Hundreds of Russians stood about together outside, in strange, poor, sc.r.a.ped-together clothes, just as they had come from Germany, peering at f.a.n.n.y in silence through the open doorway.
"But I thought these were _liberated_ prisoners from Germany?"
"Don"t ask me!" said the little man disgustedly. "I wish to heaven they were all back in Germany. Look at me! I"ve fought in the Somme, the Aisne, and Verdun, and now at the end of the war I"m left here to look after these pigs!"
A sergeant entered. "A man to take the prisoner in the fourth cell up to the doctor," he said sharply.
"It"s not my turn," said the little man, aggrieved that the eye of the sergeant should so rest on him. "It"s yours!" he said to the man on the bench beside him. "It"s yours!" replied this man to the next.
"Yes, it"s Chaumet"s! Yes, it"s Chaumet"s, _va-t"en_!" they all said, and a man with a cast in his eye got up slowly, grumbling, and turned towards the door.
"Here, dress yourself!"
"What, to take a ... to the doctor?"
He pulled his belt and gun off the rack with an ill-will and disappeared, buckling it on.
"You have Russians in cells, too?"
"Those who won"t work, yes. On bread and water. That one has been on bread and water for five days. In my opinion he"ll die."
"But why won"t they work?"
"Work! He won"t even clean his own cell out! They say it"s because they are Bolshevists, but I don"t know about that. I talk a little Russian, and I think they are convinced that if they make themselves at all useful to us we shall never send them home. Some of them think they are in Germany still. They"re an ignorant lot."
An American came in rather hesitatingly, but without nodding to the French.
"We"ve got bacon-chips in our camp," he said, addressing f.a.n.n.y directly.
"I don"t like to bring them in here, but if you"d just step across ... it isn"t a stone"s throw."
She did not like to desert the French, but she was sick with hunger, and rose. She knew she would have nothing from the guard-house meal, for they probably had the same ration as she--one piece of meat, two potatoes, and one sardine a man.
After all, food was more important than sentiment, and she followed him out of the hut.
"You won"t get anything from those skinflints," said the American, "so we thought you"d better come and have some chips."
"Because they have nothing to give," she answered, half inclined to turn back. The American barracks were opposite, and in the yard, under a shelter of planks, the men were eating round a complicated travelling kitchen on wheels. "They have all the latest, richest things," thought f.a.n.n.y, jealous for the French, antagonistic, yet hungry. But when she was among the Americans, they were simple and kind to her, offering her a great tray of fried bacon chips, concerned that she should have to eat them with her hand, washing out their tin mugs and filling them with coffee for her, making her sit on a barrel while she ate. "It"s only that they are so different," she thought. "So different from the French that they can never meet without hurting and jarring each other."
Russians slouched about in the snow, washing the pans. When they had finished eating the Americans called to the Russians to eat what remained of the bacon chips. Watching them eat with the hunger of animals, they said:
"They starve them in the French barracks. We give them food here, or they"d sure die."
"They give them what they can in the French barracks; the soldiers don"t get a ration like this, you know, even for themselves."
"Their fault for not kicking up a shindy," said the free-born Americans.
"We wouldn"t stand it."
"You have no idea of poverty."
Food was even lying in the snow. A soldier cook thrust his head out of a hut, crying: "Any one want any more chips?"
She knew that it was probably true what the Frenchman had said, that the Americans shot the Russians as lightly as if they were sparrows. Yet here they wept over the French ration that kept the Russians hungry, though alive and well. What a curious mixture of sentiment and brutality they were....
She pulled out her cigarette case and offered a cigarette to a man standing near her. He took it and answered in a thick, lisping Jewish accent, soft and uniformed: "I don"t smoke, ma"am. But I"ll keep it as a souvenir give to me by the only lady I"ve seen in three months."
"That"s really true? You haven"t seen a woman for three months?"
"No, ma"am. Not a one. It must seem strange to you to hear us say that.
Just as though you were a zebra."
"There"s some one over by your car," said the sentry, who had no idea of silence at his post. She got up quickly and flew back to the other barracks, jumping the deep pools of water and mud and the little heaps of soiled snow, started up the car and drove back to the _citadelle_ for lunch.
At one-thirty they started out again, to chase over the grey downs in search of Russian camps folded away in small depressions and hollows, invisible from the main roads.
And thus, day after day, for five days, she drove him from morning to evening, from camp to camp around Verdun, until they had seen many thousands of Russians. Sometimes the French lieutenant came with them, and once or twice the Russian gravely invited him to sit in front with the driver. Then they would talk together a little in English, and once he said: "Would you like me to tell you something that will surprise you and interest me?"
She looked round.
"Your employer," he said, smiling gently over the expression, "is jealous of you."
She did not know what to make of this.
"He dislikes it intensely when you talk to the commandant of the _citadelle_."
"But...."
"He does not think you exclusive enough, considering you, as he does, as _his woman_."
"But, why...."
"Yes, of course! But you ought to realise that you are the only woman for miles around, and you belong to us!"
"You too?"
"Well, yes. I have something the same feeling. But his is stronger because his nature is Oriental. He thinks: "This woman is a great curiosity, therefore a great treasure; and this treasure belongs to me.
I brought her here, I am responsible for her, she obeys my orders.""
"But does he tell you all this, or do you guess it?"
"We talk of this and that."
That night in the mess-room the Russian leant across the table to f.a.n.n.y.
"What is man"s mystery to a woman if she lives surrounded by him?"
"Oh, but that"s not necessary ... mystery!"
"It _is_ necessary to love."