In the Claws of the German Eagle | Page 5

selfless considerations. I am hankering to get into
the neighborhood of this fellow when he doesn't hold all the trump
cards. In justice to Javert, I must say that he reciprocated my feeling
magnificently, and, inasmuch as he was the cat and I the mouse, and a
very small one at that, he probably found much more spiritual
satisfaction in the exercise of his feelings than I did in mine. That is
why I was anxious to have the war end and embrace the first
opportunity to change our roles. I yearned to give him his proper place
in the sun.
Having completed my case, he demanded my papers, and then bade me
open the door. There was a soldier waiting, and with him ahead and

Javert behind, I was escorted into the courtyard. Here a double-door
was opened, and I was thrust into a room filled with a motley collection
of persons guarded by a dozen soldiers with rifles ready.
The sight was anything but reassuring. I turned toward Javert and asked,
somewhat frantically, I fear: "What is all this for? Aren't you going to
do anything about my case?"
My hitherto cool, smiling manner must have been an irritation to him.
A German official, especially a petty one, takes everything with such
deadly seriousness that he can't understand us taking things so
debonairly, especially when it is his own magisterial self.
So I think he thoroughly enjoyed my first signs of perturbation, and
said: "Your case will be settled in a little while--perhaps directly." He
turned to a soldier, bade him watch me, and disappeared.
About five minutes later I heard outside the command "Halt!" to a
squad of soldiers. The doors opened and Javert reappeared, this time in
the full uniform of an officer. For the moment I thought he had come
with a firing squad and they were going to make short shrift of me. The
grim humor of disposing of my case thus "directly" came home to me.
But merely flicking the ashes from his cigarette, he glanced round the
room without offering the slightest recognition, and then disappeared.
How he made his change from civilian clothes so quickly I can't
understand. It seemed like a vainglorious display of his uniform in
order to let us take full cognizance of his eminence.
I began now a survey of my surroundings. Our room was in fact a
hallway crammed with soldiers and prisoners. The soldiers, with fixed
bayonets in their rifles, stood guard at the door. The prisoners, some
thirty-five in number, were ranged on benches, overturned boxes, and
on the floor. We were of every description, from well-groomed men of
the city to artisans and peasants from the fields. The most interesting of
the peasants was a young fellow charged with carrying dispatches
through the lines to Antwerp. The most interesting of the well-dressed
urban group was a theater manager charged with making his playhouse
the center of distribution for the forbidden newspapers smuggled into
Brussels. There was a Belgian soldier in uniform, woefully battered and
beaten; and for the first time I saw a German soldier without his rifle.
He, too, was a prisoner waiting trial, having been sent up to the
headquarters accused of muttering against an under officer.

All these facts I learned later. Then I sat paralyzed in an atmosphere
charged with smoke and silence. The smoke came not from the
prisoners, for to them it was forbidden, but from the soldiers, who
rolled it up in great clouds. The silence came from the suspicion that
one's next neighbor might be a spy planted there to catch him in some
unwary statement. Each man would have sought relief from the strain
by unbosoming his hopes and fears to his neighbor, but he dared not.
That is one fearful curse of any cause that is buttressed by a system of
espionage. It scatters everywhere the seeds of suspicion. All society is
shot through with cynical distrust. It poisons the springs at the very
source--one's faith in his fellows. Ordinarily one regards the next man
as a neighbor until he proves himself a spy. In Europe he is a scoundrel
and a spy until he proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is a
neighbor.
And then one is never certain. People were everywhere aghast to find
even their life-long friends in the pay of the enemy. A large military
establishment draws spies as certainly as a carcass draws vermin; the
one is the inevitable concomitant of the other. It is the Nemesis of all
human brotherhood.
Now to be taken as a prisoner of war was to most men more of a
Godsend than a tragedy. The prisoner knew that he was to be corralled
in a camp. But he was alive