A CHANCE CATERER
November 6, 1914.
The weather is sombre. The winter is coming on apace. On the grass, rusted by the frost, the leaves fallen from the willows have already rotted. This morning a gentle, damp wind was blowing, increasing at times to vent long sighs. The whole sky was bistre. Towards France, however, an islet of light was visible. On the Austrian side, the dawn had the ardent flushes of sunset. Skimming the ground, great flights of noisy crows were settling down on the freshly turned ploughs.
Things are going badly in the fort. Not that there is any fear of defeat. Durupt has been at pains to translate the Deutschland über alles of the German military march into a sonorous Alles über Deutschland filled with hope. But even Durupt, our Déroulède, is depressed. He had promised us liberty before All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, declaring it certain that we should celebrate these festivals at home. But All Saints’ Day has passed without the faintest murmur of peace. Yesterday evening the revictualling officer said to Foch: “The war will last two years.” This prophecy has gone the round of the casemates, disseminating gloom. Every one’s patience is exhausted.
Our dietary is still further reduced. To-day we had some horrible little prunes, two years old and as hard as wood, in lieu of meat. Henceforward our five companies are to supply every day a gang of a hundred men to work five miles from here on the military hutments. Ten miles march, eight hours’ work, and to make up for this fatigue duty, a sausage of about the size of your finger. The German ganger, a tailor by trade, and a man with the finest beard you ever saw, is by no means a bad fellow. During fifteen years he has made the seat of his trousers shiny in the tailors’ workrooms of Paris. He has no hatred for the French. As he passes from group to group with his eternal, “Allons, messieurs, travaillons un peu, n’est-ce pas?”[24] he modulates his voice in such alluring intonations, that one would say he was a salesman in the rue Blanche tempting a fair customer to inspect his wares. But the customers of our tailor-ganger are proof against temptation.
Yesterday, Brissot was with the gang as interpreter. The work is going on as slowly as usual, twenty men getting in one another’s way where two would suffice, when, towards four o’clock, the chief engineer-officer, the Baurat, arrives on the scene. His tone is rough, and he makes impatient gestures. He accuses the men of slacking, whereupon Brissot makes answer, in his cold and cutting manner: “Herr Major, what can you expect them to do when their stomachs are empty? They can’t work any harder. Look at them! Their eyelids and the wings of their nostrils are blue. Do you see that fellow in the trench? He eats every earthworm that he turns up with his spade! At home in France, Herr Major, I am an employer of labour, and I expect my men to work hard. But I pay good wages, and they get plenty to eat. Can I honestly ask these poor devils, who are starving, to do any real work?”
At this unexpected reply, the officer bridles as if he had been flicked with a switch. It is too much for him that a common soldier, a Frenchman, a prisoner, can speak so boldly to him, the great Major, the master. Thunderstruck, half in mind to strike the presumptuous fellow, he suddenly turns on his heel, and, cursing loudly, he flings himself into his Mercédès, spits out a command, and drives in hot haste to Fort Orff, where he issues orders that Brissot is never to accompany the gang again.
Having got wind of this affair, I sought out the eater of earthworms. He was a reservist of the 211th regiment, from Montauban. He was didactic, and explained to me that worms are no longer edible when you dig too deeply. Those more than two feet from the surface have a bitter taste. “They look all right; they are large and fat; but they are nothing but earth!” The quaint thing is that this little fellow, sturdy, hairy, and bronzed, by no means looks starved. It seems that the earthworm must be nutritious.
Nor is this the only culinary discovery inspired by the regimen of famine. When Brissot is eating his piece of Münster cheese on Tuesday and Saturday evenings, a comrade stands at gaze, rubbing his hands. At length he says: “You mustn’t squander the rind.” Brissot hands over the rind, which he has purposely cut rather thick. The man then adds: “But you mustn’t squander the paper either.”—“What will you do with this dirty, stinking piece of paper?”—“I shall boil it with some potato peelings under the birch-trees. It’s splendid seasoning. Don’t you see that it is soaked with cheese-fat?” This same prisoner, a nice lad, always good-humoured, well set up, hunts rats in the grass. His most famous dish, one he prepared a fortnight ago, was a stew of apple parings with rats. He secured the apple parings from the participants in a sort of “banquet,” a clandestine “feast” partaken of one evening by a large group of friends after an unusually liberal consignment had been received through the instrumentality of Georg.