THE REVOLT OF THE HUNGRY
October 21, 1914.
Yesterday was a great day! Perhaps the greatest of my imprisonment, if I except that of my first “teube.”[21] Oh, that first teube! After I had worn my clothes continuously for so many days and nights, the clandestine undressing at early dawn, beside the sink in Dutrex’s kitchen; the forbidden and unhoped-for sensation, to be, as if at home, naked beneath the steaming water; the lather of soap everywhere, on the hair, the neck, the chest, the arms, the legs, the feet; the douche with the aid of a bailer; the dry rub! At length to have a clean skin and clean linen! Then to stride up to the slopes in the delightful morning solitude, repeating as it were involuntarily: “I am clean; what a luxury! I am in their hands; but I have managed to get clean. They ration our water, and I have had water. I am a prisoner; but I have secretly divested myself of my coating of filth, a burden almost as heavy as that of hunger! I am by no means wholly wretched!”
It was a month since my last bath, at Tonnoy, about a week before we were taken prisoner. We had had a long and rough journey, from Chaouilley, at the foot of the hill celebrated by Barrès, to the Moselle. The dirt of three interminable nights in a cattle truck, in which we were herded pell-mell; the dust of the complicated movement towards the front; the stiffness of the opening march, the sweat and the fatigue—I had got rid of it all in the river. It was a beautiful evening, bright and warm. The sun was setting. The Moselle flowed rapidly among the islets of shingle and the sandbanks. Groups of men, officers and soldiers, men newly called up and reservists, indiscriminately mingled, naked as worms, the fat, the tall, and the short, the pot-bellied and the thin, fringed the bank with a strip of flesh-coloured humanity. We looked like a colony of Mormons.
After leaving the water, I challenged Soulier at ducks and drakes. Do you recall, little Darry, how we played ducks and drakes on the shore at Dully? I got the better of Soulier. One of my flat stones, skimming the water briskly, flying across the brown river, made its way right over the stream to strike the rocks on the other side.
When I think the matter over, this delightful bathe remains my most agreeable souvenir of Lorraine. I grieve to have to admit (notwithstanding Barrès, whose style would ennoble the most worthless materials) that all the villages we passed through, from Mont Sion to the frontier, and above all the village of Tonnoy, left on me an impression of penurious and squalid melancholy, of ugliness and filth.
Yes, yesterday evening was epic.