September 2, 1914.
Here I am a prisoner.
What a journey! I am bitter at soul; it makes me
sick to think of it. Across Rhenish Prussia, the Palatinate,
the grand duchy of Baden, Würtemberg, and
Bavaria, for three days and three nights, at every
station, and even as we pass through the countryside,
groups of peasants and gloomy crowds of citizens
hurl execrations at us, stamp, and shake their
fists, making signs that they would like to cut our
throats and tear out our eyes. From the streets of
country towns, lost amid the sweltering plains, troops
of children assemble, waving flags. They form up
in line beside the track. When the train comes in,
moving slowly like a funeral convoy, they beg for
our képis; they vociferate in their own language,
“Paris kaput! Death to the French!” The sight of
the red cross armlet produces paroxysms of fury.
“Death,” they scream, “death to the red cross men!
These are they who finish off our wounded!” The
shouting becomes strident, terrible, mad. Sometimes
they try to take the train by storm, and are stopped
only by the bayonets of the German soldiers on guard
in each compartment, who growl out threats.
The women are even more horrible than the men.
The murderous glance, the clawed fingers, working and
tearing as if in the dream of a tigress, the nostrils dilated
and twitching, the lips cyanosed, grimacing hatred—never
before have I seen such faces of damned souls,
such Medusa heads. Who could believe that women
should appear so horrible!… When the train
stops for any time, richly dressed matrons parade beside
it, offering our guards mugs of beer, cigars and cigarettes,
bread-and-butter and jam, steaming sausages. Sick
with hunger and fatigue, we look on at this prodigality.
“Above all,” they say, “give nothing to these French!
Let them starve!” We are offered water.
Everywhere, at the stations, from the steeples, the
factories, the inns, huge flags are waving. Chime
answers chime across the rivers. The big cathedral
bells make the hills re-echo. All Germany is holiday-making,
drunk with blood, thrilling with the prospect
of victory.
Is this the Germany I knew last year?
I had travelled through the country in the company
of Marcel Chabrières, as if on a pilgrimage. We passed
through Heidelberg, my peaceful Heidelberg, so lovable
in the shade of its august ruin and of its oak-crowned
and vine-clad hill; Marburg, the quiet little town with
its professors and its workmen, resting more quietly at
the foot of the margrave’s castle than even the bones of
St. Elisabeth of Hungary beneath the pavement of the
church; Dresden, that fine seat of artistic and courtly
life; Munich, the Teuton Florence, blooming like a
flower; Weimar, more sacred than all the others, where
the neighbouring houses of Schiller and Goethe mourn
discreetly the memories of the golden century, the lyrical
and generous youth of Germany!… We were charmed
with these laughing cities of the spirit. I can still picture
them in the limpid air of last spring, I recall their dainty
aspect, and the cheerful welcome they accorded us; I
see their waters reflecting the blue skies and the bright
clouds. When I but think of them, in this damp crypt
of exile, gusts of liberty, youth, and ecstasy agitate my
heart.
We had strolled through the docks of Cologne and of
Hamburg; we had visited Elberfeld, Barmen, Hagen,
and Essen, the smoky iron-towns of Westphalia. Near
the great forges of M. Krupp von Bohlen we had admired
the fairylike village of Margaritendorf, where brutal
modern industry would seem to have pledged itself to
put its slaves to sleep every evening in an idyllic retreat.
From the window of the train, on the journey from
Hamburg to Berlin, passing through a country of pines
and lean fields, we had a glimpse of Friedrichsruhe, the
lordly domain where sleeps the “honest broker” who
made the empire, “awaiting the resurrection of the just.”
After the gentle sweetness of the ancient university
towns, we were intoxicated with the energies of this
new world, this world of pride and of money, of sweat
and of lucre. Even in ugly Berlin, the parvenu town, we
paid our respects to the titanic effort of a nation in the
full vigour of life, ambitious, stubborn, determined to
dazzle the world, to take the place of Athens, of Rome,
of Paris, convinced of its destiny to rule the universe.
But every one talked to me of peace.
Since I was upon an official mission, I was able to
converse with the men in whom young Germany recognizes
its masters. They all spoke with one voice.
They declared that their race had an ecumenical
mission. Patriotic, active, prolific, it was inevitably
destined to control Europe. “But for this,” they added,
“we need peace.”
“Why, then, are you armed?”
“We have no natural frontiers; our plains lie open
to the invader both from the east and from the west.
English merchants are jealous of our successes; France
obstinately refuses to grasp the proffered hand of friendship;
Russia is becoming panslavist. Caught in such a
vice, how can we ensure peace in any other way than
by arming for defence? But we have no need of war.
In twenty years we shall be eighty millions, and we
shall be rich. Do you imagine that it will then be
necessary for us to unsheathe the sword in order to play
our proper part in the world?”
This was the language employed to me by liberals.
It was the language of M. Simon and M. Wolf, editors
or owners of the two leading journals in Germany; of
Max Weber of Heidelberg, the keenest intelligence I
have ever known; of Troeltsch, the distinguished
sociologist; of Windelband, the successor of Kant and
of Fichte; of Vossler of Munich, the Romance philologist,
rival of such men as Ferdinand Bruneau and
Joseph Bédier; of Liebermann, the celebrated Berlin
painter, who has supplemented the labours of Paul
Cassirer in order to introduce the work of our impressionists
into Prussia; of Lichtwark, the director of the
Kunsthalle in Hamburg; of Naumann, the editor of
Hilfe, who supplies ideas to men of the left wing in
politics; above all, of a man more influential than any I
have yet named, Carl Lamprecht, the Saxon, whose
gigantic history of modern Germany has taken the form
of an epic in honour of William II.
Young men, who across the Rhine are “liberals,”[1]
talked in just the same way.
I shall long remember the night we passed at
Frankfort in the company of M. Moritz von Bethmann,
cousin of the Chancellor. How ardent was his
confidence! He was far from being a malcontent.
He had no desire for any kind of “restoration”; and
still less did he wish, in the name of a Frederick
Barbarossa or of a Frederick the Great, to anathematize
the present. He accepted it joyously,
delighted to be living in it, eager to carry his full
share of duties and hopes. But his lightness of heart
was neither studied nor ostentatious.
I recall very precisely his reply to the charge of
materialism which, on the spur of the moment, I
levelled against new Germany. His rejoinder was
spirited and instantaneous.
“Do you really believe,” he said, “that we are
going to rest satisfied for a long time in the boastful
materialism that ensued upon the victory? You dare
to say this, at the very moment when Kant and
Fichte are once more being restored to honour; when,
just like you, we are discovering the ‘buried temple,’
internal values, faith! Allow me to assure you that
the young men of Germany are at this moment more
exacting in matters of spiritual nourishment than
your young men of the Agathon type and the group
that runs the Action française. Our minds cannot
give themselves up to a stupid or politic adoration
of that which our intelligence, fully conscious of its
work, has destroyed. Though it may cost us more
suffering than you, we demand that our hearts and
our minds shall preserve full freedom of judgment,
and we know how to await their decision. We are
not prepared, under pretext of spiritual nostalgia, to
accept outworn formulas which would compel us to
shun and to disavow the social order we owe
to science, history, commerce, and democracy. We
shall not give ourselves up to the cult of any religions
which, however venerable they may be, are
surcharged with fossilized rubbish and proud of
their state of petrifaction, which would have no understanding
of our scruples, and would be absolutely
unfitted to fecundate our real life!
“I do not know if the renascence in France takes
the form of swearing by the middle ages, or by the
seventeenth century, or by Bonald and de Maistre,
and of invoking maledictions on the work of ’89.[2]…
The German renascence, if this be so, is at the
antipodes of yours. But do not imagine that we are
iconoclasts. As much as any others, we like to come
to terms with tradition. But we insist that tradition
shall not hinder our freedom of movement, that it
shall either make us live or let us live. Is that
vaingloriousness? When we claim the privilege of
living, of thinking, and of creating, no less freely than
did the men who founded the tradition of the middle
ages, or than those who founded the tradition of the
seventeenth century, are we not within our strict
rights, and is not the exercise of these rights a positive
duty? We may be wrong, but we believe that a
new world is in course of construction. The work
that has to be done is of greater value in our eyes
than the work that is finished, however venerable and
august the latter.
“I am a close student of your new political literature.
Will you permit me to say that I discover
therein a carping and regretful tone? It seems to
me that its chief effort is devoted to blackening and
decrying the regime you have chosen, to undermining
confidence in it. Our efforts take the opposite direction.
We are all for construction, adaptation, glorification,
lyric enthusiasm. We accept our national
mission. We accept our present life. We desire that
our energies should continue to increase, to coalesce,
to become intertwined. You will see; when the
right moment comes they will secure for us a
hegemony, and beyond question it will be the most
humane and the most pacific of hegemonies.”
Our conversation was a lengthy one. All the conventional
barriers had been cast down. Every one
gave utterance to his own truth, as if speaking to
himself alone, in that species of lucid exaltation which
sometimes results from a prolonged vigil. And the
strange thing was that in proportion as behind the
verbal agreements we sensed ever more strongly
the depths of unexpressed antagonisms, we felt each
for the other an increasing esteem. The hours
passed. All the lamps in the Frankfurter Hof had
been extinguished, except our own, which continued
to burn in the great reading-room, its yellow light
piercing the smoke-wreaths from our cigars, and exhibiting
the virile and yet refined features of the
young banker. We passed out into the open. The
porter was asleep. The streets were deserted. After
this great duel between our respective national
dreams, the cold of the night was agreeable.
Through the ancient street where the young Goethe,
locked up by his father in the corner room, had
watched Gretchen going by, we gained the banks
of the Main. The first streaks of dawn were already
illuminating the broad surface of the river, peopled
with motionless vessels.
This was a year ago. Now the war has come
between our dreams.
I remember this as if it were yesterday.
At Leipzig, again, I see a small and cheap room,
an eyrie in the Inselstrasse, among the great printing
houses. It was attractive none the less, almost
touching in its simplicity, the ugly little place, with
an empty cup of coffee on the edge of a deal table
laden with papers, and, fixed to the wall, two
shelves for books. It was a cell, showing that its
tenant was a man devoid of all vanities, a stranger
to the amenities of our century. Here, one fine
morning, after I had rung the bell five or six times,
I was welcomed by M. Wilhelm Baum, editor of Die
Akademische Rundschau and president of the “Free
Students.”
Mlle. Marianne Lamprecht had drawn my attention
to this young man as a sort of princeps juventutis.
Her father thought highly of him and assisted him
in his undertakings. The society of which he was
the leader had ramifications throughout lettered and
scientific Germany. All its members were serious
workers; its mere existence had overwhelmed with
ridicule the reputation of the old aristocratic “corps,”
those little courts of idlers, where the gilded youth of
the fatherland, under the pretence of study, spends all
its days in drinking, duelling, and drabbing.
The appearance of M. Wilhelm Baum surprised me.
Over his night-shirt he had hastily donned a short and
seedy jacket; his hair was untidy; he was a small
man of awkward aspect. The cinders from the stove,
scattered here and there, scrunched under our feet.
My eye was caught by the teaspoon, still wet, among
the manuscripts. The man was in keeping with his
surroundings. Yet, when I had seated myself on an
ancient sofa with broken springs, my second glance
at this “prince” aroused sympathetic feelings. A
secret flame illumined the blue eyes, the ascetic brow,
and the sickly countenance, revealing, in this shy
youth of twenty-five, a strong and lofty soul.
He, likewise, confided to me his hopes.
They differed little from those of M. Moritz von
Bethmann. But on the lips of M. Baum they received
an apostolic breadth. The young banker had not
shown that he felt any insurmountable horror of war,
which he regarded merely as a useless expense.
M. Baum, on the other hand, whose entire mentality
was under the influence of evangelical radicalism,
detested war as barbarism and as a manifestation of
antichrist.
At one o’clock, since I could not make up my mind
to leave him, I persuaded him to dine with me at my
hotel. Marcel Chabrières had spent the morning at
the museum among the tinted marbles of Max
Klinger. He was astonished to find that I was
already on a friendly footing, almost intimate indeed,
with this young German.
Enthusiasm is the bread of youth. Youth loves
the impossible, and will accept life only through a
passion which colours it with iridescent hues, invests
it with a halo, and endows it with heroic lineaments.
This meal was one of those moments of transfiguration
when the world seems malleable and impregnated
with divine fire. Our minds were filled with a vision,
the vision of a new classic age, as harmonious as the
age of Pericles in Greece or as the third Christian
century, but vaster, richer, more humane, sparkling
with youth—an age which was to integrate and
beautify the conquests and discoveries, still uncoordinated,
of the last three hundred years. German
and French, in this dream, came to an understanding.
It is true that he considered that his nation, turning
back to the tradition of Weimar, was to be the
master-craftsman, whereas I contended that France
had never ceased to occupy that role, which was her
vocation and fulfilled her nature. But this difficulty
seemed trifling. We were not so much antagonists
as friendly rivals.
Is this man, I asked myself when he had gone,
is this man typical of young and literate Germany?
In the classic land of militarism, is it only the old
who are swashbucklers?
A few weeks later, in early spring, on one of those
afternoons in which showers alternate with sunshine,
and in which the buds, swelling with sap, open, I was
walking in the beech forest to the south of Munich.
My companion, about thirty years of age, was in fine
fettle. Tall and thick-set, florid of face, hair blond
and bristly, he walked like a conqueror, and seemed
in his element among these sturdy trees. The man
of the woods personified! I considered that this professor,
already renowned, ought rightly in appearance
to be rough-hewn, massive, dynamic, like a woodman
at work. He was a hearty eater and a vigorous
drinker, ruddy with health, absolutely innocent of the
scepticism of drawing-rooms. I had several times
before had the chance of admiring this man who
reminded me of one of our Normandy horses. Above
all, I had seen him at the Hofbrauerie in Munich,
where we had washed down our political discussions
with copious draughts of that dark beer, whose consumption
in Bavaria is encouraged by old King Louis,
chief brewer, and owner of the wealthiest tavern in the
empire.
A country walk frequently encourages avowals which
would never have been made during a thousand meetings
in town, among sophisticated men. My companion
had just confessed to me that he belonged to the
“Social Democracy.” As yet in secret only, for it is
not permissible in Germany to wear openly and simultaneously
the livery of the professor and that of the
socialist. But the socialist party, suffering from a
dearth of intellectuals, desired him to become a
deputy. At the first opportunity, he would exchange
his professorial chair for a seat in the Reichstag. The
ambition to revive Bebel in his own person, to become
a new Wilhelm Liebknecht, made his nostrils dilate.
Somewhat mockingly, when with the impetuosity of
primitive man he was speaking of the social mission
of Germany, I said to him point-blank: “Admit that
you think we are worn out, that in your eyes France
is nothing more than an elderly beauty, with bald
head, pallid lips, wrinkled skin, decayed teeth, enfeebled
intelligence!”
“If I were a bourgeois,” he answered laughingly,
“I should answer in the negative. You still have your
stockings and your bankers, matters of considerable
importance in the eyes of the bourgeoisie of every land.
But I am a socialist and a democrat. The minimum
programme of our party is to effect the overthrow of
Prussian absolutism, and to apply throughout Germany
that parliamentary regime which is the conditio sine qua
non of all social advance. But you French, for your
part, hold this parliamentary regime in scorn. What
would you have me think of a nation which repents
of its virtues, which makes fun of its chief glory?
“Here in Germany we read your Maurras and similar
writers.[3] We are told that in France these men have
the ear of the younger generation. It astounds us. It
seems to us insane, this cheerful renunciation of the
tradition which has made you famous, and for which
you are still idolized by all that is noblest in the world.
Do you find this strange? When material force is
failing you, you, the noble nation, become rabid apologists
of the regime of force, of ‘the man with the
big stick.’ You take Machiavel for master. You ask
for a French Bismarck. You declare yourselves to be
royalists, imperialists, absolutists. I can see no difference
between your romano-positive young men and
our own echten Deutschen, those energumens who deafen
us in our public squares with their hochs to the Kaiser,
who shout their Deutschland über alles at every prosit,
and who pile monument upon monument in honour
of the militarist Moloch, until the appearance of our
towns becomes intolerable. Young Frenchmen converted
to the Germany of the junkers, blood-brothers
of our idiot of a crown prince! What a farce! But
for us, the German socialists, this is merely an additional
reason for the redoubling of our energies. Our
watchword to-day is extremely simple: to raise in
Europe and to carry onward to victory the standard
of democracy which has fallen from the hand of
France!”
“Such is really your idea of France, your own, and
that of all the German left?”
“To speak frankly, it is with us a dogma that
generous and humane France is dead, and that all
that was best in her spirit has entered into us.”
We walked on for some time without saying a word.
The idea never occurred to him that these wholesale
judgments could possibly shock or pain me, for he was
one of those happy men, common in Germany, endowed
with a veritable talent for frankness. He continued his
terrible strides, and after a while he exclaimed gaily:
“Anyhow, you don’t bring enough children into the
world to be socialists. Our ideas can germinate only
in dense crowds, where there is hardly standing room,
where people lack air and space, breed without restriction,
and have nothing to lose! Your Einzweikindersystem[4]
condemns you to be nothing but bourgeois, and
poor bourgeois at that!”
I made no answer. What answer was possible?
He knew my ideas. He had been one of those who
introduced my Ecoutes into Germany. Besides, it gave
him so much pleasure to believe in our decadence, to
be convinced that Germany, as far as democracy was
concerned, was henceforward without peer in the world.
Indeed it is true, all these “young men of the left”
were ardent believers in Germany’s mission. But to
justify this mission they did not, like the cynical pangermanists,
appeal to the Faustrecht, the right of the
stronger; they did not speak of bloody conquests.
Perhaps they thought of them, but such brutalities
(which the German mind, even when finely tempered,
accepts with little reluctance) remained hidden in the
background, within the domain of possibilities, among
the lesser evils and contingencies—profane delights
which a platonic lover hardly dares to envisage even
in his secret dreams. Idealists of the Michelet type,
quaffing the austere wines of Kant and Fichte (recently
unsealed and served round at the universities by the
new masters), they made an exclusive claim to the
moral heritage of ’89, of which we, they said, had
ceased to be the heirs. Were not they the youthful
neophytes of the democratic faith which the degenerate
French had lost? Had they not passionately espoused
the modern world, whose uncertain dawn had first ventured
to shine on Paris, that slight and foolish city, but
whose full noon was now to illumine the strong and
loyal (treu und fest) town of Berlin, the guardian of the
Rhine? Yes, finis Galliæ! It was theirs to lead the
great caravan of the universe towards the new justice.
It was their part, the part of these good Teutons, with
their virgin spirit and their new blood, to direct in future
the affairs of the human race. Gesta Dei per Germanos!
One of these young men was M. Wichert, director of
the Mannheim museum. He was the favourite disciple
of M. Lichtwark of Hamburg, and had also been a
pupil of the late celebrated von Tschudi, grand master
of the artistic life of Germany. Von Tschudi, it may
be mentioned in passing, of course had a quarrel with
William II, just like Bismarck, just like Haeseler, and
Bülow, just like all the clever men in the empire who
were unfortunate enough to possess a vigorous individuality.
M. Wichert was a friend of our consul,
M. Deschars,[5] who arranged a meeting between us.
Son of a poor officer, and orphaned while quite
young, M. Wichert went through his course of studies
as best he could. His life is a romance. Loneliness;
poverty; chance encounter with a Mæcenas; sudden
abandonment of science for art; renewed poverty;
unexpected patronage by the great pontiffs of art,
Tschudi and Lichtwark; appointment as sub-director
of the picture gallery of Munich; appearance upon the
scene of the Magian kings, a delegation of aldermen
from the town of Mannheim, modernist before all,
offering him carte blanche for the creation of a museum;
for a start the young Messiah purchases in Paris
Manet’s best work, “The Execution of Maximilian,”
Daumier’s portrait of Michelet, and the “Man with
the Pipe,” the most famous of Cézanne’s pictures; all
Mannheim is terrified at its commissioner’s prodigality;
he defends himself before the entire town council,
silencing some by his boldness, winning over others
by his disinterested violence, by the aspect of his
threadbare coat, and the thinness of his slight but
ardent figure; thus he arouses that municipal patriotism
which is so keen in the fatherland, convincing the
councillors that he will do nothing less than make
of Mannheim the leading art centre of Germany, and at
the point of the bayonet he wrests from them a vote of
confidence; shortly afterwards, a wealthy Jew entrusts
him with five million marks for the establishment of
a museum; he founds an art school to enlighten the
Mannheim bourgeoisie, which is upstart, elementary,
but open-minded and full of goodwill; his lectures
become fashionable in the town; he provides similar
instruction for the common people; acting upon suggestions
made by M. Osthaus, a rich bourgeois of Hagen,
he establishes travelling exhibitions. In a word,
Tschudi being dead and Lichtwark dying, M. Wichert
allowed his own way at Mannheim, at twenty-five
years of age figures in the role of co-ordinator, protector,
inspirer of the artistic life of Germany. He has
made up his mind to transform Mannheim—the Hanseatic
city of traders and manufacturers, the mushroom
town flaming red with its abundance of new bricks, an
American city suddenly appearing in Europe—into a
Jerusalem of the new art. He desires that the streets
shall become beautiful, that their names shall have a
poetic ring, that the squares shall be as harmonious as a
house by Van de Velde or Niemeyer. He secures an
order for the demolition of the theatre built ten years
earlier in the “Jugend” style, and already an object of
ridicule; a competition is opened for the design of the
building which is to replace it. The whole town
becomes crazy about art. A bourgeois is regarded
as dishonoured if he has not given 40,000 marks to the
museum to buy a Renoir or some Gauguins. If this
apostolate continues, the people will checkmate the
very Athenians.
M. Wichert talks to me in the following strain: “In
the history of art nothing can rival the creative energy
displayed by France. Romanesque, gothic, all the
gothics, renaissance, baroque, rococo (the terms have
no invidious meaning in Germany), directoire, empire—all
these are French. Throughout ten centuries you
continued to bring forth styles which were so elegant
and so convenient, whose taste was so confident, that
they instantly captured the world.
“But have you suddenly become sterile? Is France,
pre-eminently the nation of innovators, no longer competent
to do anything but to copy its own past? Like
your new sociologists, your furniture makers supply
Louis XVI, Louis XIV, empire; your builders furnish
Louis XVI, renaissance, and again Louis XVI. Have
you really ceased to produce architects since Gabriel
and Louis, cabinet-makers since Boule, enchasers since
Gouthière? Or is it that you no longer care for anything
but the old, like those respectable and fatigued
ladies who cannot endure a new face, and ask only to
be allowed to die in peace, surrounded by the things of
their youth? However this may be, we often tell one
another that France no longer possesses enough energy
to survive the titanic act of giving birth to the modern
world, and that she is now nothing more than a
beautiful corpse, embalmed and laid to rest in a
splendid museum.
“Here in Germany, believe me, we worship your
artistic tradition. For centuries we could find nothing
better to do than attempt to assimilate it. You have
visited Cassel, Pilnitz, Carlsruhe, Potsdam; I cannot
doubt that you felt at home in these royal palaces,
which are nothing but replicas of Versailles.
“But I sometimes incline to think that the creative
force which formerly existed in France has emigrated
to Germany. It is true that during the nineteenth
century there occurred in France a splendid blossoming
of sculptors and painters: Delacroix, Rude, Carpeaux,
the landscape painters of Barbizon, the admirable
school of Manet, and, coming down to to-day, Rodin,
Degas, Maillol, Jouve, Vallette, the expressionists.
Yes, unquestionably, even if your architecture (the
master art which controls and co-ordinates all the rest)
is decadent, your sculpture and your painting remain
unrivalled.
“But are you not struck by the fact that during the
last twenty years it has been in Germany, above all, that
your innovators have gained appreciation; that many of
them have had to secure their first celebrity in the
foreign world, before they were enabled to harvest in
France the fruits of a restricted glory, admired in their
own homes solely by a group of cosmopolitan epicures?
Are you not astonished that such a man as Van de
Velde, who vegetated in Paris, should build palaces for
our great manufacturers; and that Maillol, the sculptor,
a most typical Frenchman, should find a place of
honour in our museums while in France he is still
almost unknown? Is this neglect deliberate? Is it
because you are convinced that genius cannot flower
to perfection until it has suffered, that you provide this
chill atmosphere for your best artists? Or is it timidity,
unwillingness to take risks, stupidity, provincialism?
Whatever the reason, the air of France is to-day less
favourable to creation than the air of Germany.
“In Germany there is an extensive public which
lives upon the hope of a new ‘culture.’ This public has
nothing in common with the pangermanists. It includes
few generals and few leaders of the bureaucracy.
But it contains our best men of letters and some of our
principal bourgeois, in a word, the general staff of
wealthy, liberal, and parliamentary young Germany.
There are some, like Stephan Georg, Wolfskehl, and
Madame Osthaus, in whom this hope assumes an
ardent and mystical character, becoming a true
religion. While it is the fashion in Paris, at least so
we are assured, to be frankly reactionary,[6] here all the
men and all the women who wield the empire of mind
are animated by a quasi-messianic spirit. Is it possible
that Nietzsche, with his idea of the revaluation of
values, has contributed to the spread of this spirit? I
do not know. We wait; we aspire; we hope. To us
to-morrow is sacred. Every one is striving towards
forms of life and art which shall be more ample, more
truthful, more expressive, more beautiful. Every one is
making ready to welcome the wonderful butterfly which
is to spring from this larval age. It is with us a matter
of faith that the men will come, that they are now on
the way, who can provide the artillery and the watchwords
of the new civilization.
“I frequently visit Paris to attend the great sales; I
am well acquainted with the superior smiles with which
many of your critics greet our attempts. They make
fun of the curved outlines of our ‘Jugend’ buildings.
For my part, I detest that style of architecture as much
as they. Are we not now demolishing a theatre built
after this design, although the mortar is hardly dry?
But it is possible for us to destroy our architectural
abortions. In Germany you can get money, all the
money you require, for an artistic purpose. Can you
do the same in France? Can you make sacrifices to an
ideal incorporated in stone? No, you have too little
faith. You believe in your bankers, not in your artists.
You venture nothing in art; we hazard all, boldly
running the risk of making a mistake. And, by
building, we learn to build.
“Ten years ago we were making bad attempts;
to-day we have discovered a system of architecture
appropriate to modern requirements and at the same
time beautiful. Go and look at the Weltheim in
Berlin, M. Osthaus’s home at Hagen, the new station
at Hamburg. When you are in Hamburg get M.
Schumacher, chief architect of the republic, to show
you the plans of the magnificent public garden he has
just designed, which is to cost fifteen million marks.
“Here money is the ally of art, the living art of
to-day, the ally of artistic creation, whereas in your
country money, more prudent, devotes itself only to the
purchase of antique and catalogued beauty. I believe,
in fact, that France lacks Medicis, whilst Germany
possesses them in abundance. The reason is obvious.
The wealthier members of our bourgeoisie are uneasy
and discontented; they desire a true parliament which
will enable them to get the better of the junkers; it is
their nature to be progressive. Your bourgeoisie, on
the other hand, has triumphed, and, since it has nothing
more to desire, it is natural that it should dread novelty
in philosophy and art no less than in politics. I know
that what I am saying runs counter to all your hopes.
But you can do nothing to change your destiny in this
matter. France has entered the conservative phase;
we are now the creators; we, henceforward, shall be the
true successors of your masters.”
Thus everywhere was to be heard the same refrain:
the future lies in the hands of Germany! Germany
is the Messiah of the new art; the Messiah of the
socialist city; the Messiah of modern thought; the
Messiah of the new classic age. She is the successor of
aged France. It is she who will realize what the
last of the great Frenchmen have dreamed.
In all these young men, the élite of the German
nation, there was effervescing a strange force, there was
surging an ardent and emotional nationalism, a
veritable religion of German primacy. They considered
that primacy inevitable. It originated spontaneously;
its increase was dependent upon organic growth; and
no accident, whether in war or peace, could either
hasten or hinder it. They were all radiating hope;
they all had faith in the present, a warm vintage
yielding a thick and heady must, of intoxicating
aroma, and whence will be derived a robust wine for
the peoples to drink.
They were sincere when they spoke of peace.
Doubtless their idealist ambition was transformed
into a materialist and brutal ambition among men
of business, officers, and bureaucrats. For these latter,
German production was to ruin that of England, the
German will was to control the foreign chancelleries.
But such ends cannot be secured without war.
Or they could be secured without war, only if Europe
made up her mind to submit! Only if the English
merchants were good enough to go bankrupt! Only
if the greater Slavs should offer no objection to
the enslavement of their little brothers on the Drina!
Thus while the young liberals were dreaming of
a pacific hegemony, Krupp was making his 420
millimetre guns, sergeants were teaching recruits to
fear their officers as they feared God, and Berlin was
fashioning new military laws which even the socialists,
after some formal resistance, voted integrally.
But during this journey, the fact which struck me
most of all was the existence of a liberal youth. I had
not expected to find anything of the kind. I had been
so positive that from the Rhine to the Vistula I should
hear nothing but the noise of military accoutrements.
I had seen the German army in Strasburg, at the
Parole Aufgabe in the Place de Broglie, when the
general transmits to the officers’ corps the orders and
the passwords. The whole of this assembly, in its
light-grey uniform in which a simple sub-lieutenant
was indistinguishable from a colonel, made salutes.
The salute seemed to me the distinctive sign of this
army, a fervent salute, involving the head and the
entire spine, passing off in a smile at once triumphant
and humble, martial and innocent, seeming to say,
“How enviable I am in that I obey! How enviable
I am in that I command!”
I looked down on this from the third story of
the editorial offices of Le Journal d’Alsace-Lorraine.
Suddenly I came to understand the feudal spirit,
the cascade of absolute authority and of submission
which formerly descended from the sovereign to the
serf by way of the hierarchy of barons.
When I had crossed the Rhine, in the streets of the
German towns the strength of this impression grew,
until it became positively haunting. Everywhere I
saw blind adoration of the uniform, overwhelming joy
in wearing it; everywhere the intoxication of command,
equalled only by the delight of obedience;
everywhere complete ignorance of the essential equality
of men, demonstrated first of all in the life of Christ,
and which, once it is thoroughly understood, purifies
politeness of servility, transforms obedience into
affectionate collaboration, and transfigures power into
service; everywhere, both in military and in civil life,
I saw lords and servants, I saw the same man at once
lord and servant, lord of those under him, servant
of those over him—but nowhere did I see citizens. I
saw servants, submissive, prepared for anything,
obedient to every sign, mechanized and rejoicing
thereat, convinced that it was to their interest to
be so, proud of the shape and strength of the iron
hand of which individually each man was one of
the innumerable phalanges. I was tempted to see
in this the dominant characteristic of the German
nation. A powerful nation, but one estranged from
the modern spirit: a medieval islet in the midst of
liberal Europe; a redoubtable nation wherein
absolutism, exorcised elsewhere in ’89, was patiently
preparing its revenge, and whence some day, perhaps
soon, would come the initiative of a combat to the
death between feudalism and democracy.
Some weeks after the scene in the Place de Broglie,
M. von Arnim, attached to the Prussian general staff,
accompanied me through the barracks of Potsdam and
the camp of Döberitz. The regiments of the guard
were at drill. The order, the silence, were absolute,
even in the case of those standing at ease. The drill
ground was nothing but a vast solitude, like those great
electric power works, which appear deserted, and
where the only sign of life is the gentle hum of
the dynamos. There seemed nothing human in this
drill ground. From time to time there was a raucous
cry, and the gloomy maniples advanced, retired,
wheeled to the right or to the left.
“What a fine army of automata!” I said under my
breath.
“That’s it,” exclaimed M. von Arnim, grasping at
the comment, which had been made for my own
edification alone, as a eulogium. “In France you
cultivate individual initiative, but we avoid it like the
pest. The whole aim of our training is to break it
down. All we need is to produce somnambulists,
performing such and such an action upon such and
such an order; not reflecting, not reacting, but acting
merely, passively, by instinct, responding to the order
as a well-trained thoroughbred responds to the pressure
of your knee. The soldier must not think. Above
all he must not think. If we attribute so much
importance to the rigorous carrying out of movements,
if we push to the point of mania our fondness for these
drill-ground evolutions which you regard as useless and
ridiculous, it is because they break down thought, rout
it, weary it, put it to sleep, and annihilate it; because
they reduce the human being to the level of a pure
automaton. Show me a man who, by persistent
drilling, has been emptied of thought, and I will show
you a good soldier!
“On the battlefield, automatic obedience and fear
of the superior officer take the place of courage. This
doctrine has but one inconvenience: we shall sacrifice
more men than you when we have to attack. This
is of no consequence. We have less reason than
France to make a thrifty use of our soldiers. Germany
is prolific.”
This German army, what a powerful mould it would
constitute for a healthy race, one filled with the pride
of youth but still requiring to be formed, one which had
not yet emerged from the simple gregarious stage,
one without any of those dispersed indurations due
to the appearance of irreducible individualities—a race
still boneless and plastic.
I know not whether it was due to my actual
experiences, or simply to French prejudice, but I came
to doubt the reality of German liberalism, and to
regard as isolated and uprooted exceptions those young
men in whose company I had recently breathed the
pure air of democracy.
No, I said to myself at this time, the German nation
sets no value upon civil liberty; its Protestantism is
mere window-dressing; its Reformation, in contradistinction
to that of Calvin, was solely the work of
its princes (cujus regio hujus religio); if there were any
logic in events, the Germans ought to be Roman
Catholics, whilst we ought to be members of the
reformed church and modernists; Catholicism flourishes,
and socialism is so successful, in Germany, only
because both the one and the other correspond to
a general need for regimentation and tutelage, furnishing
an equivalent for military discipline to all those who
come forth from barrack life. I noted, in fact, that
German socialism had nothing in common with our
own; that it did not represent the proletariat at all;
that it was a sort of sub-bourgeoisie, comfortable,
well-off, placid, and lacking that revolutionary fervour
which arises from an outraged conscience; that it
constituted a bureaucracy, a hierarchy, a church
based upon Marxist dogma; and that it owed its
unbroken unity to the complete absence of thought
and passion among its members.
At such times it seemed to me that the Prussian
army was precisely suited to the German nation,
desirous, not of self-respect, but of material well-being,
friendly to that which controlled it, a people loving
to be led. Yes, I said, such a nation needs such an
army. And how fond the people is of the army.
The bourgeois look upon it with fatuous affection.
The kinglets of the empire are all eager to Prussianize
themselves within the framework of this army;
they all long to secure high command for themselves,
if possible to become army inspectors, considering that
the red band confers as much distinction as their
crowns. I even went so far as to tax with duplicity
the liberals of the great commercial and manufacturing
world, comparing them to some territorial chief, who in
outward aspect was pious and good-mannered, but who
in an out-of-the-way court of his castle kept a number
of hungry bears, prepared to loose them, as a final argument,
upon any one who ventured to annoy him. At
Dresden I had received a letter from M. Lichtwark,
containing the following phrase: “The two finest
types of modern man are the English gentleman and
the German officer.” It is too plain, I exclaimed,
Germany worships her army; Germany worships
herself in her army; the army is Germany; the
army dominates the entire country, just as the colossal
figure of stone which commemorates the iron chancellor
dominates with its huge symbolic sword the
port of Hamburg and the forest of masts in the
Elbe!
This doubt concerning the future of my young
liberals returned periodically to sadden me. It was
like an intermittent fever.
Was it possible to believe that they had the remotest
chances of success, the Teuton Vergniauds who thought
of renewing, after the lapse of a century, the adventure
of the constituent assembly? Had they any clear
idea of the terrible power of absolutism incarnate in
the junkers and in the Prussian officers? These had
no resemblance whatever to our eighteenth-century
seigneurs, light-hearted, winning, generous, and philosophic—such
men as Noailles, d’Aiguillon, and Montmorency,
who spontaneously despoiled themselves on
the 4th of August. I foresaw that it would be crushed
without pity, this liberal impulse, so fragile even in its
strength, the instant it transcended the sphere of art
and letters.
“Give us ten years,” the Munich socialist frequently
said. “By that time the crown prince of Bavaria, who
is a liberal, will have become king; the Prussian electoral
system, the Bastille of the autocracy, will have
been destroyed. But if we fail in Prussia, we shall have
done with legal methods, and our watchword will be
Vive la Révolution! For the death of William II will
mean the regime of the sabre.”
“Ten years,” I rejoined, “is a long time in an epoch
of tense and threatening rivalries. Are you not afraid
that before this period comes to an end fear of democracy,
ambition, and economic needs may force your
government to declare war against us?
“You will all be famous soldiers of the Kaiser, should
that happen, you good liberals and socialists. You
imagine yourselves opposed to militarism. But, without
knowing it, you are its best resource, its great
accomplice. You are such ardent patriots. You have
so fanatical a belief in the destiny of Germany. How
trifling is the difference between you and the pangermanists.
You desire hegemony without war; they
desire it at all costs, even if they have to fight for it.
What does this distinction matter? It will be so easy,
when the right moment comes, to befool you. It will be
so easy for the wolf to appear in sheep’s clothing; to
masquerade as a victim; to pretend that Germany has
been invaded; to give to a war of aggression and conquest
the sacred aspect of a war of national defence!
“Let us suppose that, through ill-luck, the war ends
in a German success. Good-bye, then, to your dreams,
to European idealism, to democratic dogmas. Great
will be the discomfiture of your Tugendbund. The
days of the Holy Alliance will return. When peace
comes under these conditions your ‘borns,’ on their
manorial estates, will luxuriate in the pious certitude
that they are essentially different from the ‘not-borns,’
and that God has predestined them to be masters and
leaders of men, just as, in the beginning, He created the
white elephant and the royal tiger. Then, perhaps, in
our defeat, we shall regretfully recall Sembat’s formula,
Faites un roi, sinon faites la paix; then we shall hail
Maurras as a prophet; inspired with a sense of renewed
virtue, we shall mock at the civic dream which was our
chief glory; and we shall fill the world, again become
feudal, with the clamour of our repentance. A fine
spectacle indeed would be such a repudiation by
France of the great vision of fraternal justice with
which she intoxicated the nations. What will you do
in those days, you German democrats, when the mother
of all democracy is vanquished, when the only disinterested
champion of your ideal has perished at your
hands?
“But you may rest easy in your minds, for we have
no intention of dying. We have agreed to three
years’ military service. We should agree, if needs must,
to four years or to five. And do not, for this reason,
accuse us of militarism. Our militarism is the militarism
of Valmy. Full well do you know that we
have no hidden thoughts of aggression or oppression.
When we consented to the increase of our army, it
was doubtless with a sincere desire to witness the
overthrow of the barbarism of the kaisers and the
crown princes, but we have never ceased to be faithful
to the revolutionary watchword: ‘Let us vote for war
upon the tyrants and for peace with the peoples!’”
The socialist of Munich, Wichert, the president of
the Freistudenten, Moritz von Bethmann—how far
away does it all seem now. They have killed; we
have killed. Their glances full of youth and intelligence,
which, when I was a free traveller, I received
frankly, face to face, man to man; our conversations;
our blossoming friendship; our common hope; the
ideal, dear to Nietzsche, of the “good European”—what
fragile things you are, beautiful creations of the
mind!
Shivering on the cement floor of the casemate during
the first night of my imprisonment here, I was continually
haunted by the faces of my German friends.
They did not smile at me as of old. Their eyes flashed.
They glared at me like hawks. They pierced me; they
wounded me. I was sad, sick at heart. How difficult
it is to endure hatred. I seemed to hear bells ringing
in my empty head. And always I seemed to see my
friends’ eyes, strangely transformed, harsh, greedy eyes
burning with ambition, cruel, the eyes of treasure-hunters,
such as one sees on the friezes of Susa in
the beast faces of the Assyrian kings with long
perfumed beards.
Here I squat in a corner of this crypt, hungry,
thirsty, stupefied, my brain inert, lacking energy to do
anything, looking on at my own adventures as if they
were those of a stranger. Images of my experiences
in the campaign, in which I seemed to have suffered
fatigues beyond the limits of the credible, pass idly and
almost indifferently through my mind. Already I seem
to regard these experiences with indifference, like those
military descriptions in Cæsar or Sallust, which no
longer stir any one’s emotions. I am aware of nothing
but my body. It seems strange to a man who believed
himself to live upon ideas, to be reduced to become
nothing but a stomach. I thought of Rabelais this
morning, of Gargantua surrendering himself to his
pleasures, of Frère Jean des Entommeures “wetting
his whistle.” My imagination wallowed in the sensuous
delights, in the gigantic satisfactions of appetite,
with which the four books abound. One needs to
be positively starving to appreciate to the full the
groaning boards of the monk of Chinon.
Our division had been sacrificed beforehand.
Charged, I imagine, to protect the retreat, it had
held firm. How, and for how long? A private in
modern warfare knows nothing. This much, at least,
is certain, that the division was wiped out. The battle
moved away from us. The sound of the cannonade
became more remote. Suddenly there ensued an
intense calm. Of the horrible struggle, with the
noise of which my ears were still ringing, there
remained no sign beyond the abominable stench of
the bodies now beginning to putrefy in the fallows
and the vineyards beside the forest of Bride, and from
time to time, rising from the deserted hollows, the prolonged
and lamentable cries of the wounded who had
been abandoned.
At Kerprich, in the district of Dieuze, in annexed
Lorraine, I passed my first week of captivity.
What a week! Among the rear-guard of the German
army which flowed on like a river, dropping with sleep
and weariness, again and again aimed at by the patrols,
by day and by night I carted human flesh. Dead, and
more dead, dead men of all sorts, those who had been
killed instantly in the heat of action, those who had
bled to death from their wounds, men who, after being
wounded, had been finished off by the scouts, had been
shot at close range when they were asking for water or
were endeavouring to keep themselves alive by eating
lucerne; then there were the half dead, men shot
through the head, men whose chests had been
riddled; men shot through the groin. When I
looked at these disfigured and groaning masses of
flesh, it seemed to me as if my nerves were being
scraped. The rest of the wounded found their way
in unaided, running, limping, dragging themselves
along, helping themselves with a stick, crawling on
all fours. It was appalling. I saw an infantryman
who had been shot through the chest and who had
walked alone for a league, holding a white flag. He
had lost almost all the blood in his body. I do not
know by what miraculous strength of will he kept
going. When he reached the field hospital he said:
“I waited four days for some one to come. I am
thirsty. I feel better, but I am thirsty.” He smiled.
He was beautiful, this young man, like a waxen St.
Sebastian. Then, without a word more, he fell dead.
I had been assigned to the tent where those most
dangerously wounded were brought. There were about
forty of them, upon a thin layer of straw, and some even
on the bare ground. The place swarmed with flies, and
it stank of dejecta and of dead bodies. When the sun
was high, the heat was stifling. In the evening, the
patients’ teeth chattered with cold. Some of them were
lads of the 20th corps, men with the colours when the
war broke out, all Parisians, of simple and engaging
courage, and able to take an interest in their bedfellows.
There were men from Provence, the pain of whose
wounds forced tears from their eyes, and who confided
to me their amours as they might have done to a sister.
When the pain was at its worst, they all cried out:
“Maman!” It was heartrending.
I tended them. By day and by night, a thousand
times I ministered to their needs. There were but two
basins for seven hundred and twenty wounded. I made
part of a shell serve me for a third. I watched the
dying; I gave what consolation I could; I buried the
dead. Always guarded by two Pomeranian soldiers, I
went through the village begging soup for the poor
lads. The inhabitants were utterly terrorized. Some
of the women, one of them lame and one but a girl of
twelve, astonished me by their persistent kindness.
Under the eyes of the Germans as they were, the ardour
they displayed, simply Christian in character, was truly
heroic. Often, however, I had to make up for the lack
of rations by a gay speech, overflowing with hope.
Continually it was necessary to remake the straw pillows
under the heads of the wounded, to rearrange their
bedding, to help them to move. Always, beneath the
low canvas roof, was to be heard the same orchestra of
cries, hollow sighs, death rattles, and lamentations.
Occasionally, during the long, cold night, lacking
strength to carry the body of some comrade who had
just died all the way across the meadow to the burial
pit, dropping the dead man, I would fall beside him and
go to sleep there.
On the 20th, when our field hospital was already in
fair order, a Prussian captain came by with his company.
He stopped, commandeered the horse of our surgeon-in-chief,
M. Bergé, and promptly mounted it. Then, in
grating and sonorous French, he called out: “Fear
nothing, wounded. I know that in your newspapers—I
read them, the Figaro, the Temps—they term us barbarians.
We are not barbarians. For my part, I bear
a French name; I am the descendant of French refugees.
My name is Charles de Beaulieu. I swear to you that
you will be well cared for in Germany. Germany
respects the red cross.”
At noon on the 28th, having sent away those fit for
transport and also those unfit, having performed a last
amputation, and having buried the rest of the dead, we
set out, with empty stomachs. What was our destination?
The innocents, of whom I was one, had no doubt
that we should be sent back to France by way of
Switzerland. The others, those who had seen the
wounded being finished off, especially the wounded
officers, declared: “The German military authorities
are unrelenting, even though the rankers are good
fellows. The patrols who finished off the officers and
some of the sergeant-majors were acting on strict orders.
If they had been inspired by personal ill-feeling, do you
think it likely that they would give coffee and brandy
to the wounded as they do often enough? Would they
stop to tend them? It is the high command which is
responsible for this base practice. Do you think those
who set so little store upon the lives of the wounded
will respect the red cross?”
Thus it was that, while we were on our way to Dieuze,
carefully escorted, the members of our little troop were
debating the question: “Are we merely detained for a
time, or are we prisoners?” At Dieuze we were marched
round the town. This was not necessary in order to
reach the railway station, and our capture hardly seemed
to afford adequate ground for a triumphal procession.
But it was evidently considered desirable to show us
off to the inhabitants, who made no sign.
A week earlier, when we had entered Dieuze as conquerors,
the shopkeepers had filled our pockets with
chocolate and sweetmeats; the publicans had given us
free drinks. “Above all,” said the people of Dieuze in
plain terms, “take care that they never set foot here
again!” Wishing for a French-German dictionary, I
begged a townsman to get me one. “I don’t use the
article,” he said; “I know no German.” He called his
daughter and she brought me her own dictionary.
“Pay yourself,” I said, offering her my purse. “Oh,
monsieur,” she answered, “I could not take money from
a French soldier!” On the sideboard there stood a
goblet, and she filled it for me with Moselle.
Throughout the little Lorraine town there was the
lively commotion of a feast day. The army and the
populace were exchanging cheerful brotherly greetings.
This delight at seeing one another again seemed so
natural. Night fell. The weather was clear and warm.
The noise of firing reached us from the vine-clad hills.
The regiments were drawn up in line of battle in the
streets. A hundred yards from the houses, behind the
stooks, a French battery was shooting towards Vargaville.
Having walked out to this battery, I enjoyed the
only sight of beauty I had during my campaign.
In the calm air, the smoke plumes of the German
shrapnel looked like fireworks. Near by, one of our
regiments, spread out like a fan, was advancing through
the oats. The men had spent the night in the barracks
of the light horse. Further on, in the stubble and the
green fields, under a rain of shells, the Alpinists were at
work with their rifles, in cheerful mood. In good order
they mounted the northern slope of the smiling basin
between Dieuze and Vargaville. It looked like one of
Van der Meulen’s pictures. The sun was setting. The
perfumed air was filled with shafts of light. After each
discharge, the song of the birds and the humming of the
insects was audible. Then, the limbers having been
attached, the battery went off at the trot to another
position.
On the 28th, on the contrary, Dieuze was like a city
of the dead. No one appeared at the windows. Huge
flags, celebrating the fall of Manonviller, had been
hoisted by German orders. There was a gloomy silence,
like that of a deserted inn, like that of Paris at four in the
morning; but instead of the carts of the market gardeners
and of the dustmen, there were heaps of empty
knapsacks, broken rifles, rags soiled with blood and
clay, which had been carted in from the battlefield.
We marched quickly, keeping the French step, so that
our guards were out of breath. Grey-clad regiments
passed us without a word. When our progress was
arrested by a number of forage wagons filled with
wounded, a tall Prussian colonel, on horseback, wearing
an eyeglass, accosted us in French, saying: “Fous n’afez
pas honte, fous la témocratie française, d’être les alliés
des Russes, ces Parpares?”[7] Not one of us made
answer. We did not even look at him. He sat there
motionless. However, showing him my armlet, I inquired,
“Are we detained, or are we prisoners?”
“Prisoners! You fire on our field hospitals!”
“Allow me to say, monsieur, that I do not believe it.”
Then we resumed our march.
The station; the long wait; the block of carts filled
with wounded; a light cavalryman on foot, with bandaged
head, advancing towards us, hatred in his eyes,
threatening us with his revolver; the search of our
knapsacks; the confiscation of our maps, knives, forks,
razors, punches—everything which could be used for
cutting or piercing. Then we entrained.
I am so foolish as to believe in the good faith of
humanity. It seemed to me incredible that a civilized
nation would not respect the red cross. “Unquestionably,”
I said, “they will send us to Switzerland.”—“We
shall see,” answered Riffard, “whether our journey leads
us southwards.” Were we going south? This was the
great question in dispute. Every one looked at his
watch and examined the position of the sun. Since the
railway line made zigzags, running sometimes to the
south and sometimes to the north, we became divided
into two camps, the “southerners” and the “northerners,”
the light of heart and the foreboders of evil. At times
the dispute between the two factions waxed lively.
After a run northward, the train passed through
Bensdorf, and at nightfall we found ourselves in the
great station of Strasburg. There we were ordered to
get out. We were shut up in a room on the landing,
below the level of the railway, giving on the street.
Through the grated door the passers-by gazed in on us.
I was kept awake by the cold and my recent memories
of the town. After some hours came the order
Vorwärts, and a fresh entrainment. What was our
destination? The first glimmer of dawn showed us the
green hills of Alsace covered with plum-trees. Alas,
we were going northward. Saargemünd. Rhenish
Prussia. Saarbrück. Oh, Saarbrück! What a reception
we had from the women of Saarbrück! My ears
still tingle with their execrations. Then came the
Palatinate, then Philippsburg. Good-bye to hope! I
did not see the Rhine, for we crossed it in the middle
of the night, and I was sleeping on the floor between
the seats.
It was obvious when we awoke that we were going
down hill. We crossed the duchy of Baden, traversed
Würtemberg by way of Stuttgart and the Swabian Jura,
with its green valleys, its woods, and its sparkling rivulets;
at length, after crossing monotonous plains, at the
bottom of a hill we reached Ulm, nestling on the Danube
beneath its graceful Gothic cathedral. Our halt was
made at Neu-Ulm, the first town we came to in Bavaria,
and a town which I shall never forget, for it was there
that we made the second meal of our journey. It consisted
of a bowl of vermicelli soup in which a gobbet of
meat was swimming. The previous day, at Zweibrücken
(otherwise known as Deux-Ponts), we had been given a
slice of Leberwurst. This pittance seemed heavenly to
us, for we were starving after a three days’ fast. Be
blessed among all the towns of Germany, Neu-Ulm and
Zweibrücken!
For the third time since our departure from Dieuze
night fell. The train continued its journey, and its
direction was now south-south-east. The southern
faction was on the increase, and the wind was setting
in the direction of hope. In the course of an animated
discussion, rendered lively by hunger and by the
doubts which Guido expressed as to the likeliness of
our liberation, I fell asleep. At two o’clock in the
morning the train stopped. I did not wake up.
Abbé Guido, tough and rugged like the mountain district
in which he toiled, one of those peasant priests
who wed the church with fanatical asperity, just as
they would have wedded their land, Guido was not
asleep. He was sitting all of a heap in the corner
of the carriage, wearing his képi wrong side before,
smoking cigarettes. From time to time the sardonic
fold of his lips was rendered yet more bitter by
a sigh as he said: “Ah! vidasse! qué vidasse!”[8]
He must have given vent to the apostrophe, which
showed his utter weariness of life, twenty times at
least, when, morning having come, I awakened to the
sound of this malediction.
It was an oppressive day. The sun was fierce; the
sky leaden, without soul, without life. In the carriage
it was stifling.
“Where are we?”
“At Ingolstadt.”
Ingolstadt! The “forty propositions,” Luther,
Father Eck, the celebrated attempt to unite the two
churches, the great “disputations” of the sixteenth
century. But the sight of the bayonets of the
Bavarian guard on the platform dispersed my train
of reminiscences.
My stomach was complaining loudly. We were
told that the stop was for six hours. The sergeant
of the guard assured us that we were to be sent to
Switzerland. Then a medical officer, thick-lipped and
hook-nosed, with small, laughing eyes, a man who
waddled continually with a sort of conceited good-nature,
passed through the carriage, and said in a
nasal accent: “Pas te malades? Pas te fièvres tes
gôlônies?”[9] This Judaico-Swabian French revived
our spirits. But the gnawing in our stomachs continued.
Would they not give us a slice of Wurst or
a plate of soup with a gobbet of meat in it? But
they brought us nothing. The six hours had passed.
The midday heat made the blood boil in our veins.
It happened but yesterday, and yet it has aged me
by a century. I say it without hatred, without the
shadow of a desire for vengeance. Under the ancien
régime the crowd was amenable without restriction
to talliage and to the corvée; now that it reigns, the
crowd is gullible without restriction; it is nothing
better than an unstable puff of vapour at the mercy
of the winds. My heart is filled with pity for the
crowd.
“Where are we going?” I asked of the Feldwebel[10]
in command of the detachment.
“To Fort Orff, two leagues from here, towards the
north. You will find there a thousand of your
compatriots.”
“Are you keeping the men of the red cross as
prisoners?”
“So it seems. I can’t understand it. At Fort
Orff there are certainly quite a hundred Sanitäter.”
“These are fine spoil!”
This Feldwebel was a tall, ruddy young man, trim
of figure, gentle and shy. His name, he told me, was
Conrad Kilian, and he was a schoolmaster from Upper
Franconia. He stationed me at the rear of the column,
beside himself, to act as interpreter. He was greatly
concerned about those of my comrades who were too
obviously exhausted. “How on earth will they be
able to walk uphill for ten kilometres?” This impotent
kindness of heart was touching. The setting
sun cast its rosy light over the Danube and the ancient
city, bristling with church spires and surrounded by
Gothic walls with massive towers. We passed through
it under a deluge of cries of “Death!” And what a
litany of kaputs![11] “Paris kaput! Manonviller kaput!
Verdun kaput!” One might have imagined that the
whole world was kaput! The gentler-minded among
the townsfolk flashed electric torches in our faces,
saying modestly: “You know that our armies are but
a few leagues from Paris?” The better educated
regaled us with French. “La foilà,” they said mockingly,
“la grande nation!” People streamed out of
the public-houses as we went by. On the threshold
the calm and paunchy drinkers waved their mugs and
vented their guffaws. The whole city was agog
beneath the great royal and imperial standards. It
was really ludicrous, all this fuss about fifty field
hospital orderlies.
It was quite clear that the German nation was the
martyr of Europe. “As for us,” said my friend the
Feldwebel, “our conscience is quite at ease!” Yes,
we, the French, were the aggressors; we were the
apaches who had come furtively (sicut fur in nocte) to
disturb the dignified repose of these excellent people,
full of humanity, thoughtful and gentle! It was
unquestionably the anger of an offended conscience,
the holy joy of justice at length avenged, which found
expression in this tumult. How easy it is to distort
facts, to cook public opinion! I looked on and
listened with greater interest than at the most exciting
of plays. From the casements, graceful beneath
their Gothic gables and bright with window-gardens,
imprecations rained down on us. And the gestures
of the silhouetted figures standing in the front of
these lighted interiors sufficed to show those among
us who could not understand Swabian the significance
of the volleys of homeric abuse.
I was not in the least humiliated by the hubbub. My
condition was one of strange exaltation. I was very
sad and yet fascinated—sad at the spectacle of mankind,
and yet fascinated at the chance of seeing man as
he really is. Tacitus, Machiavelli, Stendhal, Ferrero—not
one of these writers had succeeded in giving me
so strong an impression of human reality. But I will
defer my comments. Thoughts conceived under the
spur of hunger and in a sort of physical dementia
are not likely to be just. Besides, it is difficult to
keep one’s head cool when the whole world is
crumbling around one. I fear lest I may have to
laugh some day at the partiality of this simple and
matter-of-fact story, written for some one whom I
love, and in which I faithfully desire to use no
colours but those of truth.
Of our arrival at the fort I can recall nothing but
the memory of a great iron gate which groaned on
its hinges when it was opened, of a few lanterns
held by sentinels running hither and thither in the
darkness, of a gloomy and nauseous staircase where
I stumbled and where my nailed boots made a clatter
that aroused distant echoes, and of a casemate, this
casemate, with cemented floor, bare, without even
straw, its arches sweating damp. I threw myself on
the floor, my cheek on my knapsack. My head was
throbbing with fever. I spent a sleepless night, not
thinking, but a prey to delirium.
