Often blinded by the icy rain, which cuts their faces, the workers go away slowly like a troop of sheep led to the slaughter. They are silent. As for the Huns, they don’t say a word. With long green porcelain pipes between their lips, their heads covered by their cloaks, they only think of one thing, and that is to protect their rifles, hidden under their mackintoshes, from rust. The heavy silence is, however, troubled, as with a sort of moan; it is the rubbing together of soaked trousers, it is the sound of the sabots splashing through the puddles. From time to time a man plunges to his ankles in a rut, or a hole full of water, and lets forth an oath, which finds no echo. Every man remains isolated, lives within himself. No one wishes to confide his sadness, his weariness, his despair to a neighbour. Amongst these men who pass like a procession of ghosts is there one who feels assured about the fate of his family, is there one who does not curse his enforced separation from those he loves, or one who can satisfy his hunger every day, and preserve intact his constancy and strength of mind amid such adversity? Who, even among the most debased, has been able to become used to this brutalising life? Who has not suffered in his self-respect, or has not—for a moment at least—felt degraded, when he has seen himself, with his companions, herded like cattle, put in a cage like a wild beast and fed worse even than they? Who of them will ever speak of the physical, and above all the mental, sufferings of our prisoners, their bitter reflections, their blasphemies, their deep despair, their hatred of life? On their return to France they will wish to get rid of such remembrances, as one washes oneself from a stain.
Thus they go on, their heads bent, their hearts full of bitterness.
Suddenly the first ranks stop short, and the rear not being warned are thrown against them. The guards have made a sign. The four kilometres to the destination are covered.
The fatigue party, consisting of from seven hundred to eight hundred men, has to level a vast space of sandy soil. It is the site for a camp, the plans of which are already drawn, to which the new recruits of the next class will come to be mobilised.
They will be better off than in barracks. The position—an immense clearing in the centre of a pine-forest—is healthy. Nothing will be wanting: there is abundance of water, electric light will be installed, large windows will give light and air to the huts, the roofs will be thick and the walls made of bricks lined with wood.
Later, when the camp is on the point of being finished, the General who commands the district will let neutral notabilities and journalists visit it, and will present it to them as the future residence of those poor French prisoners over which Germany watches with a mother’s love. And these notabilities and these reporters, who in a motor have covered the distance so painfully trodden by our compatriots, who have visited the camp where one finds every modern comfort, will go back befooled by the obsequious Germans, and in good faith will relate to their countrymen how royally the French prisoners are treated in Germany.
The prisoners stop for several minutes motionless in the rain which a bitter east wind brings; the men scarcely warmed by the march, freeze again, for in the limits permitted to them there is no shelter, and it is impossible to sit on the muddy ground.
At the signal to begin work, the men, with an aspect of indifference, go towards an improvised shed, where the tools are kept during the night. Nonchalantly each takes any tool that happens to come his way—one a spade, another a pickaxe, another a wheelbarrow. The guards form a circle around the workers and the long task begins.
For several days already they have been busy filling a vast depression, and the hundreds of barrow-loads thrown in daily seem not to have made any difference. It is a painful task to push over this sodden land, where the mud sticks to the wheels, these barrows laden with sand.
But who is then this man, this Zouave, who, indifferent to the trouble that his companions are giving themselves with pickaxe and spade, stands motionless and idle in the midst of this activity? Leaning on the handle of a spade fixed in the earth, he seems to be lost in a dream. Half an hour has already passed and he has not yet touched the sand. The German guards have noticed him and his idleness. His inaction puzzles them; it must be put a stop to. A sentinel approaches and by a gesture makes the soldier understand that he must work.