a pleasure to let the eyes dwell upon the play of morning light across the open country. The cord on the flagstaff, now bearing no flag, shook in the wind and made a clicking sound as it struck the wood. For a moment from underground there came the sound of the bell rung at the elevation, a gentle, calm, and mysterious sound. It was the hour when Richeris and Guido are accustomed to serve mass for one another.

In the kitchen I found Corporal Durupt at breakfast. He stood with his back to the fire, poised askew on his heron’s legs, looking, as usual, as long and thin as a hop-pole. The co-minister of Dutrex had toasted a slice of black bread sprinkled with aniseed (bread which he detests), and, rocking to and fro a little, was moistening it in his bowl. Around him the great iron cauldrons, which had been taken down from the stoves ready for the distribution, were steaming like locomotive engines. He was drinking his coffee with a thoughtful air, one which gave him a lofty, conscientious, incorruptible aspect. When he saw me his large and trusty eyes sparkled. I detected a mischievous twinkle behind his glasses.

Instantly he began: “I have grand’chose to tell you.” He is an Alsatian and has phrases peculiar to himself. In his vocabulary “grand’chose” means something of extreme importance. And for Durupt there is but one thing of real importance, and that is the extermination of Prussia.

He hates Germany with a hatred which has been a cult in the Durupt family for generations. He went to school at MÜlhausen. He took part with the Alsatian boys in terrible fights with the German boys. Thus, in his case, hatred of the Teuton was in the first instance a suggestion of childhood. But this hatred has become envenomed by experience and mature reflection. At an age when the heart begins to devote itself to the work of life, he was subjected to the forcible, rough, relentless constraint imposed by the foreign master. The daily experience of “Germanization” had filled his kindly nature with gall against everything German.

“At Paris,” he says sometimes, “in the restaurants, in the post-offices, wherever I could, I plagued the life out of all the Boches who came my way!” On the banks of the Brusche, and especially at Saulxures, where the two sides were firing at one another haphazard in the fog, he killed furiously. Now, being a prisoner of war, and having neither rifle nor bayonet, he devotes himself to the endeavour to sow discouragement among the soldiers who guard us, considering that an army contaminated with discouragement is ripe for defeat.

Durupt is a thoroughly upright man. His everyday judgments and his ordinary actions recall the evangel of ’48 and the solid bourgeois virtues. He belongs to that undistinguished Élite which forms the real backbone of every nation, the Élite consisting of those who know how to speak the truth and to live for truth. Above all, he belongs to that France unknown to foreigners (although in it is concealed the secret of our marvellous resurrections), to that moral France which lies ever hidden beneath Gallic and frivolous France, producing, as times change, a St. Louis, a Calvin, a Saint-Cyran, a Pascal, a Lamennais, or a Fallot, men of a single colour, with consciences of iron, terrible to themselves, obedient to the point of heroism, and often scrupulous to the point of disease. Those I have named are generals of the army in which Durupt serves as a private.

He has a great love and admiration for his brother, Jacques Durupt, Goude’s antagonist at Brest in the last parliamentary elections, and, during the heroic times of Marc Sangnier, leader of the Sillonist left in association with Gacmaling and Archambault.

Durupt himself lived on the confines of the Sillonist movement. Like all the readers of DÉmocratie and Nouvelle JournÉe, he has the republic and the Christian faith in his blood.

I esteem our “co-triumvir.” I find him a trifle too meticulous for my taste. He shows little interest in the witty and graceful sides of life. He has a tendency to emphasis, and is a little inclined to act the judge. He is fond of giving an exemplary flavour to his actions, and at times plumes himself somewhat when speaking of what he does. But his heart is as clear as crystal, utterly void alike of hypocrisy and malice. His whole life, at home and abroad, even in its most trifling details, is upright, controlled, deliberate.

A certain sympathetic pleasure attended my gradual discovery in this Catholic of the merits and defects characteristic of the Scottish puritan and of the French radical. Moral, practical, ardently patriotic, ingrained with the civic spirit, something of a preacher, without any change in his modes of thought or his personal habits he might well be regarded as a perfect disciple of Christophe Dieterlen, Fallot, or Frommel, and even of Charles Wagner, Paul Doumergue, or Wilfred Monod, the file-leaders in France of reformed Catholicism.

Everywhere, fortunately, men remain men. Protestants have the Catholic spirit and Catholics have the Protestant spirit. Individual psychology laughs at doctrinal oppositions. Throughout the entire human race, temperaments and characters develop, underground, their indestructible stratifications, regardless of the walls built on the surface by the leaders of men, walls which these leaders, with their imperious will, imagine to be durable.

Durupt devotes to the indulgence of his national hatred the whole of that conscience which his Christianity (quasi-jansenist in type) has produced in him. He hates as a duty. He injures as a duty. How can he injure the Germans now that he is at their mercy? By demoralizing their men! Having an excellent knowledge of German, he has made it his mission at Fort Orff to prove by a + b to our successive relays of guards—Landwehr men on their way to the frontier, or men wounded in the first onslaught and now returning cured to the firing-line—that Germany is beaten in advance.

He arrived here on August 30th, three days after Dutrex, and the whole of Germany in the fort, from the commissariat captain down to the last Gemeiner (the commandant, whose conduct towards us has throughout been a model of courtesy, always excepted), set to work forthwith to din into his ears, “Paris kaput”—literally translated, “Paris pulverized.” For a whole fortnight this was the refrain. When the quartermaster, an ill-natured beast, stupid and uncouth, came down to the kitchens, his way of saying good-day was to laugh maliciously as he announced a new kaput: Verdun kaput; Rheims kaput; Manonviller kaput! Even the Verpflegsoffizier, Captain Friedrich Wilhelm Weidner, of the Prinz Ludwig regiment, a Nuremberg merchant with a lofty air, very erect, much mustachioed, with frank blue eyes, did not disdain, from time to time, to unfold ostentatiously among the stoves, under the noses of Dutrex and Durupt, copies of the NÜrnberger Zeitung and the MÜnchener Neueste Nachrichten with headlines screaming victory.

These were their happy days. The gateway leading to the open was black on Sundays with a gaping crowd: townsfolk in their Sunday best, wearing cocks’ feathers in their green felt hats; rich farmers’ wives trying to look comfortable in hats; swarms of children, for the most part bare-footed; peasants in ill-fitting ready-made clothes; pathetic village dames, clad as in DÜrer’s pictures, the head covered with a kerchief, a black fichu over the shoulders, a wadded corsage to fill out their figures. All these idlers, looking poverty stricken when compared with those of like class in France, would spend hour after hour staring at the “pantalons rouges,” occasionally shouting through the bars their eternal “Paris kaput,” the cry which had been reiterated from Dieuze to Strasburg, from Stuttgart to Ingolstadt, and with which our ears had been ringing since our capture.

This foolish jubilation exasperated Durupt. He kept quiet about it for some days. At length, however, having recovered his spirits, he threw himself heart and soul into the task of keeping up our hopes.

“It is absolutely impossible that we can be beaten,” he would say to the preachers of evil. “Agreed, their advance guards are at Rheims, Meaux, and CompiÈgne. But does this mean that Paris has been taken? What about the naval guns with which the Government has filled the forts? Make your minds easy; they will lose much time and much blood before they will plant their standard on the Place de la Concorde! Let us suppose the worst. Let us suppose that Paris has fallen. Does that finish the matter? Remember Chanzy’s plan. In his view, the strategic bastion of France is not Paris but the Massif Central, the Auvergne and CÉvennes mountains. Let them make their way, then, to Clermont-Ferrand and Aurillac! Besides, we are not fighting single-handed. The Russian waterspout is getting ready, and will soon break over them; it will make short work of their five poor army corps. Its waters will dash on to Berlin. The floods will chase their navy out of the Kiel Canal, will force it into the North Sea—where the English dreadnoughts are awaiting it, and will swallow it at one gulp!”

The least enthusiastic among the prisoners were enraptured at these speeches. Sometimes a voice would be heard saying, “Even so, we shall be here till the spring!” To which Durupt would peremptorily reply: “All Saints’ Day will find us at home! I know Germany as I know the palm of my hand. The country is penniless. Moreover, it is not with France alone, this time, that Germany has to do; she has to fight France, Belgium, England, and Russia—that ocean of humanity. You must be mad, I tell you, if you do not feel that Germany is going to be wiped out!”

In these surroundings, Durupt is the man with a duty, a mission. Though he is a prisoner, every hour is fully occupied, each moment has its allotted task. His life is governed by a single rule: “Every day in which we fail to enlarge our own hopes and to spread discouragement among the Germans is a day lost.” Consequently, the essential matter for him is to secure news.

The instant he has finished his supervision of the distribution of our meals and his work in casemate 16, off he goes on the hunt. He accosts Max, the canteen-keeper, the mightiest beer-drinker on the Upper Danube, a light-hearted soldier, florid, paunchy, so rough that he laughs when he tells you that in the Vosges a French shrapnel has just taken off his brother’s arm, and yet, though rough, a good fellow. It is from him that Durupt learns the gossip in the Wirtschaften of Hepperg, Lenting, KÖsching, WegstÄtten, Oberhaumstadt—in a word, in all the village taverns within reach of the fort, both on the hills and in the plain. Having finished with Max, he proceeds to pump the guard.

Here his reception is rather cold, for he is a poor diplomatist, and shows too plainly to these men of the Landwehr that at bottom he is their hereditary enemy. Still, he has a talk in the guardroom, smokes a cigar, and drinks a glass of beer with the men, exchanging Prosits. Sometimes he sees on the table, amid the beer-jugs and other debris of the meal, a newspaper which they have forgotten to put away when the Frenchman came in. My Durupt pounces upon it and stuffs it into his pocket. He strides across the bridge, hurries down the staircase, and bursts into the kitchen, breathless and radiant, with the air of a victorious athlete or a hero who has saved the republic, and brandishes his paper as if it were a flag taken from the enemy. Now he reads it, translates and comments, with exclamations of joy or of rage at the passages which delight or infuriate him. He actually talks, argues, and fights with this newspaper; he regards it as a flesh and blood Bavarian who is trying to deceive him, and with whom he has to join issue. Woe to the Bavarian if he does not admit defeat, or at least disquietude, for he will then learn to what lengths Durupt can go in his anger!

Never shall I forget these readings of the IngolstÄdter Zeitung. If I am ever tempted to doubt that the press exercises a terrible power, that its influence upon the public resembles that of a shell bursting in a cavalry square, I shall call to mind certain hours of imprisonment here, passed round our table, Durupt reading aloud, Dutrex and I sketching maps to clarify the news, while leaning over our shoulders, anxiously following us, are Paix, Scherrer, Badoy, Noverraz, Donel, Lagier, and a few others. When we break up in the evening we know what will be the public sentiment next day. According as Durupt is able to sing a triumphal pÆan, or, on the other hand, the evidence of misfortune is overwhelming, will our thousand comrades be light-hearted or sad, will hope or despair permeate the fort from this centre, from this table, from the newspaper on this table, from the group of men who sit round it evening after evening.

Sometimes Durupt, returning to the kitchen excited by the chase, is pulled up by the notice I have posted for the protection of my work: “Please do not speak to me.” He then sits down beside me without saying a word and unfolds the newspaper he has got hold of. Elbows on table, head in hands, his whole body bent eagerly forward, Claudel would say he is engaged on the “ingurgitation” of his paper.

Look at him, dissecting the leading article, heavy fare in which the most trifling details of information are sandwiched between philosophical disquisitions. He turns the fragments over and over as a starving man turns over the contents of a dustbin. He labours to unveil hidden meanings, to detect masked avowals. He displays a truly German patience in securing here and there, rari nantes in gurgite vasto, the name of a town, the number of an army corps, or some other shadow of positive information.

Then he brings forth his maps, which are shabby in appearance, worn at the folds, stained by the rain and sweat of his campaign in the Upper Vosges. He takes out his pencil. He marks the places. At length, unable to restrain himself any longer, he feels that he must tell me what has happened. He turns my protective notice with its face to the wall, and starts upon his commentary.

The splendid thing is that this commentary invariably leads up to the proof of a victory. For him every French retreat is a strategic movement, while every German retreat is a rout. All good news is positively certain; all bad news is a falsehood published to restore the courage of the German populace. Guided by these principles of criticism, he arrives at a certainty of the truth; he then cons it over to himself, gives it a portable form, and hurries off to disseminate it through the fort. He bursts into No. 19, where Merlier, Charlier, and Gautin receive him as an angel of the Lord; into No. 17, where his enthusiasm breaks vainly against the obstinate and disdainful pessimism of Guido; into No. 34, where Brissot and d’Arnoult, two mischievous devils who are equally well acquainted with German and with the beer served out to the guardroom, treat him simply as a gossip. Unfortunately, in the course of his round he will encounter, now the quartermaster, now a Gefreiter, now one of the sentinels. Remorselessly he overwhelms them with his news, thus making himself more unpopular with them than before.

Thus he takes ample revenge for the “Paris kaput” of the first few days. Dutrex and I chaff him about it, saying: “You’re behaving like a Boche in being so regardless of your adversaries’ feelings!”

“Poor fellows,” he makes answer, “it is obvious that you don’t know the Germans. As far as they are concerned the proverb is absolutely true: ‘Oignez vilain, il vous poindra; poignez vilain, il vous oigndra!’”[12]

I was walking the other day with Durupt and Sergeant Foch. We were on the little footpath which runs along the parapet, and opposite to us, across the great ditch, on the road which skirts the outer slopes, there appeared two German women. They were walking slowly, wheeling bicycles, and they looked at us curiously. We mended our gait, for no one likes to look unhappy under the eyes of the enemy.

Durupt spoke to them in German.

“Have you a newspaper?”

“No.”

“What’s the latest news?”

“Things are going well in France.”

“For which side?”

“For ours. Trainloads of wounded are coming back every day.”

“Your wounded?”

“Yes.”

“In that case, it is for our side that things are going well!”

“Possibly.”

These women had such fat bodies and short legs as to produce an impression of caricature. Sergeant Foch, Alsatian and infantry chasseur, has a malicious wit. He was cogitating a joke, but I managed to induce him to suppress it.

We walked on slowly, talking across the ditch, and the women said:

“You treat our prisoners badly, and you finish off the wounded!”

“Who told you that?”

“It’s in the papers.”

“All your papers lie, and you are stupid enough to believe them. It is just the same with the war news. You are beaten everywhere. It’s perfectly clear to any one who can read intelligently. Yet you believe yourselves to be the victors! The newspapers take their readers to be idiots. Is it possible that they are right? The real fact is that we are starved here, whilst in France, where people are rich and generous, your prisoners are fed on the fat of the land!”

“It may be so. But it was those rascals of English who caused all the trouble. If only I had them here!” (the larger woman shook her fist). “The English are the apaches of Europe (die Lumpen Europas)!”

Thus the conversation began. It must have lasted about half an hour. The conscientious Durupt “sowed discouragement” in the minds of his interlocutors, refusing to leave them until he felt that their confidence in victory had been undermined.