THE REVOLT OF THE HUNGRY
October 21, 1914.
Yesterday was a great day! Perhaps the greatest of my imprisonment, if I except that of my first “teube.”[21] Oh, that first teube! After I had worn my clothes continuously for so many days and nights, the clandestine undressing at early dawn, beside the sink in Dutrex’s kitchen; the forbidden and unhoped-for sensation, to be, as if at home, naked beneath the steaming water; the lather of soap everywhere, on the hair, the neck, the chest, the arms, the legs, the feet; the douche with the aid of a bailer; the dry rub! At length to have a clean skin and clean linen! Then to stride up to the slopes in the delightful morning solitude, repeating as it were involuntarily: “I am clean; what a luxury! I am in their hands; but I have managed to get clean. They ration our water, and I have had water. I am a prisoner; but I have secretly divested myself of my coating of filth, a burden almost as heavy as that of hunger! I am by no means wholly wretched!”
It was a month since my last bath, at Tonnoy, about a week before we were taken prisoner. We had had a long and rough journey, from Chaouilley, at the foot of the hill celebrated by Barrès, to the Moselle. The dirt of three interminable nights in a cattle truck, in which we were herded pell-mell; the dust of the complicated movement towards the front; the stiffness of the opening march, the sweat and the fatigue—I had got rid of it all in the river. It was a beautiful evening, bright and warm. The sun was setting. The Moselle flowed rapidly among the islets of shingle and the sandbanks. Groups of men, officers and soldiers, men newly called up and reservists, indiscriminately mingled, naked as worms, the fat, the tall, and the short, the pot-bellied and the thin, fringed the bank with a strip of flesh-coloured humanity. We looked like a colony of Mormons.
After leaving the water, I challenged Soulier at ducks and drakes. Do you recall, little Darry, how we played ducks and drakes on the shore at Dully? I got the better of Soulier. One of my flat stones, skimming the water briskly, flying across the brown river, made its way right over the stream to strike the rocks on the other side.
When I think the matter over, this delightful bathe remains my most agreeable souvenir of Lorraine. I grieve to have to admit (notwithstanding Barrès, whose style would ennoble the most worthless materials) that all the villages we passed through, from Mont Sion to the frontier, and above all the village of Tonnoy, left on me an impression of penurious and squalid melancholy, of ugliness and filth.
Yes, yesterday evening was epic.
The morning had passed as usual: an early walk; then work until dinner-time. There was nothing to foreshadow a storm. I had been for a stroll after dinner with Dutrex, Durupt, and Foch. A typical Bavarian day: a moist sky softening the harsh outlines of the landscape; a half light, uncertain and dreamy, as if longing for the rich azure of Piedmont and Provence; a piercing little wind which, even in the sunshine, continues to suggest melting snow and cold, almost a bise, whose very caresses sting.
For the last few days I had been working hard. My faculties were blunted. I had a vague inclination to idle. I was suffering a little from boredom, a state of mind by which, happily, I am rarely afflicted. I was discouraged. I wanted a rest, and yet lacked energy to make up my mind to lay aside my work.
As I was returning to my task, I encountered little Brissot. Lately he has taken to wearing the Bavarian cap, a sort of Phrygian cap which I have made the fashion at Fort Orff. Mine is green—you know whose colour green is. Brissot’s is blue, and this tint sets off admirably his energetic blond countenance. Seeing that I was a little out of sorts, and not so cheerful as usual, he prevented me from going down.
“Abandon your kitchen for a while,” he said. “It reeks of sulphur, drains, burned fat, and vegetable refuse. You are getting mildewed amid the steam. The fires draw badly, and when I pay you a visit there your eyes are watering from the smoke. Besides, you have slaved quite enough this week under cover of your famous notice. You can be quite easy in your mind, you will have more than enough time to finish your studies. The Russian generals will secure you months and months for reflection. If that does not suffice, our diplomatists will see to it that you have an extension of time. This evening you must put aside your philosophies and your histories. We will go the round of the slopes together. The weather is fine. We will have a talk with my little friend across the ditch; you can’t think how sorry she is for us. Here is one, at any rate, who is utterly unconcerned as to questions of state. What does she care about French, Germans, English, Belgians, Russians? She knows men only. Her heart has skipped several centuries, and without an effort has attained the era of thoroughgoing internationalism. I can assure you that if she had to choose between a hübscher Franzose and a böser Deutscher,[22] there would be no hesitation.”
Brissot is light-hearted, firm, bold, definite, gently peremptory, perfectly self-reliant; he is a surprising compound of boy and of leader, of artist and tradesman, endowed with a lively will; how can any one who is in the dumps resist Brissot? I accompany him to the parapet. Positively she is there, a sort of Munich Flora, short and plump, with great black eyes, whom he calls his “bonne amie,” walking upon the footpath of the glacis, accompanied by three bare-headed village girls and a troop of children. “Damn the escort!” says my hübscher Franzose in an aside. The conversation is opened; it is as innocent as the arched forehead and rounded cheeks of the three slatterns. One of them is in high spirits to know that her affianced is safe. He has been made prisoner, and she has just received her first letter, dated from Gap. She asks if I am betrothed, if the ring I wear (Véron, the corporal in the engineers, cast it for me a few days back out of one of the metal buttons of the coat of a chausseur à pied) is an engagement ring, and why it is made of silver. Brissot takes the initiative in the reply, saying with an air of disgust that it is not silver but platinum, a metal far more costly than gold. She is astonished. She has never heard of platinum.
The conversation continues, agreeably stupid. Then the children ask for French pfennigs. “You shall have some if you will give us a newspaper in exchange.” The answer is not new to them; of course they have one ready. They roll it round a stone and throw it across the great ditch. The paper is four days old, but we throw back some sous which fall behind them some way down the glacis. Children and slatterns rush greedily to pick them up. Brissot, profiting by this moment of freedom, says to his Flora of the great eyes: “Come again to-morrow, and without your companions, who are not worthy of you!”
“My dear fellow,” I say to him, “I leave you to your love affairs. Farewell.”
The splendid reds of autumn flame on the great oaks along the border of the pine-wood—a strategic wood, designed to mask the west battery. The parapets are packed with soldiers, fine blue-and-red spots upon a dull yellowish-green ground. Some, chisel in hand, silently bent over their work, are carving pebbles. Others are wearing out their finger-nails and wearing down the corner stones in polishing tablets of white chalk destined for employment as ex votos. The cries of men playing at ball and at prisoner’s base resound from the ramparts. At the foot of a slope adorned with a clump of birches, men are busily engaged in cooking their extra provender. There is a circle round each improvized kitchen: some dry and break up the small branches rifled from the trees of the fort; some tend the refractory fire, for the wood will not flame; some agitate the contents of the mess-tins—fragments of stolen meat, choice morsels of vegetable peelings, coffee dregs begged from the kitchen, potatoes pocketed when the dinner was being prepared, edible snails found on the grass on rainy mornings and kept fasting in an old cigar-box, cheese-rind, plum mushrooms, wild chicory. Soldier-priests walk up and down reading their breviaries. On one of the slopes, a crowd surrounds Le Second, who is displaying his latest cubist composition; at the “kitchen windows” a number of poor devils whose stomachs are empty are patiently sniffing the thin odours that rise from the cooking-pots. Here and there are to be seen the dealers, their wares hidden beneath their coats, passing from group to group, and offering for sale at three or four times its value a cigarette, a lump of sugar, or a stick of chocolate. The blue-and-red ants have all emerged from the subterranean galleries of their ant-hill. On this October afternoon they produce a sad impression of mingled gaiety and wretchedness.
Yet amid this chaos I seem also to have before my eyes the picture of a city, a city of very ancient days. Characteristics of civic order are plainly manifest. A semblance of social life declares itself. Broken to pieces a few months ago by the sudden call to arms, flattened out and pulverized by the forces of hunger and tedium, the world that existed before the mobilization begins to reconstitute itself. By a sort of spontaneous generation, the eternal society rises anew from the void, with its groups of leaders and of poets, of traders and of artisans, with its classes of profiteers and of exploited, of originators and of simple executants. It is reborn, but in a less intricate form, with plainer contrasts, accentuated to caricature. Here, temperament, initiative, and energy have replaced tradition. There are no privileged positions. Social functions are not acquired as a right, but are seized. There is free competition. We all start from scratch. Each man takes his place in the natural hierarchy by the sole right of conquest. He can retain it only by cunning, force, or the power of genius, and at the price of a persistent victory.
Hence there have been strange changes of fortune. A man who arrived without a farthing, sold for sixpence a cigar he had been given, bought chocolate with the sixpence, resold it at 1,000 per cent., and, continually bargaining, always turning over his money with increased profit, has succeeded in this way in amassing a capital. I have several times come across this brilliant trader on the slopes at nightfall, when he believed himself alone. Leaning forward on his hands, he was contemplating his greasy handkerchief stretched out on the grass, covered with little piles of silver. Another, who was scullion in a drinking-booth, has taken to writing poems; at the Saturday concerts in No. 7 he sings them to well-known airs, amid universal applause. A man named Tarbouriech, a farmer from the Agen district, has made himself graving tools and carves pebbles for French and Bavarian customers. He gets a mark for each carving, and can thus from time to time buy himself a supplementary loaf. He is a real decorative artist, a good sculptor, and he did not know it.
As I lounge in the last rays of sunshine, I admire the spontaneous manifestation of creative energy. I am astonished at the superabundance of talents in so restricted a group. Yet there is a sadness in the sight of this poor primitive city which has set itself to sprout upon the levelled bed of servile equality.
Everything betrays the stimulus of hunger. Hunger is here the universal mother of artistic, commercial, and industrial inventions; it even induces devotion to the collectivity, for the performance of a public service commonly secures an extra ration. Work or starve, such is the rule. Each one makes his plans, exercises his ingenuity, does the best for himself. The aim is simple: not to die of hunger, to keep oneself going, if possible to improve in appearance and to grow fat. Some, too, having filled their stomachs, try to line their pockets. The strong try to get the better of the weak; the cunning, of the stupid; those who know a little German, of those who know none at all. Hence arises extreme inequality, tangible, crying inequality, shown by the cheeks, the eyes, the gait—the inequality between those who are hungry and those who are fed. Here is one running upstairs, happy, and lively as a cricket, for he has eaten his fill. Unashamedly he overtakes and passes a poor devil, a man quite well off in civil life, but who has had a visit from the body stripper when lying in a swoon on the field of battle; he makes his way up with great difficulty, breathless, shaky, clinging to the banister, finding the flight of stairs interminable.
Sad thoughts assail me as I walk. This battle without rifles or artillery, exempt from immediate risk of death, baser than war because it is more hypocritical, more crafty, and carried on under the Christian ægis—is it not life itself? Is not life immoral in its very essence?
For, after all, one must live. First of all, one must live. Now, here it is clear that there is not enough food to go round. What then? Then the field is open for the craftiest and the boldest. Let us suppose that there are twenty bold men among the thousand prisoners. From the lean corpse of our cow they have cut their large share, the lion’s share; now it is the turn of the little jackals to divide up what remains. Let us suppose that one of these “lions” has a conscience. Let us suppose that his mind is influenced by the morality of the gospels or by socialist ideas. Is he to sacrifice his average share, the share requisite to keep him in good health, because the others, nine hundred and eighty in the thousand, have nothing but a famine ration, and can have nothing else, whatever he may do? Ought he to make up his mind, as an act of goodwill, and knowing that the general regimen will be no whit bettered, to accept malnutrition for himself, to accept the permanent ruin of his health? Christ, where are your beatitudes? Will the determinism of the body ever be overcome? Will your reign, your city of justice, ever be established upon this dreary planet? But if the world continues, and if the general supply of goods should happen to become as greatly restricted as it is within the limits of our fortress, I shall be sorry for the city of the just. Let the twenty “lions,” from virtuous motives, tie up their jaws, let us suppose that there are one thousand ascetics in place of nine hundred and eighty, the stew will be little thicker.
The electric bell, its jarring note issuing from all the doorways, breaks in upon these grey reflections, as much the outcome, perhaps, of personal discouragement as of the realities of the situation. It is five o’clock. In a twinkling the ants disappear into the under ways.
In kitchen No. 22, Dutrex, Durupt, and the three cooks are standing round the vice. Half a gruyère cheese is fixed in it. This is the entire dinner; each one of our four hundred and eighty men, those fed from the first of the three kitchens, will have to be satisfied this evening with the four hundred and eightieth part of this half cheese. Devèse is usually responsible for the serious task of cutting up the cheese. He is an expert, being accustomed every day in Paris to serve out large quantities of ham, saveloy, and galantine. Unfortunately our cook-butcher is confined to bed in the hospital casemate with a sore throat. Dutrex has therefore asked little Lambert, Maître Lambert, Lambert the Good, to do the cutting up.
The great kitchen knife passes busily through the hard, white curd. The usher of Saint-Joseph-de-Tinée holds the knife in both hands and presses on it with all his weight. Beads of perspiration are standing on his besmirched forehead; his goggle eyes dilate; the ruddy skin of his face, downy with sparse golden hairs, is deeply wrinkled. He sweats as only a thoroughly good fellow, a man who puts all his will into his work, can sweat. Bouquet and Pailloux look on indifferently. Durupt, who becomes absorbed in the most trifling matters as if they were affairs of state, gravely counts the slices and arranges them on the right-hand corner of the kitchen table in piles of ten. Dutrex has assumed his service manner. He stands stiffly upright at the left corner; his moustache is brushed away from his lips, his eye is severe, he holds his check-list. “Lambert, cut more equal slices!”
“Corporal Dutrex, I am doing my best, as you see; it is very difficult.”
“I know it. Durupt, you will give an extra piece to the rooms whose share is obviously too small.”
Seated at my table, I contemplate this Rembrandtesque scene. The melancholy lamp, its chimney broken, is smoking among the pale faces and the piled up slices. The cheese is being contaminated by the foul air of the dark casemate, in which all the stoves have gone out. The light of the dying day still pierces the window bars, its tender blues and reds fading slowly away. Through the closed door comes the impatient, angry, and menacing sound of shuffling feet. The men waiting there know that it is “cheese evening.” They detest this meal. It is cold and hard to digest, less filling than a ladleful of hot semolina or vermicelli, and makes extravagant demands upon their bread.
The distribution does not take long. When there is soup and meat, our four hundred and eighty men come individually to receive their rations, passing in a continuous stream, first in front of the cauldron to get the soup, and then in front of the vice for the portion of meat. The procession lasts an hour, as at a great funeral. “The holy water!” say the jokers, stretching out their basins. “The handful of earth!” extending their hands for the three ounces of cow-flesh. But on cheese nights there is no procession. The twenty-three headmen of the rooms supplied from No. 22 bring bowls, and when these are charged the headmen go off to distribute the contents in their respective casemates.
At six everything is finished. Heaving a sigh of relief, the cooks clear the table and draw up the two benches and the three stools. All of them, cooks and ministers, are about to swallow their allotted rations. These look very small, especially to Lambert, who has been sweating blood and water.
There is a knock at the door. “Confound it!” says Dutrex; “some more fellows to bother us! We never have a moment’s peace.” Then, “Who is there?” he shouts in a forbidding tone. Two ingratiating voices make answer, those of little Corporal Véron and of Boisdin, a sergeant of engineers, long as a lamp-post. “It’s us!” Dutrex opens the door, and the two non-commissioned officers of room No. 3 display their bowl, wherein are heaped, not neat slices à la Devèse, but fragments of every possible shape, square and rectangular, thin and thick, with no rind or all rind, tapering, pyramidal, and concave.
“Dutrex, old fellow,” says Véron, “we’re sorry to bother you, but our men are on strike. They’re not having any of these leavings. Now, just look at this piece.” He points out a well cut slice. “This is what the ‘poilus’ are receiving from kitchen No. 53.”
“My good chap,” Dutrex answers quietly, “what do you expect me to do? I give what is given me. I know that Sarrazin’s kitchen is specially favoured—it is the kitchen of the Germans. For the hundred and fifty-two men it has to supply, which includes himself and the twenty-four Bavarians of the guard, the quartermaster delivers almost as much as for us who are four hundred and eighty. Go and make your complaint to him. He’ll give you a reception. You will find out how amiable he is. For my part, I have given up trying to argue with this tête de Boche, who is as obstinate as a hundred Spanish mules rolled into one, and who detests the French. It is true that the contents of your dish do not look very grand. As you see, I have had to get on without Devèse. His substitute is quite a novice. Besides, your room was the last served, and naturally you got the remnants. But I assure you that your full allowance is there. Durupt allotted each ration in little heaps with his usual conscientiousness. If your men don’t like it, well, let’s settle the matter among ourselves. You’d better go and consult our own medical officers. I can do no more.”
Five minutes later the door opens. “Attention!” It is the surgeon-in-chief, Monsieur Langlois, the major with four stripes, who came here yesterday from fort No. 8 with three colleagues, so that, with our two other medical officers, MM. Cavaillé and Lœbre, we have now six doctors. He is short and fat; his hair is pepper and salt, with more salt than pepper; his gestures are lively; his head resembles that of Poincaré; his eyes sparkle mischievously. He takes from the hands of Véron the allowance of No. 3. “You are nineteen?” he asks. He quietly repeats the work of Durupt. Upon the table, encumbered with our hunks of bread and our rations of gruyère, he arranges the bowlful of “leavings” in nineteen small heaps, being careful to make them as equal as possible. He then says: “Do you know that your room No. 3 is specially favoured? I have seen what has been allotted to the other rooms. I assure you, sergeant, that yours is one of the best served. Call your men.” The men of No. 3 are waiting outside, and, judging from the noise which comes through the door, it would seem that there are others in the corridor besides the men of No. 3.
“Men of No. 3, enter,” orders Dutrex. The nineteen defile in front of the table and M. Langlois points out to each man his own little heap. When they have withdrawn, Dutrex, in the presence of Boisdin and Véron, tells the surgeon-in-chief about Devèse’s illness and the misdeeds of the quartermaster; how he favours kitchen No. 53 because it is the kitchen of the Germans; and how he takes a large “squeeze” from the supplies. “M. le Major, I was in the guardroom yesterday. By chance I came across his store-book, and I found that he had entered thirty kilogrammes of rice when he had certainly not distributed more than twelve kilos at the outside. It is just the same with coffee, sugar, milk, and meat. I am absolutely certain that he is a cheat!”
M. Langlois listens. He listens attentively. He has no wish to assert himself prematurely. He is not here to play the officer. He is a friend, an elder brother, frank and simple. He looks behind words, and endeavours to grasp the secret essence of the soldier who is speaking to him. He must be a man of intelligence, good and just.
“We will discuss the matter again,” he says as he leaves. “Meanwhile, keep a record of the quantities delivered to you. If you can manage it, make a steelyard. For my part, I will sound the commandant. I believe him to be well disposed. Perhaps he will be willing to listen to a courteously worded complaint against his quartermaster. But if we make a complaint we must be extremely careful that we have strong evidence to back it up. And when all is said and done, I am under no illusions as to my power with the German authorities. We are at war. All the conventions have been violated. Notwithstanding the armlet I wear, I am a prisoner just like the rest of you.”
The kitchen staff sits down a second time. Every one is enchanted with the surgeon-in-chief.
In the passages there is an unusual movement. Ordinarily, when supper is over, most of the men lie down upon their straw. The roll-call finds them nearly all asleep. During these two hours there is no life in the fort, except in the kitchens and in the consulting room, which are, after a fashion, clubs where the few intellectuals assemble to enjoy their tobacco in company, to read the paper, or to drink the beer which the most diplomatic among the circle has secured at a high price from the guardroom—all these actions being utterly contrary to regulations.
It sometimes happens, however, that in their casemates the Bretons of the 19th and the 118th of the line, suffering from home-sickness, are day-dreaming as they lie motionless on their couches. If, now, one of them begins to hum softly to himself, his comrades, silent men for the most part, will little by little take up the strain. Most of them have clear, tender, somewhat bleating voices. They drag at the end of the verses. The movement is heavy and lachrymose. It sounds like the desolate psalmody of a religion of despair unillumined by a single gleam of hope. Or again, in rooms No. 16 and No. 17, two fragments translated from Provence, one hears on certain evenings, voiced with a glad pulsation, Magali, Galanto Chatouno, and other love-songs of old Languedoc, that country of leisure and passion. The round coming to call the roll stops sometimes outside the door to listen for a moment to these graceful melodies, so different from the German Choral and the German Lied. But the thick crypts and walls muffle these concerts. The fort is not disturbed by them. Even the nearest casemate will only become aware at intervals, and remotely, of the sound of melody. The long corridors, to which the sun never penetrates, are already as quiet, as mournfully quiet, as they are during the heaviest hours before the dawn.
The unusual activity in the passages astonishes the cooks. The conversation outside becomes livelier, and rises to the intensity of a real tumult. It draws nearer. It is at the door of No. 22. Now come blows on the door, shouts and execrations. “Resign, resign! Fritters! Legs of mutton!” Some of the rioters positively bellow with indignation. The blows on the door become more violent. “Come out, if you dare!”
This goes on for quite two minutes. The slender repast is finished. It is time to fetch some coal. Pailloux and Bouquet, the head cook, take up the coal-box, open the door, and say firmly: “Make way for us, by thunder!” They pass out. But through the door, which is left ajar, fists are shaken, and vociferations rain in. “Food snatchers!” Durupt, shrugging his shoulders, shuts the door in the shouters’ faces. The demonstration becomes still more lively. The noise must be heard a long way off, for suddenly there comes a terrible growling, raucous and determined: “Zurück mit dem Pöbel!”[23] In an instant the crowd, numbering about fifty, disperses like a flight of sparrows. A single man, Georg, the commandant’s boot-polisher, has broken the back of the riot. He disappears. The corridors relapse into silence, the mournful silence of a cellar.…
We are invited to No. 41, to visit Juramy and Roy, chasseurs alpins, together with Foch, d’Arnoult, and Brissot. We go out. A man of the guard, with fixed bayonet, slowly walks by the kitchen. He smiles and greets us.
“Grüss Gott!”
“Gute Nacht!”
On the staircases and in the upper corridors the “ministers” encounter glances of anger and surprise. At No. 41 the comrades, seated upon the twin straw piles of Roy and Juramy, receive them with marked friendliness.
“Well!” says Sergeant Foch, the sturdiest soldier in the fort, chief of the second kitchen, “so it’s your turn this time. You have had your revolt! It seems to have been better organized than mine. But it means nothing. We business men, Brissot and I, know all about the caprices of the crowd. Suddenly, without knowing why, it rages against friends or against foes, haphazard. These good fellows are governed by pure instinct. In my opinion this particular revolt has been mainly the work of the exploiters whose usurious traffic was relentlessly suppressed by Dutrex and Durupt. It’s bad policy to be savage with the strong and gentle with the weak, for the strong avenge themselves. Now they are posing as defenders of the collective stomach. If you only knew all that they are saying, and all that they are leading others to say! I’ve had my eye on them for a long time. This evening they really believed they were going to do something—that to-morrow they would usurp your places. They were already licking their chops. It was a case of trust against trust. I shall laugh if the trust of virtue proves, for once in a way, victorious.”
Dutrex is taciturn.
“Before the roll is called,” he says, “I shall hand in my resignation to M. Langlois.”
“That’s right,” says Brissot approvingly. “Otherwise you will seem to be clinging to a fat position.”
“What are you thinking about?” protests Durupt. “You will seem to justify the enemy; you will accept defeat. The sharp practitioners who, under pretext of serving their comrades, were buying for sixpence from the guard commodities worth about twopence, and selling them at a profit of a shilling, thus realizing as much as a pound a day—these fellows whom you saw through, who would have liked to blarney you, but whom you summoned to the table, whom you shook as one shakes a plum-tree, whom you threatened with the cells (some of them even non-commissioned officers), whom you treated in that cutting way which you know how to assume—these sneak-thieves, who are almost as repulsive as the body strippers, do you want with your own hand to put them in your place in the kitchen? I don’t understand you. I stand firm. If there be a trust of virtue, I promise you it shall checkmate the trust of the lick-cheeses.”
“Meanwhile,” says Foch light-heartedly, “let us drink. Here’s a big jug of beer which I brought from the guardroom under my coat. For your sake I made myself look like a woman in the family way! What, old Riou, are you still in the dumps? Haven’t you got a thirst this evening?”
“My dear Foch, I admit that I do not feel myself to be designed for the government of men. One who wishes to rule men must make up his mind to despise them and to come to terms with their rascality. Now (you will laugh), I respect them. I am even rather fond of them. And it is my weakness to wish them to be fond of me. These hostile cries, these angry glances, which we have just had to endure—I find them difficult of digestion.”
“Digest them as quickly as you can, you big baby! It’s a stage in your education. You need to lose a few illusions. Men are rather a poor lot. You Christians believe that men are brothers. That’s nothing but religious tosh. Men are no good. Brothers?—not a bit of it. They are venomously jealous of any one who has a straighter nose or a prettier wife than their own, of any one with greater talent or more charm. No doubt the worst of them have their good days. When the weather is fine, when their bellies are well lined, when they have done a good stroke of business, they are pleased with every one. They are all smiles. But what does that amount to? A momentary intoxication. The instant they fancy that their neighbour’s belly is fuller than their own, or that he has had better luck in business, there is very little smile about them, and don’t you forget it. It is true that some men are the salt of the earth. These are worth loving, for they are scarce. But most people pass their whole lives in being envious. When it’s their turn to become stiffs, it’s envy that finishes them off!
“If they had any sense, these fellows, I shouldn’t mind so much. But they swallow all the gossip that comes their way. Morning after morning a flight of canards settles upon the fort, and the prisoners spend the rest of the day in roasting them. Do you know what they are all telling one another in the casemates? They declare that the major with four stripes made a raid upon kitchen No. 22, and that he found fifty chops, seventy steaks, a leg of mutton, a lot of fritters, a store of cheese—all pinched by Durupt from the men’s rations. Whereupon the major sent you to the cells under guard of four bayonets! Now you know why these rascals looked at you with angry surprise as you passed along the passage.
“When such fellows are really famished, as they are here, seeing that they are jealous and stupid, and, above all, driven out of their senses by starvation, how can you expect them to be anything but idiots? All at once, they see red, and must instantly have a victim. But they are incapable of finding one for themselves. Always some cunning rogues among them point out the victims, indicating as if by chance the men of whom they are jealous, and whom they long to replace. Don’t take it so much to heart. In ten years from now it will all seem to you perfectly natural.”
This profession of social faith gives me no pleasure, although to-night the temptation to approve it is only too strong. What an affair! It is precisely the kitchen run by Dutrex and Durupt, men of principle, men who may be said to be scrupulous to excess, before which a noisy demonstration is made, whilst no one attempts to interfere with kitchen No. 53, notoriously privileged by the quartermaster. How mean! And it is Frenchmen, men of intelligence, men quite capable of recognizing the real causes of things, who, inspired by envy and revenge, have directed against No. 22 the vague wrath of hungry stomachs! Fames malesuada. Yes, this is what it means, the ambition of a few turning to profit the hunger of all.
It is strange, but a clear recognition of the motives that have brought about this storm in a teacup produces in my mind a sort of philosophic disillusionment. My thoughts pass quite beyond the present affair. I find myself dreading all at once lest the great social movements, those I most admire, those I see on the horizon of history, sublime, heroic, superhuman like the Marseillaise of the Arc de Triomphe, may not resemble this trifling affair, which aimed, beneath the standard of justice, at introducing a set of rogues into the heart of the temple of their thoughts, the kitchen.
If we look at matters without prejudice, a little thing is just as significant as are many events which are regarded as grand simply because the trumpeters of a faction or of a nation have magnified their importance. Indeed, this attempted revolution concerning a piece of cheese suddenly renders all revolutions suspect to me. The little revolution seems to spoil the great revolution, and to lessen the stature of humanity. Is it possible that, in the last analysis, clamours for justice are nothing more than the growls of envy?
Dutrex left us early. I stayed in No. 41 until the roll-call. I was genuinely unhappy.
It need hardly be said that M. Langlois absolutely refused to accept any resignations.
To-day I was out walking before dawn. My thoughts were gloomy. The sun rose in a calm sky, a sky that was greenish-blue, clear, and magnificent, with a flotilla of tiny clouds, white tipped with gold, and melting away at the edges.
When I began work just now I was well content, content to be here, among the placidly gurgling cauldrons, and away from the company of men. But this sudden access of misanthropy is probably the sequel of my fit of the blues. I am “fortorffish,” as the prisoners say. The paroxysm will soon pass.