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.”
This calm declaration from one so highly cultured that he will distract his mind from the cares of important business by reading James and Bergson, from one intimately acquainted with Montaigne and the Lake poets, seemed to us neither paradoxical, nor irrelevant, nor cynical.
Among those who are able, by illicit and extremely laborious methods, to procure food from outside, there are few who do not seize their opportunity.
Men will try to get a thorough chill, hoping to be sent to the infirmary, where they usually receive double rations. Yesterday two prisoners, one of them a corporal, fainted from hunger. Quite a number are so weakened by want of food that they can no longer climb the staircases leading to the courts and to the slopes. When we heard just now that in the neighbouring fort, Fort Hartmann, one of the prisoners had hanged himself, the same thought ran through all our minds: “The epidemic has begun, and will speedily spread to our own prison.”
Ultimately, however, people grow accustomed to short commons. Their activities, in some cases at least, gradually become accommodated to their regimen. In the long run, physical and mental life are reduced to nil. The man hardly suffers, and he no longer revolts.
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; 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 but 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 of grapes have been so 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 self-possessed, 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 whose eyes shone with hunger, this hollow-cheeked 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 so much trouble to bear. I should have liked to pet him like a little brother, this man already grey.