“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.