the prospect of victory. Is this the Germany I knew last year?

I had traveled through the country as if on a pilgrimage. We passed through Heidelberg, my peaceful Heidelberg, so lovable in the shade of its august ruin and of its oakcrowned 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 neighboring 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.

THE setting sun cast its rosy light over the Danube and the ancient city of Ingolstadt, in Bavaria, when we passed through it as prisoners. 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.

We passed through the city under a deluge of cries of "Death!" And what a litany of kaputs we heard! "Paris kaput! Manonviller kaput! Verdun kaput!" One might have imagined that the whole world was kaput. The gentle-minded among the townsfolk flashed electric

torches in our faces, saying modestly, "You know that our armies are only a few leagues from Paris?" The bettereducated 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 the sergeant-major, "our conscience is quite at ease." Yes, we, the French, were the aggressors; we were the apaches who had come furtively 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. 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-from none of these have I gained 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, which I

have written for some one whom I love, and in which I faithfully desire to use no colors but those of truth.

Of our arrival at Fort Orff 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.

September 16, 1914.

THE casemate is empty. My comrades have gone up to the nine-o'clock roll-call. I am still "confined to my room by illness." I am happy to be alone. It is cold. Wrapping my rug closely round me, I lie listening to the bitter wind. I am alone; I am free. It seems to me that the current of life has swept me away to the end of the world, depositing me amid dumb deserts of infinite vastness.

The straw upon which I have been lying for a fortnight is reduced to powder. I roll myself in it as if it were a dust bath for chickens. How thin is my rug! My limbs shake with the cold of fever. Yesterday for a quarter of an hour I dragged myself along in the east court, but I was unable to get as far as the first glacis. When I was coming down-stairs on the way back my legs seemed heavier than hand-grenades. I am very cold. Through the upper parts of the two screened windows I catch a glimpse of a strip of sky, gray and heavy, crushing down on the slope, on the portcullis on the top of the slope, on the wild rose-bush which breaks the straight line of the portcullis. On the steep slope I see the long grass bending before the gusts.

I am alone. How delightful! What wealth! What a privilege! Here we are never alone. We sleep, we dress, we eat,

we amuse ourselves, we walk about, we hunt for lice, we dream, we are filled with indignation, we soften, we caress the dear relics hidden in our knapsacks, we retire into ourselves-all this we do in public. How well do I understand the phrase of St. Bernard, the phrase of a monk, "O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo!"

Take men who have nothing in common but the flag; throw these soldiers pell-mell into a cellar, where they hunger and are cut off from news; subject them to meddlesome regulations; compel them, in this wretchedness, to live always in close proximity, and far from everything which they have hitherto known as life. Doubtless they will have their good hours; at times, when their minds are filled with thoughts of those they love and of their motherland, their words and their silences will be no less pure and sweet than is a long summer twilight: but at other times— No, I wish to forget. After all, the heroes of the great epic are only men. Why should we expect of them, during months and months, a patience and a self-command of which many men in good society, men esteemed well bred, are incapable when a caller stays too long?

The effort to pull myself together and to become what I was before these days in prison is too much for my poor strength. I am shivering with cold. To throw off this torpor I should need to eat three or four times as much as we are allowed. Alas! the wretched half-loaf of the first few days has been reduced to a third of a loaf, for the German authorities are methodically restricting our rations. Even the dullest of the soldiers, heavy, goodnatured fellows, those who never think and consequently waste very little energy, find it difficult to keen mothers, could you of your sons, yo used to pet and in the would se drawn f skin,

carved by Boude, he looks straight in front of him. He is in a fine fit of the blues. If his fiancée could see him thus, his fiancée of Ciotat!

At the end of the room, beneath the windows, two groups are playing cards for pfennig stakes. Beyond them, leaning against the bars, Sabatier, grave and mute, is plaiting a horsehair watch-chain. Over there, from every mouth, from all the Bavarian pipes hanging over the players' stomachs, mount thick clouds of smoke. In our corner, spoken of as the "club" by the men of the "fond," or window end, every one is silent. Bertrand is in Ciotat. Guido, hunched against the wall, his kepi pulled down over his eyes, seems to be turning over disconsolate thoughts. Boude, the good Boude, with the soul of an artist who has lost his way in every-day life, stands up, looking at our trio.

All of a sudden, Bertrand, with a yawn,

murmurs:

"I would sell my life for a penny." Boude smiles at his alter ego.

"For my part, old chap, I brought with me from Marseilles a certain store of philosophy."

"That also gets used up, Sergeant Boude," says Guido, "just as certainly as the cigar that you are smoking. And once your cigar is finished, in these times of dearth, you may find it difficult to get

THE FIRST LETTER

October 8, 1914. YESTERDAY the rumor was current, derived, it was said, from the guard, that we were going to be permitted to write to our families.

That evening I was deluged with requests: "Riou, could you lend me your pen and ink?" "Can you spare a sheet or two of paper?" There was a regular procession of them. The mere thought, or, rather, the conviction, that they would be able to write home transfigured them. Home, the fireside, the loved ones, the familiar objects, the birthplace, the motherland!

Even the cooks, more practised in criticism than the other prisoners, had lost all sense of proportion. They handled their utensils with a terrible joy. Then the tumult was stilled. A gentle atmosphere of harmony hovered over the stoves. The cooks were silent and motionless. Like every one else, they were bewitched with thoughts of France. For France they forgot the most serious of their immediate duties. One was allowed an entrance into the secret universe of their thoughts, as if into a public place.

In the evening, when roll-call was finished, the news was confirmed.

To-day every one has spent the morning

in writing his letter, the one and only letter to which we are entitled. But what a disappointment! No more than one company is to be allowed to send letters each day. We are fiye companies. Only one letter every five days! But that melancholy barrier of silence which for a month and a half has separated us from the world has at last been broken down.

It is true that we have been ordered to say nothing about the war and to instruct our correspondents to observe a similar restriction. This morning these forbidden things have disturbed us little. Do you think that any

one of the prisoners, when writing his letter, had a fancy for dissertations upon strategy? His wife, his fiancée, his children, his mother, his whole life, were before his eyes. At length people would know that he was alive. head was singing with voices from his own fireside. He was intoxicated, at once giddy with excitement, softened, bitter, almost mad. The most indifferent, the most torpid, seemed to have been awakened with a start. Permission to write, the act of writing, had shaken them out of their inertia.

For, fortunately, imprisonment dulls our sensibilities. At first it causes poignant suffering, and suffering, of whatever kind, sharpens the faculties. But im prisonment is above all hunger, chronic hunger. Those only who have experienced it can understand the effect which chronic hunger speedily exercises even upon an active brain. At first it induces hallucinations. With terrible realism the sufferer recalls meals eaten before the war, some particular dinner, such and such a picnic. The nerves of taste and smell, exasperated by the scanty regimen, are visited by memories of odors and tastes. The man thinks of nothing but eating. Literally he is nothing but a clamorous stomach. He will lie awake the entire night think

ing only of this, What can I do to-morrow morning to secure a supplementary loaf? Little Brissot, my friend of the Alpine Infantry, when we were walking a few days ago with our two French medical officers, made this. unexpected confession:

"Only one thing can give me pleasure now-to get food. Only one man interests me the man who is capable of getting me food."

Even in the bravest the soldier spirit dies. Look at these men crouching on their heaps of straw hour after hour, silent and half asleep, or look at them as with hands in pockets and hanging heads they slowly make their way up the slopes of the fort-yard; who can imagine that these are the men who fought like lions at Montcourt and Lagarde?

These sudden visions of home were requisite to restore many of our prisoners, though only for a moment, to life. But for how many of them this has also involved a revival of suffering!

"I don't know how I shall be able to feed my three children next year unless I can get home soon. I can't help thinking about my farm, where the harvests of corn and grapes have been poorly gathered, and where everything is running to waste." The soldier who spoke thus comes from Uriage, in Dauphiné. He stopped me when I was walking with measured steps after the seven-o'clock coffee, taking my anti-rheumatic constitutional on the slopes. He drew me aside. into a corner of the fortifications. Taking a letter from his pocket, he modestly asked me in a melancholy tone: "Could you tell me if that is all right, and whether you think it will be allowed to pass? Please be good enough to read it. You have my leave." Poor comrade! It cut me to the

heart to see him. He wanted to look selfpossessed, to look like a man; but he had been weeping. He spoke low and quietly in order to keep the tears out of his voice. The paper shook in his hand. I read: "My dear Marguerite,"-there was nothing in the letter,-"don't worry about me . . . All is well with me We are very well cared for

These reassuring phrases were reiterated throughout the four pages, the very words repeated again and again. My master, Jean Monnier, declares that repetition is the rhetorical flower of simple minds. What a tragedy underlay the disjointed prose! This prisoner of war

eyes, the cold, distrustful eyes of the mountain-dweller and of the priest. Then, making up his mind to open his thin lips, he said:

"You are in a gloomy mood. You have been writing to her."

We went out together. I felt his harsh sympathy as he strode by my side. Every one was out of doors, but there were very few groups. Each man walked by himself, rapt in his own visions. Guido remarked:

"It 's extraordinary how little noise they make, eleven hundred warriors."

whose eyes shone with hunger, this hollowcheeked man who had spent all his poor pocket-money so that he could no longer buy any smuggled goods,-bread, sugar, or chocolate,-wrote: "All is well with me," "We are very well cared for." He said it and resaid it monotonously throughout the entire letter. It was essential that his wife should have no doubt about the matter, his poor wife, who had already much trouble to bear. I should have liked to pet him like a little brother, this man already gray.

I also wrote my letter. Having too much to say, I said nothing. What are words when the heart hungers for material presence, for a touch, for a living silence? My letter was not even of the regulation length.

At eleven Guido came in with his rug

THE RUSSIANS

April 20, 1915. THE Russian prisoners whom we were dreading have arrived. For the last three months the Germans have been threatening us with them as with the plague, adding, "In the camps where the French and the Russians are together they always come to blows."

One morning the Oberstabs-arzt inoculated us against cholera. Every one said, "They are coming!" The sergeant-major did, in fact, go through the casemates, allotting five to one, ten to another, and fifteen to some. At six in the evening, an hour earlier than usual, the electric bell rang for the evacuation of the courts. Immediately afterward the forty-nine heads of rooms were summoned, were