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.