The Diary of a French Private: War-Imprisonment 1914-1915

The Russians 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 Oberstabsarzt inoculated us against cholera. Every one said: “They are coming!” TheFeldwebel did in fact go through the casemates, allotting five to one, ten to another, and fifteen to some. In the afternoon, groups were watching from the outer part of the slope which commands the road from Ingolstadt. There was much grumbling. Some were cursing the Germans for wishing to poison us with the deadly Asiatic disease. Some, frightened by the inoculation, were already imagining themselves black and rotten.

At six in the evening, an hour earlier than usual, the electric bell rang for the evacuation of the courts. Immediately afterwards, the forty-nine heads of rooms were summoned, were drawn up in line beyond the bridge, and were told to wait.


The gentle April twilight had already enveloped the brow of the slopes, and the lower red-brick front looking into the ditch lay hidden in the gathering darkness as if in ambuscade. French prisoners were bunched round the windows. With laughing faces they defied the commandant, stiff and dapper, doing sentry-go on the glacis. Under his very nose they began to hum the Russian national anthem. But the Russians did not come. The great black gate, buttressed between the mossy walls of the counterscarp, starred with anemone and colt’s-foot, remained obstinately shut. Impatience grew. At length the outer sentry whistled, the Hauptmann went forward, and the gate opened.

The distribution of the convoy was effected in the Prussian manner. Each headman went to take delivery of his Russians outside, behind the gate, and conducted the supplementary squad to his casemate. This took half an hour. In Indian file, following their French corporal or sergeant, they went along at a quick step, but noiselessly in their supple jack-boots; they were muffled in huge grey overcoats, and their size was increased by enormous fur caps. Night fell. The dead colour of their uniforms melted away in the darkness. The silence was absolute. Pale Scythian faces, flat-nosed Tartar faces, Asiatic types with wide cheek-bones, Samoyede beards, downy and curled—all the Russias were passing. We looked on. When they had crossed the bridge the fort swallowed them.

In the interior, to the scandal of our masters, French rule prevailed. Notwithstanding the order confining us to our rooms, the “Frantsuz” crowded to the thresholds to greet the “little fathers”—“Good-day, Russkis!” they cried, regardless of the Boches; “Germania kaput! The Carpathians floup!” They made roguish gestures indicating freedom.

“What monkeys!” thought the Germans, as they looked on. The truth is that no one understands so well as the French how to invent a language, to supplement words by signs and onomatopœias. They have an excellent excuse for neglecting the study of foreign languages! Does a good mime learn foreign tongues?

The Russians got on little faster in the corridors of Fort Orff than in the attack upon Lowicz, where their advance was obstructed by barbed wire. Each door was an ambush; every Frenchman an obstacle. Cigars and cakes rained upon them. And then the handshakings and the amicable clappings on the shoulder. Détry, though he is as much afraid of lice as of cholera, exchanged his képi for an imposing Siberian headdress made of sheepskin, bristling, stinking, and alive!

The little fathers had had nothing to eat since the previous day. The quartermaster served them out a morsel of cheese, but no bread. “Germania, niet hleb” (“There is no bread in Germany!”), said the Russians, “Ja, nichts Brot!” rejoined the French in their bad German; “but France Brot, plenty Brot!” Thus communicating with their friends in n****r talk, they emptied their haversacks before the hungry men.