The Diary of a French Private: War-Imprisonment, 1914-1915

by Gaston Riou

Here is an example. On one occasion I, a prisoner of war, roundly reprimanded a sentry, reproaching him with disobedience to orders. Secretly I was laughing, but the sentry trembled. Standing at attention as if confronted by an officer, he trembled before the majesty of the command, the Befehl. I had issued an order, and that is why he stood to attention; there he was, submissive, stupefied with willingness; he forgot that I was a Frenchman, subject to his orders, that the regulations forbade me to speak to him, that he should have charged bayonet and touched me with the steel, even run me through. No, I had issued an order; the man who commands, who gives a Befehl, is sacrosanct for the German.

The reason is that the German has never emerged from private life. He lives in his house, on his land, in his factory, his tavern, his church; he lives with his family, with a few friends, with his professional associates. He makes his life there as agreeable as possible; he is an able domestic economist, knowing well how to adorn his residence, his table, his savings bank. The currents of modern life, socialism, liberalism, materialism, the religion of comfort and of hygiene, have developed his practical aptitudes to an unimaginable extent, to a degree unsuspected in France. But no current of modern life has induced him to touch the holy of holies, the government; to discuss the constitution, the bureaucracy, or the army; to investigate the essential problems of political life. Even the boldest among them does not lose his veneration for constituted authority. In fine, there is but one domain in which he is free, that of economic life. Here, therefore, his energy is concentrated, and within this sphere his thoughts are confined. Here he is master; here none can equal him in perseverance and tenacity; here he risks everything and makes trial of everything; unceasingly he innovates; he is hindered by no prejudice: the poverty of recent days spurs him on and makes wealth seem marvellously appetizing; in a decade he transforms a province; in three decades he makes of Germany a fragment of America in the heart of Europe. We are forced to recognize that Germany is the “Marius’s mule” of the economic world.

But this suffices him. Formerly he possessed the clouds, but he has bartered the inheritance for the markets of the world. He boasted of being Greek, but he is now content to be Carthaginian. He makes money, and he knows nothing more.

And authority? Does he not know authority? Yes, he knows it, but as something grand and remote, as a sort of divinity which might do him harm, and which he must render favourable or at least indifferent. He knows it as an average Christian knows the invisible. He believes in it, but continues to mind his own business; he is not jealous of it and has no desire to share its exercise; he gives it his confidence, and pays it a certain worship of an unexacting character; above all, he asks that authority should help him to make money; in that case he finds everything good—the Kaiser, the bureaucracy, the army.

This utilitarian loyalty is especially characteristic of the wealthy German. As far as those of small means are concerned, they recognize that outside private life, beyond the family, the factory, the tavern, and the trade-union, there exists something that is great, divine, and unknowable. In the highest degree of the unknowable, in close proximity to God, the saints, and the hero Siegfried, there exists authority: emperor, princes, generals, diplomatists, ministers. All this is an immense and unfathomable ocean, primitive and sacred; but he, poor mollusc, rooted to his rock, is concerned solely with the tiny region upon which his valves open. And when the terrible convulsion of the powers of the abyss, of the sceptred, gold-laced, and helmeted majesties, rages athwart him, shaking his frail habitation, he trembles, simultaneously inspired with dread and with love, and he murmurs his abjection and his devotion in inarticulate words. When all is over, forgetting the gods that have passed, the gods that glitter, shout at him, and sometimes kick and chastise him, he conscientiously resumes the task of loving his wife, of procreating as many children and of earning as many marks as possible.

After all, the German of no account is utilitarian in his loyalty. He does not, like the wealthy German, demand that his government shall deliver the universe into his hands, so that he may inundate it with wares great and small “made in Germany.” He is less exacting. He asks merely for work and a livelihood. But upon this his desire is firmly fixed. He has become accustomed to a certain degree of comfort—quite recently, it is true, but the newest pleasure is ever the most attractive. He wants to get his belly well-lined during the week, and to be able on Sundays to go with his gnädige Frau and his quiverful of children, all smartly dressed, to drain several dozen tankards of beer, and to spend the entire afternoon, laughing boisterously, in the arbours of neighbouring Wirtschaften. He likes to think proudly that his father lived in poverty, but that he lives at ease. He likes to imagine that no workman in the world is happier than the German workman. As long as he has a full stomach, he can believe that all is well. The government can do what it likes, can ally itself to Austria or to France, can be licentious or strait-laced, can obey or disobey the Reichstag. He himself, trusty Michael, is well off. Germany, therefore, is great, the world is perfect.

I have gradually been able to fathom this state of mind through more or less clandestine conversations with the soldiers who guard us and the peasants who employ us at twenty pfennig for the day of nine hours. Notwithstanding all the patriotic songs with which the recruits make the roads resound, and notwithstanding all the pratings of the pulpit and the school, I am now confident that the affairs of the fatherland are not Michael’s affairs. Whether it be that the degree of economic emancipation he has attained supplements or reinforces his ingrained instinct of submission to authority, in any case, the ancient sentiment, quasi-religious in nature, and the new sentiment, thoroughly utilitarian, lead to the same result, a concern with nothing but private affairs, political indifference, so that one can even say that in the world of politics the common German is a mere cipher.

This state of mind has its advantages. It is favourable to the maintenance of public order. Since everyone rests content in his own sphere, there is no friction, there is no waste of energy, no mutual suspicion between the classes. Authority, certain of its durability, can take long views, it has elbow-room. Whilst those in authority are loved, they can give themselves up to their natural bent, which is to regulate—to regulate the workman at home, the employer abroad; to wrap themselves in purple, to cut a dash, to astonish the universe. All these things are done for their own sake, for the pleasure they give, but they serve also to shed a reflected glory on German commerce. This political nullity of the crowd has hitherto had good results. But hitherto the crowd has consisted of fat kine. Association with the worthy Michael day after day in these times when every one is rationed, when poverty and death stalk abroad, has led me to think that the political nullity of the people, precious to those in authority, is hardly likely to produce a tenacious and trustworthy patriotism, and that in the long run it may well eventuate in disaster.

For nearly a year I have been studying life in this corner of Germany. I observe, I ask questions, and I listen. They are now quite tamed. No longer do they cry death on us. No longer do they call out kaput, except as a joke. In the villages, when the working gang arrives, the children flock to the scene from all directions, bare-footed, somewhat timid, at once shy and smiling. They have heard their fathers say that the French are splendid soldiers, “the only ones who can hold their ground against the grey-blues.” The description has raised us in these youngsters’ esteem. They know, too, that we receive parcels, many parcels. They believe us to be extraordinarily wealthy. The gossips even state with definite assurance that there are six millionaires and one multi-millionaire at Fort Orff; and, for what reason I know not, I am the multi-millionaire. This little world is astonished that persons of such eminence, terrible on the battlefield, should be so friendly with their humble selves. The German bourgeois and the junkers, we gather, have less agreeable manners. Finally, the villagers have been informed that our prison society is a true republic, that we have suppressed all distinctions of fortune, that the “sans-parcels” gain just as much advantage from the coming of the French mail as the “little-parcels” and the “big-parcels.” This communism, natural as it seems to us, touches and vanquishes them.