The happiest moment in the day is in the early morning, when I leave the sleeping casemate. On the staircases, the lamps are flickering to extinction. The passages, always dark, are filled with the stench from the latrines and with what is sometimes termed a “poor smell.” I make a hasty toilet in the kitchen; take my half-pint of coffee from one of the steaming cauldrons; gulp it down without straining it, Turkish fashion; don my coat and my green cap; mount the stairs leading to the upper courts. At length I am out of doors.
Dawn, fresh air, solitude!
This morning I was in a frisky mood. Life seemed good. The cold was biting. The white frost endowed the simplest objects with a Christmas purity. I walked smartly along the broad path which surmounts the escarp. When we arrived at the fort, this path, like the other parapets, was covered with moss and turf; but now, through our continual walking on it, the grass has been worn away. It has become a road.
Though I am a sociable creature, and delight in company, I find it extraordinarily pleasurable to be alone. I need long hours all to myself. In Paris, at Dully, at Lablachère, I never weary of my workroom, where I see no one before luncheon. The mornings are always too short. I don’t know if I ought to regard it as an obsession, but here, when I have been walking for an hour immersed in thoughts and memories, in solitary enjoyment of the quiet northward landscape of fields and forests, my first encounter with a man causes me real discomfort. I cannot be agreeable before midday.
First of all, I made my clandestine and customary visit to your acacias. They grow at the highest point of our domain. A look-out is hidden here. I had long been familiar with a kind of large metal hood which interrupts the long grass for a moment, and projects barely a span above the surface of the soil. Yet had it not been for a recent adventure of two of the prisoners, Noverraz and Laloux, I should never have dreamed that this was a strategic eye, the eye of the fort.
Last Wednesday the men of the heavy artillery were engaged in their final practice before leaving for the Russian front. The idea was that Fort Orff was being attacked by an enemy hidden in Kösching wood, and suddenly appearing to the north of the fort. The object of the defence was to check the onslaught. Stationed to the southward, between Orff and Ingolstadt, near Lenting, the gunners were firing over us, the line of fire almost touching the parapets of the fort. It need hardly be said that, by special order, all access to the parapets had been forbidden from nine till three, while the manœuvres were in progress. The guns thundered; the weather was fine; how dull it seemed, even to men whose legs were weakened from hunger, to be penned in the casemates! At ten o’clock the Protestant service was held. Crowds attended it, so that it was necessary to open both wings of the door, and thus to include in the chapel a gloomy passage which leads up to it. But what was there to do after service? The few who are usually energetic enough to play at prisoners’ base, leapfrog, or some other lively game, in the east court, were itching to be out. The ration snatchers, those who, in the dark corridors, armed with a sharp knife, surreptitiously hack a steak from the passing joint, and those who, when the vegetables are being prepared, filch a turnip or a potato, longed for their open-air kitchens, hastily installed during the intervals between the rounds. The carvers and polishers, who sell pebbles fashioned into képis or into spiked helmets, or simply decorated with the Bavarian arms, sighed for the pleasures of their trade. The whole fortress was heavily uneasy. But who would care to take the risk of going out? The orders issued that morning had been peremptory.
But the cannonade continued, and my friends Noverraz and Laloux, being non-combatants (one is a musician and the other a doctor of medicine), were naturally lovers of military displays. Unable to endure any longer the pharmaceutical aroma of the consulting room, they abandoned the place to Badoy, who, left alone, gave himself up to a profound fit of home-sickness.
Beneath the sombre arches our adventurers go to and fro, exploring the ant-hill. All at once, having entered an unknown region, they discover a narrow staircase. They mount it. It leads to a revolving cupola. What luck! Through the peep-hole in the armoured wall it is possible for them to examine the whole of our northern horizon, right up to the wood. Upon the ploughs, the meadows, and the clover fields, the heavy projectiles from the 21-centimetre guns are falling incessantly. The earth shakes under their impact. Plumes of white smoke, like those emitted by burning straw, rise from the soil. Sometimes, in the clear atmosphere, they can distinguish the actual flight of the projectiles. But the imaginary columns of the assault are drawing nearer. The fire of percussion shells ceases; crackling shrapnel shells take their place. They pass from twenty to fifty yards above the glacis, great balls of dense smoke, from which are emitted in all directions smaller balls, a rain of satellites, which fly to pieces in their turn with the rattling noise of bullets.
Our two red cross men are absorbed in this scene, which lies almost at their feet, when the German quartermaster comes in. Red with wrath, swearing like a cabdriver, he seizes them by the arm, hurls them down the iron stairway, and installs himself in their place. Crestfallen, but at bottom thoroughly well pleased at having enjoyed the sight, they return to the consulting-room to rejoin Badoy and his home-sickness.