But that melancholy barrier of silence which for a month and a half has separated us from the world has at last been broken down!
It is true that we have been ordered to say nothing about the war, and to instruct our correspondents to observe a similar restriction. This morning these Verboten have disturbed us little. Do you think any one of the prisoners, when writing his letter, had a fancy for dissertations upon strategy? His wife, his fiancée, his children, his mother, his whole life, were before his eyes. At length people would know that he was alive! His head was singing with voices from his own fireside. He was intoxicated—at once giddy with excitement, softened, bitter, almost mad. The most indifferent, the most torpid, seemed to have been awakened with a start. Permission to write, the act of writing, had shaken them out of their inertia.
For, fortunately, imprisonment dulls our sensibilities. At first it causes poignant suffering; and suffering, of whatever kind, sharpens the faculties. But imprisonment is above all hunger, chronic hunger. Those only who have experienced it can understand the effect which chronic hunger speedily exercises even upon an active brain. At first it induces hallucinations. With terrible realism the sufferer recalls meals eaten before the war some particular dinner, such and such a picnic. The nerves of taste and smell, exasperated by the scanty regimen, are visited by memories of odours and tastes. The man thinks of nothing but eating. Literally he is nothing but a clamorous stomach. He will lie awake the entire night thinking only of this: What can I do to-morrow morning to secure a supplementary loaf?
Little Brissot, my friend of the Alpine infantry, when we were walking a few days ago with our two French medical officers, made this unexpected confession: “Only one thing can give me pleasure now—to get food. Only one man interests me—the man who is capable of getting me food.”
This calm declaration from one so highly cultured that he will distract his mind from the cares of important business by reading James and Bergson, from one intimately acquainted with Montaigne and the Lake poets, seemed to us neither paradoxical, nor irrelevant, nor cynical.
Among those who are able, by illicit and extremely laborious methods, to procure food from outside, there are few who do not seize their opportunity.
Men will try to get a thorough chill, hoping to be sent to the infirmary, where they usually receive double rations. Yesterday two prisoners, one of them a corporal, fainted from hunger. Quite a number are so weakened by want of food that they can no longer climb the staircases leading to the courts and to the slopes. When we heard just now that in the neighbouring fort, Fort Hartmann, one of the prisoners had hanged himself, the same thought ran through all our minds: “The epidemic has begun, and will speedily spread to our own prison.”
Ultimately, however, people grow accustomed to short commons. Their activities, in some cases at least, gradually become accommodated to their regimen. In the long run, physical and mental life are reduced to nil. The man hardly suffers, and he no longer revolts.
Even in the bravest the soldier-spirit dies. Look at these men crouching on their heaps of straw hour after hour, silent and half asleep; or look at them as with hands in pockets and hanging heads they slowly make their way up the slopes; who can imagine that these are the men who fought like lions at Montcourt and Lagarde?
These sudden visions of home were requisite to restore many of our prisoners, though but for a moment, to life. But for how many of them this has also involved a revival of suffering.