REMINISCENCES OF A PREVIOUS JOURNEY
September 2, 1914.
Here I am a prisoner.
What a journey! I am bitter at soul; it makes me sick to think of it. Across Rhenish Prussia, the Palatinate, the grand duchy of Baden, Würtemberg, and Bavaria, for three days and three nights, at every station, and even as we pass through the countryside, groups of peasants and gloomy crowds of citizens hurl execrations at us, stamp, and shake their fists, making signs that they would like to cut our throats and tear out our eyes. From the streets of country towns, lost amid the sweltering plains, troops of children assemble, waving flags. They form up in line beside the track. When the train comes in, moving slowly like a funeral convoy, they beg for our képis; they vociferate in their own language, “Paris kaput! Death to the French!” The sight of the red cross armlet produces paroxysms of fury. “Death,” they scream, “death to the red cross men! These are they who finish off our wounded!” The shouting becomes strident, terrible, mad. Sometimes they try to take the train by storm, and are stopped only by the bayonets of the German soldiers on guard in each compartment, who growl out threats.
The women are even more horrible than the men. The murderous glance, the clawed fingers, working and tearing as if in the dream of a tigress, the nostrils dilated and twitching, the lips cyanosed, grimacing hatred—never before have I seen such faces of damned souls, such Medusa heads. Who could believe that women should appear so horrible!… When the train stops for any time, richly dressed matrons parade beside it, offering our guards mugs of beer, cigars and cigarettes, bread-and-butter and jam, steaming sausages. Sick with hunger and fatigue, we look on at this prodigality. “Above all,” they say, “give nothing to these French! Let them starve!” We are offered water.
Everywhere, at the stations, from the steeples, the factories, the inns, huge flags are waving. Chime answers chime across the rivers. The big cathedral bells make the hills re-echo. All Germany is holiday-making, drunk with blood, thrilling with the prospect of victory.
Is this the Germany I knew last year?
I had travelled through the country in the company of Marcel Chabrières, as if on a pilgrimage. We passed through Heidelberg, my peaceful Heidelberg, so lovable in the shade of its august ruin and of its oak-crowned and vine-clad hill; Marburg, the quiet little town with its professors and its workmen, resting more quietly at the foot of the margrave’s castle than even the bones of St. Elisabeth of Hungary beneath the pavement of the church; Dresden, that fine seat of artistic and courtly life; Munich, the Teuton Florence, blooming like a flower; Weimar, more sacred than all the others, where the neighbouring houses of Schiller and Goethe mourn discreetly the memories of the golden century, the lyrical and generous youth of Germany!… We were charmed with these laughing cities of the spirit. I can still picture them in the limpid air of last spring, I recall their dainty aspect, and the cheerful welcome they accorded us; I see their waters reflecting the blue skies and the bright clouds. When I but think of them, in this damp crypt of exile, gusts of liberty, youth, and ecstasy agitate my heart.
We had strolled through the docks of Cologne and of Hamburg; we had visited Elberfeld, Barmen, Hagen, and Essen, the smoky iron-towns of Westphalia. Near the great forges of M. Krupp von Bohlen we had admired the fairylike village of Margaritendorf, where brutal modern industry would seem to have pledged itself to put its slaves to sleep every evening in an idyllic retreat. From the window of the train, on the journey from Hamburg to Berlin, passing through a country of pines and lean fields, we had a glimpse of Friedrichsruhe, the lordly domain where sleeps the “honest broker” who made the empire, “awaiting the resurrection of the just.”
After the gentle sweetness of the ancient university towns, we were intoxicated with the energies of this new world, this world of pride and of money, of sweat and of lucre. Even in ugly Berlin, the parvenu town, we paid our respects to the titanic effort of a nation in the full vigour of life, ambitious, stubborn, determined to dazzle the world, to take the place of Athens, of Rome, of Paris, convinced of its destiny to rule the universe.
But every one talked to me of peace.
Since I was upon an official mission, I was able to converse with the men in whom young Germany recognizes its masters. They all spoke with one voice. They declared that their race had an ecumenical mission. Patriotic, active, prolific, it was inevitably destined to control Europe. “But for this,” they added, “we need peace.”
“Why, then, are you armed?”
“We have no natural frontiers; our plains lie open to the invader both from the east and from the west. English merchants are jealous of our successes; France obstinately refuses to grasp the proffered hand of friendship; Russia is becoming panslavist. Caught in such a vice, how can we ensure peace in any other way than by arming for defence? But we have no need of war. In twenty years we shall be eighty millions, and we shall be rich. Do you imagine that it will then be necessary for us to unsheathe the sword in order to play our proper part in the world?”
This was the language employed to me by liberals. It was the language of M. Simon and M. Wolf, editors or owners of the two leading journals in Germany; of Max Weber of Heidelberg, the keenest intelligence I have ever known; of Troeltsch, the distinguished sociologist; of Windelband, the successor of Kant and of Fichte; of Vossler of Munich, the Romance philologist, rival of such men as Ferdinand Bruneau and Joseph Bédier; of Liebermann, the celebrated Berlin painter, who has supplemented the labours of Paul Cassirer in order to introduce the work of our impressionists into Prussia; of Lichtwark, the director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg; of Naumann, the editor of Hilfe, who supplies ideas to men of the left wing in politics; above all, of a man more influential than any I have yet named, Carl Lamprecht, the Saxon, whose gigantic history of modern Germany has taken the form of an epic in honour of William II.
Young men, who across the Rhine are “liberals,”[1] talked in just the same way.
I shall long remember the night we passed at Frankfort in the company of M. Moritz von Bethmann, cousin of the Chancellor. How ardent was his confidence! He was far from being a malcontent. He had no desire for any kind of “restoration”; and still less did he wish, in the name of a Frederick Barbarossa or of a Frederick the Great, to anathematize the present. He accepted it joyously, delighted to be living in it, eager to carry his full share of duties and hopes. But his lightness of heart was neither studied nor ostentatious.
I recall very precisely his reply to the charge of materialism which, on the spur of the moment, I levelled against new Germany. His rejoinder was spirited and instantaneous.
“Do you really believe,” he said, “that we are going to rest satisfied for a long time in the boastful materialism that ensued upon the victory? You dare to say this, at the very moment when Kant and Fichte are once more being restored to honour; when, just like you, we are discovering the ‘buried temple,’ internal values, faith! Allow me to assure you that the young men of Germany are at this moment more exacting in matters of spiritual nourishment than your young men of the Agathon type and the group that runs the Action française. Our minds cannot give themselves up to a stupid or politic adoration of that which our intelligence, fully conscious of its work, has destroyed. Though it may cost us more suffering than you, we demand that our hearts and our minds shall preserve full freedom of judgment, and we know how to await their decision. We are not prepared, under pretext of spiritual nostalgia, to accept outworn formulas which would compel us to shun and to disavow the social order we owe to science, history, commerce, and democracy. We shall not give ourselves up to the cult of any religions which, however venerable they may be, are surcharged with fossilized rubbish and proud of their state of petrifaction, which would have no understanding of our scruples, and would be absolutely unfitted to fecundate our real life!
“I do not know if the renascence in France takes the form of swearing by the middle ages, or by the seventeenth century, or by Bonald and de Maistre, and of invoking maledictions on the work of ’89.[2]… The German renascence, if this be so, is at the antipodes of yours. But do not imagine that we are iconoclasts. As much as any others, we like to come to terms with tradition. But we insist that tradition shall not hinder our freedom of movement, that it shall either make us live or let us live. Is that vaingloriousness? When we claim the privilege of living, of thinking, and of creating, no less freely than did the men who founded the tradition of the middle ages, or than those who founded the tradition of the seventeenth century, are we not within our strict rights, and is not the exercise of these rights a positive duty? We may be wrong, but we believe that a new world is in course of construction. The work that has to be done is of greater value in our eyes than the work that is finished, however venerable and august the latter.
“I am a close student of your new political literature. Will you permit me to say that I discover therein a carping and regretful tone? It seems to me that its chief effort is devoted to blackening and decrying the regime you have chosen, to undermining confidence in it. Our efforts take the opposite direction. We are all for construction, adaptation, glorification, lyric enthusiasm. We accept our national mission. We accept our present life. We desire that our energies should continue to increase, to coalesce, to become intertwined. You will see; when the right moment comes they will secure for us a hegemony, and beyond question it will be the most humane and the most pacific of hegemonies.”
Our conversation was a lengthy one. All the conventional barriers had been cast down. Every one gave utterance to his own truth, as if speaking to himself alone, in that species of lucid exaltation which sometimes results from a prolonged vigil. And the strange thing was that in proportion as behind the verbal agreements we sensed ever more strongly the depths of unexpressed antagonisms, we felt each for the other an increasing esteem. The hours passed. All the lamps in the Frankfurter Hof had been extinguished, except our own, which continued to burn in the great reading-room, its yellow light piercing the smoke-wreaths from our cigars, and exhibiting the virile and yet refined features of the young banker. We passed out into the open. The porter was asleep. The streets were deserted. After this great duel between our respective national dreams, the cold of the night was agreeable. Through the ancient street where the young Goethe, locked up by his father in the corner room, had watched Gretchen going by, we gained the banks of the Main. The first streaks of dawn were already illuminating the broad surface of the river, peopled with motionless vessels.
This was a year ago. Now the war has come between our dreams.
I remember this as if it were yesterday.
At Leipzig, again, I see a small and cheap room, an eyrie in the Inselstrasse, among the great printing houses. It was attractive none the less, almost touching in its simplicity, the ugly little place, with an empty cup of coffee on the edge of a deal table laden with papers, and, fixed to the wall, two shelves for books. It was a cell, showing that its tenant was a man devoid of all vanities, a stranger to the amenities of our century. Here, one fine morning, after I had rung the bell five or six times, I was welcomed by M. Wilhelm Baum, editor of Die Akademische Rundschau and president of the “Free Students.”
Mlle. Marianne Lamprecht had drawn my attention to this young man as a sort of princeps juventutis. Her father thought highly of him and assisted him in his undertakings. The society of which he was the leader had ramifications throughout lettered and scientific Germany. All its members were serious workers; its mere existence had overwhelmed with ridicule the reputation of the old aristocratic “corps,” those little courts of idlers, where the gilded youth of the fatherland, under the pretence of study, spends all its days in drinking, duelling, and drabbing.
The appearance of M. Wilhelm Baum surprised me. Over his night-shirt he had hastily donned a short and seedy jacket; his hair was untidy; he was a small man of awkward aspect. The cinders from the stove, scattered here and there, scrunched under our feet. My eye was caught by the teaspoon, still wet, among the manuscripts. The man was in keeping with his surroundings. Yet, when I had seated myself on an ancient sofa with broken springs, my second glance at this “prince” aroused sympathetic feelings. A secret flame illumined the blue eyes, the ascetic brow, and the sickly countenance, revealing, in this shy youth of twenty-five, a strong and lofty soul.
He, likewise, confided to me his hopes.
They differed little from those of M. Moritz von Bethmann. But on the lips of M. Baum they received an apostolic breadth. The young banker had not shown that he felt any insurmountable horror of war, which he regarded merely as a useless expense. M. Baum, on the other hand, whose entire mentality was under the influence of evangelical radicalism, detested war as barbarism and as a manifestation of antichrist.
At one o’clock, since I could not make up my mind to leave him, I persuaded him to dine with me at my hotel. Marcel Chabrières had spent the morning at the museum among the tinted marbles of Max Klinger. He was astonished to find that I was already on a friendly footing, almost intimate indeed, with this young German.
Enthusiasm is the bread of youth. Youth loves the impossible, and will accept life only through a passion which colours it with iridescent hues, invests it with a halo, and endows it with heroic lineaments. This meal was one of those moments of transfiguration when the world seems malleable and impregnated with divine fire. Our minds were filled with a vision, the vision of a new classic age, as harmonious as the age of Pericles in Greece or as the third Christian century, but vaster, richer, more humane, sparkling with youth—an age which was to integrate and beautify the conquests and discoveries, still uncoordinated, of the last three hundred years. German and French, in this dream, came to an understanding. It is true that he considered that his nation, turning back to the tradition of Weimar, was to be the master-craftsman, whereas I contended that France had never ceased to occupy that role, which was her vocation and fulfilled her nature. But this difficulty seemed trifling. We were not so much antagonists as friendly rivals.
Is this man, I asked myself when he had gone, is this man typical of young and literate Germany? In the classic land of militarism, is it only the old who are swashbucklers?
A few weeks later, in early spring, on one of those afternoons in which showers alternate with sunshine, and in which the buds, swelling with sap, open, I was walking in the beech forest to the south of Munich. My companion, about thirty years of age, was in fine fettle. Tall and thick-set, florid of face, hair blond and bristly, he walked like a conqueror, and seemed in his element among these sturdy trees. The man of the woods personified! I considered that this professor, already renowned, ought rightly in appearance to be rough-hewn, massive, dynamic, like a woodman at work. He was a hearty eater and a vigorous drinker, ruddy with health, absolutely innocent of the scepticism of drawing-rooms. I had several times before had the chance of admiring this man who reminded me of one of our Normandy horses. Above all, I had seen him at the Hofbrauerie in Munich, where we had washed down our political discussions with copious draughts of that dark beer, whose consumption in Bavaria is encouraged by old King Louis, chief brewer, and owner of the wealthiest tavern in the empire.
A country walk frequently encourages avowals which would never have been made during a thousand meetings in town, among sophisticated men. My companion had just confessed to me that he belonged to the “Social Democracy.” As yet in secret only, for it is not permissible in Germany to wear openly and simultaneously the livery of the professor and that of the socialist. But the socialist party, suffering from a dearth of intellectuals, desired him to become a deputy. At the first opportunity, he would exchange his professorial chair for a seat in the Reichstag. The ambition to revive Bebel in his own person, to become a new Wilhelm Liebknecht, made his nostrils dilate.
Somewhat mockingly, when with the impetuosity of primitive man he was speaking of the social mission of Germany, I said to him point-blank: “Admit that you think we are worn out, that in your eyes France is nothing more than an elderly beauty, with bald head, pallid lips, wrinkled skin, decayed teeth, enfeebled intelligence!”
“If I were a bourgeois,” he answered laughingly, “I should answer in the negative. You still have your stockings and your bankers, matters of considerable importance in the eyes of the bourgeoisie of every land. But I am a socialist and a democrat. The minimum programme of our party is to effect the overthrow of Prussian absolutism, and to apply throughout Germany that parliamentary regime which is the conditio sine qua non of all social advance. But you French, for your part, hold this parliamentary regime in scorn. What would you have me think of a nation which repents of its virtues, which makes fun of its chief glory?
“Here in Germany we read your Maurras and similar writers.[3] We are told that in France these men have the ear of the younger generation. It astounds us. It seems to us insane, this cheerful renunciation of the tradition which has made you famous, and for which you are still idolized by all that is noblest in the world. Do you find this strange? When material force is failing you, you, the noble nation, become rabid apologists of the regime of force, of ‘the man with the big stick.’ You take Machiavel for master. You ask for a French Bismarck. You declare yourselves to be royalists, imperialists, absolutists. I can see no difference between your romano-positive young men and our own echten Deutschen, those energumens who deafen us in our public squares with their hochs to the Kaiser, who shout their Deutschland über alles at every prosit, and who pile monument upon monument in honour of the militarist Moloch, until the appearance of our towns becomes intolerable. Young Frenchmen converted to the Germany of the junkers, blood-brothers of our idiot of a crown prince! What a farce! But for us, the German socialists, this is merely an additional reason for the redoubling of our energies. Our watchword to-day is extremely simple: to raise in Europe and to carry onward to victory the standard of democracy which has fallen from the hand of France!”
“Such is really your idea of France, your own, and that of all the German left?”
“To speak frankly, it is with us a dogma that generous and humane France is dead, and that all that was best in her spirit has entered into us.”
We walked on for some time without saying a word. The idea never occurred to him that these wholesale judgments could possibly shock or pain me, for he was one of those happy men, common in Germany, endowed with a veritable talent for frankness. He continued his terrible strides, and after a while he exclaimed gaily: “Anyhow, you don’t bring enough children into the world to be socialists. Our ideas can germinate only in dense crowds, where there is hardly standing room, where people lack air and space, breed without restriction, and have nothing to lose! Your Einzweikindersystem[4] condemns you to be nothing but bourgeois, and poor bourgeois at that!”
I made no answer. What answer was possible? He knew my ideas. He had been one of those who introduced my Ecoutes into Germany. Besides, it gave him so much pleasure to believe in our decadence, to be convinced that Germany, as far as democracy was concerned, was henceforward without peer in the world.
Indeed it is true, all these “young men of the left” were ardent believers in Germany’s mission. But to justify this mission they did not, like the cynical pangermanists, appeal to the Faustrecht, the right of the stronger; they did not speak of bloody conquests. Perhaps they thought of them, but such brutalities (which the German mind, even when finely tempered, accepts with little reluctance) remained hidden in the background, within the domain of possibilities, among the lesser evils and contingencies—profane delights which a platonic lover hardly dares to envisage even in his secret dreams. Idealists of the Michelet type, quaffing the austere wines of Kant and Fichte (recently unsealed and served round at the universities by the new masters), they made an exclusive claim to the moral heritage of ’89, of which we, they said, had ceased to be the heirs. Were not they the youthful neophytes of the democratic faith which the degenerate French had lost? Had they not passionately espoused the modern world, whose uncertain dawn had first ventured to shine on Paris, that slight and foolish city, but whose full noon was now to illumine the strong and loyal (treu und fest) town of Berlin, the guardian of the Rhine? Yes, finis Galliæ! It was theirs to lead the great caravan of the universe towards the new justice. It was their part, the part of these good Teutons, with their virgin spirit and their new blood, to direct in future the affairs of the human race. Gesta Dei per Germanos!
One of these young men was M. Wichert, director of the Mannheim museum. He was the favourite disciple of M. Lichtwark of Hamburg, and had also been a pupil of the late celebrated von Tschudi, grand master of the artistic life of Germany. Von Tschudi, it may be mentioned in passing, of course had a quarrel with William II, just like Bismarck, just like Haeseler, and Bülow, just like all the clever men in the empire who were unfortunate enough to possess a vigorous individuality. M. Wichert was a friend of our consul, M. Deschars,[5] who arranged a meeting between us.
Son of a poor officer, and orphaned while quite young, M. Wichert went through his course of studies as best he could. His life is a romance. Loneliness; poverty; chance encounter with a Mæcenas; sudden abandonment of science for art; renewed poverty; unexpected patronage by the great pontiffs of art, Tschudi and Lichtwark; appointment as sub-director of the picture gallery of Munich; appearance upon the scene of the Magian kings, a delegation of aldermen from the town of Mannheim, modernist before all, offering him carte blanche for the creation of a museum; for a start the young Messiah purchases in Paris Manet’s best work, “The Execution of Maximilian,” Daumier’s portrait of Michelet, and the “Man with the Pipe,” the most famous of Cézanne’s pictures; all Mannheim is terrified at its commissioner’s prodigality; he defends himself before the entire town council, silencing some by his boldness, winning over others by his disinterested violence, by the aspect of his threadbare coat, and the thinness of his slight but ardent figure; thus he arouses that municipal patriotism which is so keen in the fatherland, convincing the councillors that he will do nothing less than make of Mannheim the leading art centre of Germany, and at the point of the bayonet he wrests from them a vote of confidence; shortly afterwards, a wealthy Jew entrusts him with five million marks for the establishment of a museum; he founds an art school to enlighten the Mannheim bourgeoisie, which is upstart, elementary, but open-minded and full of goodwill; his lectures become fashionable in the town; he provides similar instruction for the common people; acting upon suggestions made by M. Osthaus, a rich bourgeois of Hagen, he establishes travelling exhibitions. In a word, Tschudi being dead and Lichtwark dying, M. Wichert allowed his own way at Mannheim, at twenty-five years of age figures in the role of co-ordinator, protector, inspirer of the artistic life of Germany. He has made up his mind to transform Mannheim—the Hanseatic city of traders and manufacturers, the mushroom town flaming red with its abundance of new bricks, an American city suddenly appearing in Europe—into a Jerusalem of the new art. He desires that the streets shall become beautiful, that their names shall have a poetic ring, that the squares shall be as harmonious as a house by Van de Velde or Niemeyer. He secures an order for the demolition of the theatre built ten years earlier in the “Jugend” style, and already an object of ridicule; a competition is opened for the design of the building which is to replace it. The whole town becomes crazy about art. A bourgeois is regarded as dishonoured if he has not given 40,000 marks to the museum to buy a Renoir or some Gauguins. If this apostolate continues, the people will checkmate the very Athenians.
M. Wichert talks to me in the following strain: “In the history of art nothing can rival the creative energy displayed by France. Romanesque, gothic, all the gothics, renaissance, baroque, rococo (the terms have no invidious meaning in Germany), directoire, empire—all these are French. Throughout ten centuries you continued to bring forth styles which were so elegant and so convenient, whose taste was so confident, that they instantly captured the world.
“But have you suddenly become sterile? Is France, pre-eminently the nation of innovators, no longer competent to do anything but to copy its own past? Like your new sociologists, your furniture makers supply Louis XVI, Louis XIV, empire; your builders furnish Louis XVI, renaissance, and again Louis XVI. Have you really ceased to produce architects since Gabriel and Louis, cabinet-makers since Boule, enchasers since Gouthière? Or is it that you no longer care for anything but the old, like those respectable and fatigued ladies who cannot endure a new face, and ask only to be allowed to die in peace, surrounded by the things of their youth? However this may be, we often tell one another that France no longer possesses enough energy to survive the titanic act of giving birth to the modern world, and that she is now nothing more than a beautiful corpse, embalmed and laid to rest in a splendid museum.
“Here in Germany, believe me, we worship your artistic tradition. For centuries we could find nothing better to do than attempt to assimilate it. You have visited Cassel, Pilnitz, Carlsruhe, Potsdam; I cannot doubt that you felt at home in these royal palaces, which are nothing but replicas of Versailles.
“But I sometimes incline to think that the creative force which formerly existed in France has emigrated to Germany. It is true that during the nineteenth century there occurred in France a splendid blossoming of sculptors and painters: Delacroix, Rude, Carpeaux, the landscape painters of Barbizon, the admirable school of Manet, and, coming down to to-day, Rodin, Degas, Maillol, Jouve, Vallette, the expressionists. Yes, unquestionably, even if your architecture (the master art which controls and co-ordinates all the rest) is decadent, your sculpture and your painting remain unrivalled.
“But are you not struck by the fact that during the last twenty years it has been in Germany, above all, that your innovators have gained appreciation; that many of them have had to secure their first celebrity in the foreign world, before they were enabled to harvest in France the fruits of a restricted glory, admired in their own homes solely by a group of cosmopolitan epicures? Are you not astonished that such a man as Van de Velde, who vegetated in Paris, should build palaces for our great manufacturers; and that Maillol, the sculptor, a most typical Frenchman, should find a place of honour in our museums while in France he is still almost unknown? Is this neglect deliberate? Is it because you are convinced that genius cannot flower to perfection until it has suffered, that you provide this chill atmosphere for your best artists? Or is it timidity, unwillingness to take risks, stupidity, provincialism? Whatever the reason, the air of France is to-day less favourable to creation than the air of Germany.
“In Germany there is an extensive public which lives upon the hope of a new ‘culture.’ This public has nothing in common with the pangermanists. It includes few generals and few leaders of the bureaucracy. But it contains our best men of letters and some of our principal bourgeois, in a word, the general staff of wealthy, liberal, and parliamentary young Germany. There are some, like Stephan Georg, Wolfskehl, and Madame Osthaus, in whom this hope assumes an ardent and mystical character, becoming a true religion. While it is the fashion in Paris, at least so we are assured, to be frankly reactionary,[6] here all the men and all the women who wield the empire of mind are animated by a quasi-messianic spirit. Is it possible that Nietzsche, with his idea of the revaluation of values, has contributed to the spread of this spirit? I do not know. We wait; we aspire; we hope. To us to-morrow is sacred. Every one is striving towards forms of life and art which shall be more ample, more truthful, more expressive, more beautiful. Every one is making ready to welcome the wonderful butterfly which is to spring from this larval age. It is with us a matter of faith that the men will come, that they are now on the way, who can provide the artillery and the watchwords of the new civilization.
“I frequently visit Paris to attend the great sales; I am well acquainted with the superior smiles with which many of your critics greet our attempts. They make fun of the curved outlines of our ‘Jugend’ buildings. For my part, I detest that style of architecture as much as they. Are we not now demolishing a theatre built after this design, although the mortar is hardly dry? But it is possible for us to destroy our architectural abortions. In Germany you can get money, all the money you require, for an artistic purpose. Can you do the same in France? Can you make sacrifices to an ideal incorporated in stone? No, you have too little faith. You believe in your bankers, not in your artists. You venture nothing in art; we hazard all, boldly running the risk of making a mistake. And, by building, we learn to build.
“Ten years ago we were making bad attempts; to-day we have discovered a system of architecture appropriate to modern requirements and at the same time beautiful. Go and look at the Weltheim in Berlin, M. Osthaus’s home at Hagen, the new station at Hamburg. When you are in Hamburg get M. Schumacher, chief architect of the republic, to show you the plans of the magnificent public garden he has just designed, which is to cost fifteen million marks.
“Here money is the ally of art, the living art of to-day, the ally of artistic creation, whereas in your country money, more prudent, devotes itself only to the purchase of antique and catalogued beauty. I believe, in fact, that France lacks Medicis, whilst Germany possesses them in abundance. The reason is obvious. The wealthier members of our bourgeoisie are uneasy and discontented; they desire a true parliament which will enable them to get the better of the junkers; it is their nature to be progressive. Your bourgeoisie, on the other hand, has triumphed, and, since it has nothing more to desire, it is natural that it should dread novelty in philosophy and art no less than in politics. I know that what I am saying runs counter to all your hopes. But you can do nothing to change your destiny in this matter. France has entered the conservative phase; we are now the creators; we, henceforward, shall be the true successors of your masters.”
Thus everywhere was to be heard the same refrain: the future lies in the hands of Germany! Germany is the Messiah of the new art; the Messiah of the socialist city; the Messiah of modern thought; the Messiah of the new classic age. She is the successor of aged France. It is she who will realize what the last of the great Frenchmen have dreamed.
In all these young men, the élite of the German nation, there was effervescing a strange force, there was surging an ardent and emotional nationalism, a veritable religion of German primacy. They considered that primacy inevitable. It originated spontaneously; its increase was dependent upon organic growth; and no accident, whether in war or peace, could either hasten or hinder it. They were all radiating hope; they all had faith in the present, a warm vintage yielding a thick and heady must, of intoxicating aroma, and whence will be derived a robust wine for the peoples to drink.
They were sincere when they spoke of peace. Doubtless their idealist ambition was transformed into a materialist and brutal ambition among men of business, officers, and bureaucrats. For these latter, German production was to ruin that of England, the German will was to control the foreign chancelleries. But such ends cannot be secured without war.
Or they could be secured without war, only if Europe made up her mind to submit! Only if the English merchants were good enough to go bankrupt! Only if the greater Slavs should offer no objection to the enslavement of their little brothers on the Drina! Thus while the young liberals were dreaming of a pacific hegemony, Krupp was making his 420 millimetre guns, sergeants were teaching recruits to fear their officers as they feared God, and Berlin was fashioning new military laws which even the socialists, after some formal resistance, voted integrally.
But during this journey, the fact which struck me most of all was the existence of a liberal youth. I had not expected to find anything of the kind. I had been so positive that from the Rhine to the Vistula I should hear nothing but the noise of military accoutrements.
I had seen the German army in Strasburg, at the Parole Aufgabe in the Place de Broglie, when the general transmits to the officers’ corps the orders and the passwords. The whole of this assembly, in its light-grey uniform in which a simple sub-lieutenant was indistinguishable from a colonel, made salutes. The salute seemed to me the distinctive sign of this army, a fervent salute, involving the head and the entire spine, passing off in a smile at once triumphant and humble, martial and innocent, seeming to say, “How enviable I am in that I obey! How enviable I am in that I command!”
I looked down on this from the third story of the editorial offices of Le Journal d’Alsace-Lorraine. Suddenly I came to understand the feudal spirit, the cascade of absolute authority and of submission which formerly descended from the sovereign to the serf by way of the hierarchy of barons.
When I had crossed the Rhine, in the streets of the German towns the strength of this impression grew, until it became positively haunting. Everywhere I saw blind adoration of the uniform, overwhelming joy in wearing it; everywhere the intoxication of command, equalled only by the delight of obedience; everywhere complete ignorance of the essential equality of men, demonstrated first of all in the life of Christ, and which, once it is thoroughly understood, purifies politeness of servility, transforms obedience into affectionate collaboration, and transfigures power into service; everywhere, both in military and in civil life, I saw lords and servants, I saw the same man at once lord and servant, lord of those under him, servant of those over him—but nowhere did I see citizens. I saw servants, submissive, prepared for anything, obedient to every sign, mechanized and rejoicing thereat, convinced that it was to their interest to be so, proud of the shape and strength of the iron hand of which individually each man was one of the innumerable phalanges. I was tempted to see in this the dominant characteristic of the German nation. A powerful nation, but one estranged from the modern spirit: a medieval islet in the midst of liberal Europe; a redoubtable nation wherein absolutism, exorcised elsewhere in ’89, was patiently preparing its revenge, and whence some day, perhaps soon, would come the initiative of a combat to the death between feudalism and democracy.
Some weeks after the scene in the Place de Broglie, M. von Arnim, attached to the Prussian general staff, accompanied me through the barracks of Potsdam and the camp of Döberitz. The regiments of the guard were at drill. The order, the silence, were absolute, even in the case of those standing at ease. The drill ground was nothing but a vast solitude, like those great electric power works, which appear deserted, and where the only sign of life is the gentle hum of the dynamos. There seemed nothing human in this drill ground. From time to time there was a raucous cry, and the gloomy maniples advanced, retired, wheeled to the right or to the left.
“What a fine army of automata!” I said under my breath.
“That’s it,” exclaimed M. von Arnim, grasping at the comment, which had been made for my own edification alone, as a eulogium. “In France you cultivate individual initiative, but we avoid it like the pest. The whole aim of our training is to break it down. All we need is to produce somnambulists, performing such and such an action upon such and such an order; not reflecting, not reacting, but acting merely, passively, by instinct, responding to the order as a well-trained thoroughbred responds to the pressure of your knee. The soldier must not think. Above all he must not think. If we attribute so much importance to the rigorous carrying out of movements, if we push to the point of mania our fondness for these drill-ground evolutions which you regard as useless and ridiculous, it is because they break down thought, rout it, weary it, put it to sleep, and annihilate it; because they reduce the human being to the level of a pure automaton. Show me a man who, by persistent drilling, has been emptied of thought, and I will show you a good soldier!
“On the battlefield, automatic obedience and fear of the superior officer take the place of courage. This doctrine has but one inconvenience: we shall sacrifice more men than you when we have to attack. This is of no consequence. We have less reason than France to make a thrifty use of our soldiers. Germany is prolific.”
This German army, what a powerful mould it would constitute for a healthy race, one filled with the pride of youth but still requiring to be formed, one which had not yet emerged from the simple gregarious stage, one without any of those dispersed indurations due to the appearance of irreducible individualities—a race still boneless and plastic.
I know not whether it was due to my actual experiences, or simply to French prejudice, but I came to doubt the reality of German liberalism, and to regard as isolated and uprooted exceptions those young men in whose company I had recently breathed the pure air of democracy.
No, I said to myself at this time, the German nation sets no value upon civil liberty; its Protestantism is mere window-dressing; its Reformation, in contradistinction to that of Calvin, was solely the work of its princes (cujus regio hujus religio); if there were any logic in events, the Germans ought to be Roman Catholics, whilst we ought to be members of the reformed church and modernists; Catholicism flourishes, and socialism is so successful, in Germany, only because both the one and the other correspond to a general need for regimentation and tutelage, furnishing an equivalent for military discipline to all those who come forth from barrack life. I noted, in fact, that German socialism had nothing in common with our own; that it did not represent the proletariat at all; that it was a sort of sub-bourgeoisie, comfortable, well-off, placid, and lacking that revolutionary fervour which arises from an outraged conscience; that it constituted a bureaucracy, a hierarchy, a church based upon Marxist dogma; and that it owed its unbroken unity to the complete absence of thought and passion among its members.
At such times it seemed to me that the Prussian army was precisely suited to the German nation, desirous, not of self-respect, but of material well-being, friendly to that which controlled it, a people loving to be led. Yes, I said, such a nation needs such an army. And how fond the people is of the army. The bourgeois look upon it with fatuous affection. The kinglets of the empire are all eager to Prussianize themselves within the framework of this army; they all long to secure high command for themselves, if possible to become army inspectors, considering that the red band confers as much distinction as their crowns. I even went so far as to tax with duplicity the liberals of the great commercial and manufacturing world, comparing them to some territorial chief, who in outward aspect was pious and good-mannered, but who in an out-of-the-way court of his castle kept a number of hungry bears, prepared to loose them, as a final argument, upon any one who ventured to annoy him. At Dresden I had received a letter from M. Lichtwark, containing the following phrase: “The two finest types of modern man are the English gentleman and the German officer.” It is too plain, I exclaimed, Germany worships her army; Germany worships herself in her army; the army is Germany; the army dominates the entire country, just as the colossal figure of stone which commemorates the iron chancellor dominates with its huge symbolic sword the port of Hamburg and the forest of masts in the Elbe!
This doubt concerning the future of my young liberals returned periodically to sadden me. It was like an intermittent fever.
Was it possible to believe that they had the remotest chances of success, the Teuton Vergniauds who thought of renewing, after the lapse of a century, the adventure of the constituent assembly? Had they any clear idea of the terrible power of absolutism incarnate in the junkers and in the Prussian officers? These had no resemblance whatever to our eighteenth-century seigneurs, light-hearted, winning, generous, and philosophic—such men as Noailles, d’Aiguillon, and Montmorency, who spontaneously despoiled themselves on the 4th of August. I foresaw that it would be crushed without pity, this liberal impulse, so fragile even in its strength, the instant it transcended the sphere of art and letters.
“Give us ten years,” the Munich socialist frequently said. “By that time the crown prince of Bavaria, who is a liberal, will have become king; the Prussian electoral system, the Bastille of the autocracy, will have been destroyed. But if we fail in Prussia, we shall have done with legal methods, and our watchword will be Vive la Révolution! For the death of William II will mean the regime of the sabre.”
“Ten years,” I rejoined, “is a long time in an epoch of tense and threatening rivalries. Are you not afraid that before this period comes to an end fear of democracy, ambition, and economic needs may force your government to declare war against us?
“You will all be famous soldiers of the Kaiser, should that happen, you good liberals and socialists. You imagine yourselves opposed to militarism. But, without knowing it, you are its best resource, its great accomplice. You are such ardent patriots. You have so fanatical a belief in the destiny of Germany. How trifling is the difference between you and the pangermanists. You desire hegemony without war; they desire it at all costs, even if they have to fight for it. What does this distinction matter? It will be so easy, when the right moment comes, to befool you. It will be so easy for the wolf to appear in sheep’s clothing; to masquerade as a victim; to pretend that Germany has been invaded; to give to a war of aggression and conquest the sacred aspect of a war of national defence!
“Let us suppose that, through ill-luck, the war ends in a German success. Good-bye, then, to your dreams, to European idealism, to democratic dogmas. Great will be the discomfiture of your Tugendbund. The days of the Holy Alliance will return. When peace comes under these conditions your ‘borns,’ on their manorial estates, will luxuriate in the pious certitude that they are essentially different from the ‘not-borns,’ and that God has predestined them to be masters and leaders of men, just as, in the beginning, He created the white elephant and the royal tiger. Then, perhaps, in our defeat, we shall regretfully recall Sembat’s formula, Faites un roi, sinon faites la paix; then we shall hail Maurras as a prophet; inspired with a sense of renewed virtue, we shall mock at the civic dream which was our chief glory; and we shall fill the world, again become feudal, with the clamour of our repentance. A fine spectacle indeed would be such a repudiation by France of the great vision of fraternal justice with which she intoxicated the nations. What will you do in those days, you German democrats, when the mother of all democracy is vanquished, when the only disinterested champion of your ideal has perished at your hands?
“But you may rest easy in your minds, for we have no intention of dying. We have agreed to three years’ military service. We should agree, if needs must, to four years or to five. And do not, for this reason, accuse us of militarism. Our militarism is the militarism of Valmy. Full well do you know that we have no hidden thoughts of aggression or oppression. When we consented to the increase of our army, it was doubtless with a sincere desire to witness the overthrow of the barbarism of the kaisers and the crown princes, but we have never ceased to be faithful to the revolutionary watchword: ‘Let us vote for war upon the tyrants and for peace with the peoples!’”
The socialist of Munich, Wichert, the president of the Freistudenten, Moritz von Bethmann—how far away does it all seem now. They have killed; we have killed. Their glances full of youth and intelligence, which, when I was a free traveller, I received frankly, face to face, man to man; our conversations; our blossoming friendship; our common hope; the ideal, dear to Nietzsche, of the “good European”—what fragile things you are, beautiful creations of the mind!
Shivering on the cement floor of the casemate during the first night of my imprisonment here, I was continually haunted by the faces of my German friends. They did not smile at me as of old. Their eyes flashed. They glared at me like hawks. They pierced me; they wounded me. I was sad, sick at heart. How difficult it is to endure hatred. I seemed to hear bells ringing in my empty head. And always I seemed to see my friends’ eyes, strangely transformed, harsh, greedy eyes burning with ambition, cruel, the eyes of treasure-hunters, such as one sees on the friezes of Susa in the beast faces of the Assyrian kings with long perfumed beards.
Here I squat in a corner of this crypt, hungry, thirsty, stupefied, my brain inert, lacking energy to do anything, looking on at my own adventures as if they were those of a stranger. Images of my experiences in the campaign, in which I seemed to have suffered fatigues beyond the limits of the credible, pass idly and almost indifferently through my mind. Already I seem to regard these experiences with indifference, like those military descriptions in Cæsar or Sallust, which no longer stir any one’s emotions. I am aware of nothing but my body. It seems strange to a man who believed himself to live upon ideas, to be reduced to become nothing but a stomach. I thought of Rabelais this morning, of Gargantua surrendering himself to his pleasures, of Frère Jean des Entommeures “wetting his whistle.” My imagination wallowed in the sensuous delights, in the gigantic satisfactions of appetite, with which the four books abound. One needs to be positively starving to appreciate to the full the groaning boards of the monk of Chinon.
Our division had been sacrificed beforehand. Charged, I imagine, to protect the retreat, it had held firm. How, and for how long? A private in modern warfare knows nothing. This much, at least, is certain, that the division was wiped out. The battle moved away from us. The sound of the cannonade became more remote. Suddenly there ensued an intense calm. Of the horrible struggle, with the noise of which my ears were still ringing, there remained no sign beyond the abominable stench of the bodies now beginning to putrefy in the fallows and the vineyards beside the forest of Bride, and from time to time, rising from the deserted hollows, the prolonged and lamentable cries of the wounded who had been abandoned.
At Kerprich, in the district of Dieuze, in annexed Lorraine, I passed my first week of captivity.
What a week! Among the rear-guard of the German army which flowed on like a river, dropping with sleep and weariness, again and again aimed at by the patrols, by day and by night I carted human flesh. Dead, and more dead, dead men of all sorts, those who had been killed instantly in the heat of action, those who had bled to death from their wounds, men who, after being wounded, had been finished off by the scouts, had been shot at close range when they were asking for water or were endeavouring to keep themselves alive by eating lucerne; then there were the half dead, men shot through the head, men whose chests had been riddled; men shot through the groin. When I looked at these disfigured and groaning masses of flesh, it seemed to me as if my nerves were being scraped. The rest of the wounded found their way in unaided, running, limping, dragging themselves along, helping themselves with a stick, crawling on all fours. It was appalling. I saw an infantryman who had been shot through the chest and who had walked alone for a league, holding a white flag. He had lost almost all the blood in his body. I do not know by what miraculous strength of will he kept going. When he reached the field hospital he said: “I waited four days for some one to come. I am thirsty. I feel better, but I am thirsty.” He smiled. He was beautiful, this young man, like a waxen St. Sebastian. Then, without a word more, he fell dead.
I had been assigned to the tent where those most dangerously wounded were brought. There were about forty of them, upon a thin layer of straw, and some even on the bare ground. The place swarmed with flies, and it stank of dejecta and of dead bodies. When the sun was high, the heat was stifling. In the evening, the patients’ teeth chattered with cold. Some of them were lads of the 20th corps, men with the colours when the war broke out, all Parisians, of simple and engaging courage, and able to take an interest in their bedfellows. There were men from Provence, the pain of whose wounds forced tears from their eyes, and who confided to me their amours as they might have done to a sister. When the pain was at its worst, they all cried out: “Maman!” It was heartrending.
I tended them. By day and by night, a thousand times I ministered to their needs. There were but two basins for seven hundred and twenty wounded. I made part of a shell serve me for a third. I watched the dying; I gave what consolation I could; I buried the dead. Always guarded by two Pomeranian soldiers, I went through the village begging soup for the poor lads. The inhabitants were utterly terrorized. Some of the women, one of them lame and one but a girl of twelve, astonished me by their persistent kindness. Under the eyes of the Germans as they were, the ardour they displayed, simply Christian in character, was truly heroic. Often, however, I had to make up for the lack of rations by a gay speech, overflowing with hope. Continually it was necessary to remake the straw pillows under the heads of the wounded, to rearrange their bedding, to help them to move. Always, beneath the low canvas roof, was to be heard the same orchestra of cries, hollow sighs, death rattles, and lamentations. Occasionally, during the long, cold night, lacking strength to carry the body of some comrade who had just died all the way across the meadow to the burial pit, dropping the dead man, I would fall beside him and go to sleep there.
On the 20th, when our field hospital was already in fair order, a Prussian captain came by with his company. He stopped, commandeered the horse of our surgeon-in-chief, M. Bergé, and promptly mounted it. Then, in grating and sonorous French, he called out: “Fear nothing, wounded. I know that in your newspapers—I read them, the Figaro, the Temps—they term us barbarians. We are not barbarians. For my part, I bear a French name; I am the descendant of French refugees. My name is Charles de Beaulieu. I swear to you that you will be well cared for in Germany. Germany respects the red cross.”
At noon on the 28th, having sent away those fit for transport and also those unfit, having performed a last amputation, and having buried the rest of the dead, we set out, with empty stomachs. What was our destination? The innocents, of whom I was one, had no doubt that we should be sent back to France by way of Switzerland. The others, those who had seen the wounded being finished off, especially the wounded officers, declared: “The German military authorities are unrelenting, even though the rankers are good fellows. The patrols who finished off the officers and some of the sergeant-majors were acting on strict orders. If they had been inspired by personal ill-feeling, do you think it likely that they would give coffee and brandy to the wounded as they do often enough? Would they stop to tend them? It is the high command which is responsible for this base practice. Do you think those who set so little store upon the lives of the wounded will respect the red cross?”
Thus it was that, while we were on our way to Dieuze, carefully escorted, the members of our little troop were debating the question: “Are we merely detained for a time, or are we prisoners?” At Dieuze we were marched round the town. This was not necessary in order to reach the railway station, and our capture hardly seemed to afford adequate ground for a triumphal procession. But it was evidently considered desirable to show us off to the inhabitants, who made no sign.
A week earlier, when we had entered Dieuze as conquerors, the shopkeepers had filled our pockets with chocolate and sweetmeats; the publicans had given us free drinks. “Above all,” said the people of Dieuze in plain terms, “take care that they never set foot here again!” Wishing for a French-German dictionary, I begged a townsman to get me one. “I don’t use the article,” he said; “I know no German.” He called his daughter and she brought me her own dictionary. “Pay yourself,” I said, offering her my purse. “Oh, monsieur,” she answered, “I could not take money from a French soldier!” On the sideboard there stood a goblet, and she filled it for me with Moselle.
Throughout the little Lorraine town there was the lively commotion of a feast day. The army and the populace were exchanging cheerful brotherly greetings. This delight at seeing one another again seemed so natural. Night fell. The weather was clear and warm. The noise of firing reached us from the vine-clad hills. The regiments were drawn up in line of battle in the streets. A hundred yards from the houses, behind the stooks, a French battery was shooting towards Vargaville. Having walked out to this battery, I enjoyed the only sight of beauty I had during my campaign.
In the calm air, the smoke plumes of the German shrapnel looked like fireworks. Near by, one of our regiments, spread out like a fan, was advancing through the oats. The men had spent the night in the barracks of the light horse. Further on, in the stubble and the green fields, under a rain of shells, the Alpinists were at work with their rifles, in cheerful mood. In good order they mounted the northern slope of the smiling basin between Dieuze and Vargaville. It looked like one of Van der Meulen’s pictures. The sun was setting. The perfumed air was filled with shafts of light. After each discharge, the song of the birds and the humming of the insects was audible. Then, the limbers having been attached, the battery went off at the trot to another position.
On the 28th, on the contrary, Dieuze was like a city of the dead. No one appeared at the windows. Huge flags, celebrating the fall of Manonviller, had been hoisted by German orders. There was a gloomy silence, like that of a deserted inn, like that of Paris at four in the morning; but instead of the carts of the market gardeners and of the dustmen, there were heaps of empty knapsacks, broken rifles, rags soiled with blood and clay, which had been carted in from the battlefield. We marched quickly, keeping the French step, so that our guards were out of breath. Grey-clad regiments passed us without a word. When our progress was arrested by a number of forage wagons filled with wounded, a tall Prussian colonel, on horseback, wearing an eyeglass, accosted us in French, saying: “Fous n’afez pas honte, fous la témocratie française, d’être les alliés des Russes, ces Parpares?”[7] Not one of us made answer. We did not even look at him. He sat there motionless. However, showing him my armlet, I inquired, “Are we detained, or are we prisoners?”
“Prisoners! You fire on our field hospitals!”
“Allow me to say, monsieur, that I do not believe it.” Then we resumed our march.
The station; the long wait; the block of carts filled with wounded; a light cavalryman on foot, with bandaged head, advancing towards us, hatred in his eyes, threatening us with his revolver; the search of our knapsacks; the confiscation of our maps, knives, forks, razors, punches—everything which could be used for cutting or piercing. Then we entrained.
I am so foolish as to believe in the good faith of humanity. It seemed to me incredible that a civilized nation would not respect the red cross. “Unquestionably,” I said, “they will send us to Switzerland.”—“We shall see,” answered Riffard, “whether our journey leads us southwards.” Were we going south? This was the great question in dispute. Every one looked at his watch and examined the position of the sun. Since the railway line made zigzags, running sometimes to the south and sometimes to the north, we became divided into two camps, the “southerners” and the “northerners,” the light of heart and the foreboders of evil. At times the dispute between the two factions waxed lively.
After a run northward, the train passed through Bensdorf, and at nightfall we found ourselves in the great station of Strasburg. There we were ordered to get out. We were shut up in a room on the landing, below the level of the railway, giving on the street. Through the grated door the passers-by gazed in on us. I was kept awake by the cold and my recent memories of the town. After some hours came the order Vorwärts, and a fresh entrainment. What was our destination? The first glimmer of dawn showed us the green hills of Alsace covered with plum-trees. Alas, we were going northward. Saargemünd. Rhenish Prussia. Saarbrück. Oh, Saarbrück! What a reception we had from the women of Saarbrück! My ears still tingle with their execrations. Then came the Palatinate, then Philippsburg. Good-bye to hope! I did not see the Rhine, for we crossed it in the middle of the night, and I was sleeping on the floor between the seats.
It was obvious when we awoke that we were going down hill. We crossed the duchy of Baden, traversed Würtemberg by way of Stuttgart and the Swabian Jura, with its green valleys, its woods, and its sparkling rivulets; at length, after crossing monotonous plains, at the bottom of a hill we reached Ulm, nestling on the Danube beneath its graceful Gothic cathedral. Our halt was made at Neu-Ulm, the first town we came to in Bavaria, and a town which I shall never forget, for it was there that we made the second meal of our journey. It consisted of a bowl of vermicelli soup in which a gobbet of meat was swimming. The previous day, at Zweibrücken (otherwise known as Deux-Ponts), we had been given a slice of Leberwurst. This pittance seemed heavenly to us, for we were starving after a three days’ fast. Be blessed among all the towns of Germany, Neu-Ulm and Zweibrücken!
For the third time since our departure from Dieuze night fell. The train continued its journey, and its direction was now south-south-east. The southern faction was on the increase, and the wind was setting in the direction of hope. In the course of an animated discussion, rendered lively by hunger and by the doubts which Guido expressed as to the likeliness of our liberation, I fell asleep. At two o’clock in the morning the train stopped. I did not wake up. Abbé Guido, tough and rugged like the mountain district in which he toiled, one of those peasant priests who wed the church with fanatical asperity, just as they would have wedded their land, Guido was not asleep. He was sitting all of a heap in the corner of the carriage, wearing his képi wrong side before, smoking cigarettes. From time to time the sardonic fold of his lips was rendered yet more bitter by a sigh as he said: “Ah! vidasse! qué vidasse!”[8] He must have given vent to the apostrophe, which showed his utter weariness of life, twenty times at least, when, morning having come, I awakened to the sound of this malediction.
It was an oppressive day. The sun was fierce; the sky leaden, without soul, without life. In the carriage it was stifling.
“Where are we?”
“At Ingolstadt.”
Ingolstadt! The “forty propositions,” Luther, Father Eck, the celebrated attempt to unite the two churches, the great “disputations” of the sixteenth century. But the sight of the bayonets of the Bavarian guard on the platform dispersed my train of reminiscences.
My stomach was complaining loudly. We were told that the stop was for six hours. The sergeant of the guard assured us that we were to be sent to Switzerland. Then a medical officer, thick-lipped and hook-nosed, with small, laughing eyes, a man who waddled continually with a sort of conceited good-nature, passed through the carriage, and said in a nasal accent: “Pas te malades? Pas te fièvres tes gôlônies?”[9] This Judaico-Swabian French revived our spirits. But the gnawing in our stomachs continued. Would they not give us a slice of Wurst or a plate of soup with a gobbet of meat in it? But they brought us nothing. The six hours had passed. The midday heat made the blood boil in our veins.
It happened but yesterday, and yet it has aged me by a century. I say it without hatred, without the shadow of a desire for vengeance. Under the ancien régime the crowd was amenable without restriction to talliage and to the corvée; now that it reigns, the crowd is gullible without restriction; it is nothing better than an unstable puff of vapour at the mercy of the winds. My heart is filled with pity for the crowd.
“Where are we going?” I asked of the Feldwebel[10] in command of the detachment.
“To Fort Orff, two leagues from here, towards the north. You will find there a thousand of your compatriots.”
“Are you keeping the men of the red cross as prisoners?”
“So it seems. I can’t understand it. At Fort Orff there are certainly quite a hundred Sanitäter.”
“These are fine spoil!”
This Feldwebel was a tall, ruddy young man, trim of figure, gentle and shy. His name, he told me, was Conrad Kilian, and he was a schoolmaster from Upper Franconia. He stationed me at the rear of the column, beside himself, to act as interpreter. He was greatly concerned about those of my comrades who were too obviously exhausted. “How on earth will they be able to walk uphill for ten kilometres?” This impotent kindness of heart was touching. The setting sun cast its rosy light over the Danube and the ancient city, bristling with church spires and surrounded by Gothic walls with massive towers. We passed through it under a deluge of cries of “Death!” And what a litany of kaputs![11] “Paris kaput! Manonviller kaput! Verdun kaput!” One might have imagined that the whole world was kaput! The gentler-minded among the townsfolk flashed electric torches in our faces, saying modestly: “You know that our armies are but a few leagues from Paris?” The better educated regaled us with French. “La foilà,” they said mockingly, “la grande nation!” People streamed out of the public-houses as we went by. On the threshold the calm and paunchy drinkers waved their mugs and vented their guffaws. The whole city was agog beneath the great royal and imperial standards. It was really ludicrous, all this fuss about fifty field hospital orderlies.
It was quite clear that the German nation was the martyr of Europe. “As for us,” said my friend the Feldwebel, “our conscience is quite at ease!” Yes, we, the French, were the aggressors; we were the apaches who had come furtively (sicut fur in nocte) to disturb the dignified repose of these excellent people, full of humanity, thoughtful and gentle! It was unquestionably the anger of an offended conscience, the holy joy of justice at length avenged, which found expression in this tumult. How easy it is to distort facts, to cook public opinion! I looked on and listened with greater interest than at the most exciting of plays. From the casements, graceful beneath their Gothic gables and bright with window-gardens, imprecations rained down on us. And the gestures of the silhouetted figures standing in the front of these lighted interiors sufficed to show those among us who could not understand Swabian the significance of the volleys of homeric abuse.
I was not in the least humiliated by the hubbub. My condition was one of strange exaltation. I was very sad and yet fascinated—sad at the spectacle of mankind, and yet fascinated at the chance of seeing man as he really is. Tacitus, Machiavelli, Stendhal, Ferrero—not one of these writers had succeeded in giving me so strong an impression of human reality. But I will defer my comments. Thoughts conceived under the spur of hunger and in a sort of physical dementia are not likely to be just. Besides, it is difficult to keep one’s head cool when the whole world is crumbling around one. I fear lest I may have to laugh some day at the partiality of this simple and matter-of-fact story, written for some one whom I love, and in which I faithfully desire to use no colours but those of truth.
Of our arrival at the fort I can recall nothing but the memory of a great iron gate which groaned on its hinges when it was opened, of a few lanterns held by sentinels running hither and thither in the darkness, of a gloomy and nauseous staircase where I stumbled and where my nailed boots made a clatter that aroused distant echoes, and of a casemate, this casemate, with cemented floor, bare, without even straw, its arches sweating damp. I threw myself on the floor, my cheek on my knapsack. My head was throbbing with fever. I spent a sleepless night, not thinking, but a prey to delirium.