CHAPTER II
DIJON TO BELFORT
In Paris, when we passed through it, it was still possible for inoffensive travellers to feel themselves free men. At Dijon we had our first real taste of the restrictions on personal liberty imposed by the war in the zone of the armies. Each time that we came to a new place we had to get at least three separate signed and stamped permits (from three or more officials) empowering us to leave the station, to stay, even for an hour, in the town, and to go into the station again, or anywhere outside the town, when our business was done. To all such applications the attitude of officialdom, entrenched behind barriers and supported by bayonets, and vindictive or regretful according to the temperament of the individual representative of the law and the degree of exasperation to which he had been brought by previous encounters with the public, was, as a rule, one of uncompromising refusal. At first that kind of thing, even when it has become a commonplace of one’s existence, is rather trying. The shock to one’s self-esteem and the sense of confinement are both extremely galling. It is not pleasant day after day to put yourself in a position in which you are liable to be treated like a naughty schoolboy, nor to feel that you are as restricted in your walks abroad as a Dartmoor convict. From the abominable feeling of being shut up in a cage there was, with rare exceptions, no escape, any more than there is for the lions at the Zoo. But we soon found that the chase after permits, if we treated it as a kind of game, was tolerable and even exciting, because each time we played it, though with The Times as our trump card we almost invariably won, we stood a good chance of losing. The real skill consisted in knowing when it was wise and safe to play it. Our opponents, destined in time to become our friends, were generals, staff officers, gendarmes, station guards and their commandants, military police commissaires, civil police “agents,” and other officials of all sorts and sizes. Most of them started by being suspicious of us and our mission, and generally speaking the more humble their post the more they wanted humouring before they could be brought to see that the rules of the game might perhaps be slightly relaxed in our favour. But once they had reached that point, as soon, that is to say, as they got to know us for what we said we were, they were ready to do anything in their power, because we were allies and representatives of The Times—which has not yet been burnt, and never will be, on any Bourse in the east of France. With the exception of a fierce-moustachioed warrior who had a holy horror of German spies (and therefore, if you see the connexion, of English journalists) the only French officials, high or low, who persistently refused anything important for which we asked them, were a distinguished General Officer and his Chief of Staff, who always dealt with us through their subordinates. If only we could have seen and known the General himself I firmly believe that he would have been as kind as all the rest. But he had other things to do, or else he never got our cards and letters.
Having got into Dijon, and having received reluctant permission to stay there, first for a night, and then for as much longer as we liked, the next thing was to get out of it, using it, if it would allow itself so to be used, as a stepping stone to higher things. It was occupied at that time by the 20th (Reserve) Army Corps, which had its staff headquarters at the hotel where we put up. Both before and after we received the news of the Battle of the Marne all the officers whom we met there were chafing to be at the front, and openly envious of our poor little chance of getting there before them. They little knew how slender it was. However, in General Brissaud, the Governor of the town, we found after a time a real friend, and from him we got a personal visa as far as Besançon, which was the limit of his jurisdiction, together with a verbal recommendation that we should be passed on to Belfort. At Besançon we had a bad quarter of an hour, as the station-commandant hesitated a long time before he agreed to let us go on, and we only just escaped being sent back to Paris. Something, however, turned the scale in our favour, and at last, though with rather a wry face, he sent us on our way rejoicing, greatly relieved at our escape, but careful not to show it till we were safe in our carriage.
It was long after dark when we got to Belfort. There was nowhere for us to sleep in the station, and no return train. Otherwise I think the little knot of officers who shook their heads doubtfully over our passports on the dimly lit platform would certainly have packed us into it straight away. There were some grounds for their hesitation. We had reached one of the chief of the gates of France, and were getting near the enemy. The Trouée de Belfort, the wide flat opening between the foothills of the Vosges and the Jura mountains, had to be defended from possible foes within as well as without. War, as the warrior with the fierce moustachios remarked to me a month or two later, is a serious matter, and nowhere were the French taking it more seriously than in the war-worn outpost fortress that stands sentinel in front of the Belfort gap, linked to the heart of the Republic by the long chain of lonely sentries that guarded the railway night and day all the way to Paris. Outside it very little was known at that time—in England nothing at all—of its then condition. Even the Germans knew nothing, so they, or their newspapers, invented lies about it, and said that it was closely invested. But though no German soldier, except in an aeroplane, ever got within miles of it, the state of siege proclaimed by the Governor was enforced with rigid strictness, and the whole of the civil population, except those who catered for the needs of the garrison, had been evacuated some days before we got there. At the best, therefore, however genuine our passports and however innocent our appearance, we were two bouches inutiles who would have to be fed; at the worst, as journalists, the chances were that we should be indiscreet (that is the normal view); and anyhow it was very doubtful if we had any right to be there at all. But there, undeniably, we were, and so—well, perhaps after all the best way out of the difficulty was to send us to the Governor’s headquarters and leave him to deal with our case. So to the General’s quarters, the heart of the fortress, which we were as anxious as any German to reach, we set out, under the escort of Private Jouanard, election agent and newspaper correspondent, a convinced socialist and anti-militarist, but, like his idol Jaurès, a Frenchman first of all, and therefore an ardent soldier of France, a warm admirer of England, and a bitter enemy of the Boche and all his works.
I suppose that long before this book is published England will have at last realized the truth of the creed of French soldiers like Private Jouanard, and will have demanded as one man to be put, like France, on the footing of national service. But I may be too sanguine; we may have to grapple with the industrial revolution threatened by Mr. J. H. Thomas, M.P. In any case I should like to quote once more a proclamation written by Private Jouanard for l’Humanité, which, before our acquaintance was twelve hours old, he gave me for publication in The Times. It was addressed “Aux Camarades Socialistes,” and signed “L. J. A mobilized comrade.”
“We are now at the parting of the ways. After having fought stubbornly against that human scourge—war, the insatiable ambition of a despot forces us to take up arms. Despite the immense sorrow that grips us at the thought of being the involuntary murderers of those Germans and Austrians who have the same communion of ideas, in their name and in our own, for humanity, socialism, right against the arbitrary, civilization against barbarism, in the name of all these sacred principles, our brothers of England, of Belgium, of Russia, and ourselves have answered ‘Present’ with one voice to the call of our native land. Each one filled with emotion and confident in the justice of our cause, we have flown to arms at the cry of Liberty, like the great revolutionaries of ’93.
“Socialists of the allied armies, we have not to weep, but to avenge the death of the martyr of the Idea, our great friend Jaurès, our guide