September 16, 1914.
The casemate is empty. My comrades have gone up to the nine o’clock roll-call. I am still “confined to my room by illness.” I am happy to be alone. It is cold. Wrapping my rug closely round me, I lie listening to the bitter wind. I am alone; I am free. It seems to me that the current of life has swept me away to the end of the world, depositing me amid dumb deserts of infinite vastness.
The straw upon which I have been lying for a fortnight is reduced to powder. I roll myself in it as if it were a dust bath for chickens. How thin is my rug! My limbs shake with the cold of fever. Yesterday for a quarter of an hour I dragged myself along in the east court, but I was unable to get as far as the first glacis. When I was coming downstairs on the way back, my legs seemed heavier than hand grenades. I am very cold. Through the upper part of the two screened windows I catch a glimpse of a strip of sky, grey and heavy, crushing down on the slope, on the portcullis on the top of the slope, on the wild rose bush which breaks the straight line of the portcullis. On the steep slope I see the long grass bending before the gusts.
I am alone. How delightful! What wealth! What a privilege! Here we are never alone.
We sleep, we dress, we eat, we amuse ourselves, we walk about, we hunt for lice, we attend to the calls of nature, we dream, we are filled with indignation, we soften, we caress the dear relics hidden in our knapsacks, we retire into ourselves—we do all this in public.
How well do I understand the phrase of St. Bernard, the phrase of a monk, O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo! Sometimes in the morning, when we awaken, this awakening devoid of dignity, full of oaths, when the same voices gabble the same platitudes, in the same eternal access of sterile boredom, makes me feel positively sick. How long will it continue, this life in a herd? It seems to me that the effluvium of the crowd, of the sweat of human cattle, has penetrated into all the interstices of my soul.
No, it is useless; the effort to pull myself together and to become what I was before these days in prison is too much for my poor strength. I am shivering with cold. To throw off this torpor I should need to eat three or four times as much as we are allowed. Alas! the wretched half loaf of the first few days has been reduced to a third of a loaf, for the German authorities are methodically restricting our rations. Even the dullest of the soldiers, heavy, good-natured fellows, those who never think and consequently waste very little energy, find it difficult to keep going. Poor mothers, could you but catch a glimpse of your sons, your fine lads, those whom you used to pet so tenderly! On the slopes and in the dry ditches of the fort you would see them gloomy and slow, with drawn features, with a yellow and dirty skin, almost always crouching on the ground. They look like shades in Purgatory. Are these the youths of France?
Sergeant Bertrand is the first to come down. Without saying a word, he throws himself on his heap of straw beside me. Then, one behind the other, come dreamily in Sergeant Boude and Guido, my terrible and dear Guido. Soon all the rest of the section enters, a stamping and noisy rout.
Bertrand does not move. Leaning against his knapsack, pipe in mouth—a pipe carved by Boude—he looks straight in front of him. He is in a fine fit of the blues, our “agent de change,” as he is nicknamed by his comrades from Marseilles. If his fiancée could see him thus, his fiancée of Ciotat!
At the end of the room, beneath the windows, two groups are playing cards for pfennig stakes. Beyond them, leaning against the bars, Sabatier, grave and mute like a bonze, is plaiting a horsehair watch-chain. Over there, from every mouth, from all the Bavarian pipes hanging over the players’ stomachs, there mount thick clouds of smoke.