I esteem our “co-triumvir.” I find him a trifle too meticulous for my taste. He shows little interest in the witty and graceful sides of life. He has a tendency to emphasis, and is a little inclined to act the judge. He is fond of giving an exemplary flavour to his actions, and at times plumes himself somewhat when speaking of what he does. But his heart is as clear as crystal, utterly void alike of hypocrisy and malice. His whole life, at home and abroad, even in its most trifling details, is upright, controlled, deliberate.
A certain sympathetic pleasure attended my gradual discovery in this Catholic of the merits and defects characteristic of the Scottish puritan and of the French radical. Moral, practical, ardently patriotic, ingrained with the civic spirit, something of a preacher, without any change in his modes of thought or his personal habits he might well be regarded as a perfect disciple of Christophe Dieterlen, Fallot, or Frommel, and even of Charles Wagner, Paul Doumergue, or Wilfred Monod, the file-leaders in France of reformed Catholicism.
Everywhere, fortunately, men remain men. Protestants have the Catholic spirit and Catholics have the Protestant spirit. Individual psychology laughs at doctrinal oppositions. Throughout the entire human race, temperaments and characters develop, underground, their indestructible stratifications, regardless of the walls built on the surface by the leaders of men, walls which these leaders, with their imperious will, imagine to be durable.
Durupt devotes to the indulgence of his national hatred the whole of that conscience which his Christianity (quasi-jansenist in type) has produced in him. He hates as a duty. He injures as a duty. How can he injure the Germans now that he is at their mercy? By demoralizing their men! Having an excellent knowledge of German, he has made it his mission at Fort Orff to prove by a + b to our successive relays of guards—Landwehr men on their way to the frontier, or men wounded in the first onslaught and now returning cured to the firing-line—that Germany is beaten in advance.
He arrived here on August 30th, three days after Dutrex, and the whole of Germany in the fort, from the commissariat captain down to the last Gemeiner (the commandant, whose conduct towards us has throughout been a model of courtesy, always excepted), set to work forthwith to din into his ears, “Paris kaput”—literally translated, “Paris pulverized.” For a whole fortnight this was the refrain. When the quartermaster, an ill-natured beast, stupid and uncouth, came down to the kitchens, his way of saying good-day was to laugh maliciously as he announced a new kaput: Verdun kaput; Rheims kaput; Manonviller kaput! Even the Verpflegsoffizier, Captain Friedrich Wilhelm Weidner, of the Prinz Ludwig regiment, a Nuremberg merchant with a lofty air, very erect, much mustachioed, with frank blue eyes, did not disdain, from time to time, to unfold ostentatiously among the stoves, under the noses of Dutrex and Durupt, copies of the Nürnberger Zeitung and the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten with headlines screaming victory.
These were their happy days. The gateway leading to the open was black on Sundays with a gaping crowd: townsfolk in their Sunday best, wearing cocks’ feathers in their green felt hats; rich farmers’ wives trying to look comfortable in hats; swarms of children, for the most part bare-footed; peasants in ill-fitting ready-made clothes; pathetic village dames, clad as in Dürer’s pictures, the head covered with a kerchief, a black fichu over the shoulders, a wadded corsage to fill out their figures. All these idlers, looking poverty stricken when compared with those of like class in France, would spend hour after hour staring at the “pantalons rouges,” occasionally shouting through the bars their eternal “Paris kaput,” the cry which had been reiterated from Dieuze to Strasburg, from Stuttgart to Ingolstadt, and with which our ears had been ringing since our capture.
This foolish jubilation exasperated Durupt. He kept quiet about it for some days. At length, however, having recovered his spirits, he threw himself heart and soul into the task of keeping up our hopes.
“It is absolutely impossible that we can be beaten,” he would say to the preachers of evil. “Agreed, their advance guards are at Rheims, Meaux, and Compiègne. But does this mean that Paris has been taken? What about the naval guns with which the Government has filled the forts? Make your minds easy; they will lose much time and much blood before they will plant their standard on the Place de la Concorde! Let us suppose the worst. Let us suppose that Paris has fallen. Does that finish the matter? Remember Chanzy’s plan. In his view, the strategic bastion of France is not Paris but the Massif Central, the Auvergne and Cévennes mountains. Let them make their way, then, to Clermont-Ferrand and Aurillac! Besides, we are not fighting single-handed. The Russian waterspout is getting ready, and will soon break over them; it will make short work of their five poor army corps. Its waters will dash on to Berlin. The floods will chase their navy out of the Kiel Canal, will force it into the North Sea—where the English dreadnoughts are awaiting it, and will swallow it at one gulp!”
The least enthusiastic among the prisoners were enraptured at these speeches. Sometimes a voice would be heard saying, “Even so, we shall be here till the spring!” To which Durupt would peremptorily reply: “All Saints’ Day will find us at home! I know Germany as I know the palm of my hand. The country is penniless. Moreover, it is not with France alone, this time, that Germany has to do; she has to fight France, Belgium, England, and Russia—that ocean of humanity. You must be mad, I tell you, if you do not feel that Germany is going to be wiped out!”
In these surroundings, Durupt is the man with a duty, a mission. Though he is a prisoner, every hour is fully occupied, each moment has its allotted task. His life is governed by a single rule: “Every day in which we fail to enlarge our own hopes and to spread discouragement among the Germans is a day lost.” Consequently, the essential matter for him is to secure news.