The morning had passed as usual: an early walk; then work until dinner-time. There was nothing to foreshadow a storm. I had been for a stroll after dinner with Dutrex, Durupt, and Foch. A typical Bavarian day: a moist sky softening the harsh outlines of the landscape; a half light, uncertain and dreamy, as if longing for the rich azure of Piedmont and Provence; a piercing little wind which, even in the sunshine, continues to suggest melting snow and cold, almost a bise, whose very caresses sting.
For the last few days I had been working hard. My faculties were blunted. I had a vague inclination to idle. I was suffering a little from boredom, a state of mind by which, happily, I am rarely afflicted. I was discouraged. I wanted a rest, and yet lacked energy to make up my mind to lay aside my work.
As I was returning to my task, I encountered little Brissot. Lately he has taken to wearing the Bavarian cap, a sort of Phrygian cap which I have made the fashion at Fort Orff. Mine is green—you know whose colour green is. Brissot’s is blue, and this tint sets off admirably his energetic blond countenance. Seeing that I was a little out of sorts, and not so cheerful as usual, he prevented me from going down.
“Abandon your kitchen for a while,” he said. “It reeks of sulphur, drains, burned fat, and vegetable refuse. You are getting mildewed amid the steam. The fires draw badly, and when I pay you a visit there your eyes are watering from the smoke. Besides, you have slaved quite enough this week under cover of your famous notice. You can be quite easy in your mind, you will have more than enough time to finish your studies. The Russian generals will secure you months and months for reflection. If that does not suffice, our diplomatists will see to it that you have an extension of time. This evening you must put aside your philosophies and your histories. We will go the round of the slopes together. The weather is fine. We will have a talk with my little friend across the ditch; you can’t think how sorry she is for us. Here is one, at any rate, who is utterly unconcerned as to questions of state. What does she care about French, Germans, English, Belgians, Russians? She knows men only. Her heart has skipped several centuries, and without an effort has attained the era of thoroughgoing internationalism. I can assure you that if she had to choose between a hübscher Franzose and a böser Deutscher,[22] there would be no hesitation.”
Brissot is light-hearted, firm, bold, definite, gently peremptory, perfectly self-reliant; he is a surprising compound of boy and of leader, of artist and tradesman, endowed with a lively will; how can any one who is in the dumps resist Brissot? I accompany him to the parapet. Positively she is there, a sort of Munich Flora, short and plump, with great black eyes, whom he calls his “bonne amie,” walking upon the footpath of the glacis, accompanied by three bare-headed village girls and a troop of children. “Damn the escort!” says my hübscher Franzose in an aside. The conversation is opened; it is as innocent as the arched forehead and rounded cheeks of the three slatterns. One of them is in high spirits to know that her affianced is safe. He has been made prisoner, and she has just received her first letter, dated from Gap. She asks if I am betrothed, if the ring I wear (Véron, the corporal in the engineers, cast it for me a few days back out of one of the metal buttons of the coat of a chausseur à pied) is an engagement ring, and why it is made of silver. Brissot takes the initiative in the reply, saying with an air of disgust that it is not silver but platinum, a metal far more costly than gold. She is astonished. She has never heard of platinum.
The conversation continues, agreeably stupid. Then the children ask for French pfennigs. “You shall have some if you will give us a newspaper in exchange.” The answer is not new to them; of course they have one ready. They roll it round a stone and throw it across the great ditch. The paper is four days old, but we throw back some sous which fall behind them some way down the glacis. Children and slatterns rush greedily to pick them up. Brissot, profiting by this moment of freedom, says to his Flora of the great eyes: “Come again to-morrow, and without your companions, who are not worthy of you!”
“My dear fellow,” I say to him, “I leave you to your love affairs. Farewell.”
The splendid reds of autumn flame on the great oaks along the border of the pine-wood—a strategic wood, designed to mask the west battery. The parapets are packed with soldiers, fine blue-and-red spots upon a dull yellowish-green ground. Some, chisel in hand, silently bent over their work, are carving pebbles. Others are wearing out their finger-nails and wearing down the corner stones in polishing tablets of white chalk destined for employment as ex votos. The cries of men playing at ball and at prisoner’s base resound from the ramparts. At the foot of a slope adorned with a clump of birches, men are busily engaged in cooking their extra provender. There is a circle round each improvized kitchen: some dry and break up the small branches rifled from the trees of the fort; some tend the refractory fire, for the wood will not flame; some agitate the contents of the mess-tins—fragments of stolen meat, choice morsels of vegetable peelings, coffee dregs begged from the kitchen, potatoes pocketed when the dinner was being prepared, edible snails found on the grass on rainy mornings and kept fasting in an old cigar-box, cheese-rind, plum mushrooms, wild chicory. Soldier-priests walk up and down reading their breviaries. On one of the slopes, a crowd surrounds Le Second, who is displaying his latest cubist composition; at the “kitchen windows” a number of poor devils whose stomachs are empty are patiently sniffing the thin odours that rise from the cooking-pots. Here and there are to be seen the dealers, their wares hidden beneath their coats, passing from group to group, and offering for sale at three or four times its value a cigarette, a lump of sugar, or a stick of chocolate. The blue-and-red ants have all emerged from the subterranean galleries of their ant-hill. On this October afternoon they produce a sad impression of mingled gaiety and wretchedness.
Yet amid this chaos I seem also to have before my eyes the picture of a city, a city of very ancient days. Characteristics of civic order are plainly manifest. A semblance of social life declares itself. Broken to pieces a few months ago by the sudden call to arms, flattened out and pulverized by the forces of hunger and tedium, the world that existed before the mobilization begins to reconstitute itself. By a sort of spontaneous generation, the eternal society rises anew from the void, with its groups of leaders and of poets, of traders and of artisans, with its classes of profiteers and of exploited, of originators and of simple executants. It is reborn, but in a less intricate form, with plainer contrasts, accentuated to caricature. Here, temperament, initiative, and energy have replaced tradition. There are no privileged positions. Social functions are not acquired as a right, but are seized. There is free competition. We all start from scratch. Each man takes his place in the natural hierarchy by the sole right of conquest. He can retain it only by cunning, force, or the power of genius, and at the price of a persistent victory.