“Which, the game or the imprisonment?” asks Laloux quietly, as he takes Badoy’s queen.
“How can you ask?” Then, as if speaking to himself: “Oh! my wife and my three little ones, when shall I see them again? Still no letters! It’s terrible.”
From my corner in the window I contemplate the circle of smoke and of light, and I look at these six men packed together, chilly and sad. I dare not open my lips. My depression is turning to gall. I am not far, this evening, from understanding certain scenes in the casemates which had astonished me, when taciturn men became suddenly exasperated, and, for a single word, hurled themselves on one another, fighting like horses without oats in a stable. Poor caged beasts! The others, at least, those in Flanders and in France, have room to move. They have an object for action. After the stagnation of the trenches they can assuage their anger in the fury of the assault. But as for us, heavy with wrath, we are confined within thick walls; we can but swing our frozen and idle arms; we are cut off from all news; we are the prey of dreams and of hunger. Outside the screened window, the ditch, the counterscarp, and the grating; outside the grating, a Bavarian bayonet marches to and fro.
What can account for this state of nerves which I am unable to control? The hour for the arrival of the postman has passed. I have been waiting all day. It has passed. There is nothing. I ought to be able to find a reason. Why am I outwardly so hard and inwardly near to weeping? Suddenly there come great silent waves of memory. I hear her singing. She is dressed in green. The dark perfume of her golden hair enwraps me. The melody of César Franck’s Procession rises athwart my fever; it is broad, sweet, richer and more peaceful than a field of ripe wheat upon a warm evening. It sings within me; it assumes the cadence of my breathing. I am stifling. I live, I love, and I am loved; and yet I am thrust out from life as if I were in the tomb.
Elbow to elbow and forehead to forehead, the six men at the table are silent. I look down upon the circle of light and the smoke of the pipes. Not a sound is to be heard. Buried in the mound, surrounded by meadows and woods, the fort is as cold and mute, as remote, desolate, and dead, as a soldier’s grave in the corner of a field.
A FRANCONIAN QUARTERMASTER
December 4, 1914.
The “Salle du Jeu de Paume” was born, if I may use the expression, from a conjunction of coups d’état.