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prison-camp. The rest were 'lost.' So it was no trifle to have a post-office director among your friends. I can convey no idea of the worry and sorrow which the blundering Russian postal authorities caused. To do that I must make you see the pained, expectant eyes of the waiting men, when letters were distributed, hoping against hope that their names would be called; and the weary disappointment when weeks and months passed without a line from home.

A young wife complained: 'I write you and write you all the time, and do not know whether my letters reach you. I have not had a word from you for months. I know that you are writing me I don't doubt that one second; yet it is so hard to wait and wait and to be consumed with this ceaseless worry. It was just that way last autumn; for two months I did not receive a word from you, and then suddenly all the letters you had written during that time came in a bunch.'

Another young wife had been without news from her husband for six months. Yet her letters came every day. Every day she wrote her husband a postal card bearing a message of despair. The husband wrote six times each month trying to console her, yet knowing that he could accomplish nothing, for his cards and letters never got through.

A young wife wrote: 'Light of my life, Wanyuscha. My life is a mere empty shell without you. I don't eat or drink; I simply weep and weep and weep. I go to church just to pray the Mother of God to send me news of you. But she is deaf to my prayers.'

Not only did the Russian post-office busy itself to make the lot of our prisoners harder, but the Russian censors added their bit to that cruel task. It was quite right and proper for the latter to cancel involuntary imprudent remarks

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regarding military and political events. But their meddling did not stop there. The censors even added marginal comments to letters. One wife wrote to her husband in the torment of her soul: 'If it were only all over. If you were only back with me and the children. What good do all our victories do? [This letter was written just when the Russians were advancing in triumph through Galicia.] What do we get from all our military successes if I do not have you with me? All the rest sinks to nothing in comparison. I have only one thought -of you.' The censor added on the margin in a hard, pedantic hand: ‘Absolutely disgraceful! A Russian wife should attach more importance to the military successes of her country!' Under this comment was the red seal of the Petrograd military censor.

Another wife informed her husband of the death of his brother. She did not know that prisoners could receive letters written in their mother-tongue, and consequently wrote in German. She wrote a bad, incorrect German. But she did so to be sure that the letter would reach its destination. 'Your brother fell in battle,' wrote the sorrowing wife; and the censor placed directly opposite the sentence this feelingless comment: 'Why does the wife of a Russian officer write to her husband in German, and in such bad German at that? It is disgraceful!' Directly beneath this, again, stood the official red seal of the Petrograd censor.

And the letters with death messages! One man lost a brother, another his mother, the third a friend. I would see faces light up on mail days when I called the names, and men stretched out glad hands to receive their letters, unconscious of the tragic messages they contained.

Frequently I would give these letters out privately, or inform friends of the recipients of the nature of their con

tents, in order that they might be prepared for bad news. I recall a young officer who was in the camp for ten months. He had not received a single line from home. I can hardly describe his joy on learning that a postal card had come for him; but that postal card brought the message of the death of his mother.

For months one young officer had been receiving letters from his wife, in which he could detect something stilted and artificial, something evidently suppressed. The husband kept writing to her: 'I cannot understand it. What is the matter? Tell me what it is. You are concealing something. Trust me with all your troubles. Are you ill? You evade my questions.' At last the answer came: 'Our little child died six months ago.' The whole letter was nothing but one cry of despair and grief. She had kept her secret for six months in order to spare her husband. But she could contain it no longer. I had seen her photograph; she was a dark, melancholy woman, whose lips, eyes, and hands betrayed an intensely sentimental and passionate temperament. She had fought for months to keep the bad news from her husband; at last her grief welled over in a perfect flood of unchecked lament and anguish. The pale lieutenant's hands trembled as he read the lines, crouched over in a corner; read them over and over, with wild distended eyes.

Frequently, as so often occurs in war, false reports of death reached the prisoncamp. One young lieutenant, hardly more than a boy, was notified that his father had fallen in battle. The next day he wrote a letter of condolence to his mother, so tender and gentle that I felt almost as if I were sharing his grief. A few weeks later news was received that the father was alive and well. There had been a mistake made in names. In many instances also pris

oners in our camp were regarded as dead because their letters never came through. One Caucasian officer was fortunate enough to have his letters reach home; but his mother insisted that he was dead. She was a Georgian woman and could read only the Georgian language. Her son was obliged by the reg ulations to write in the Russian language, and his letters had to be read to his mother. She could not tell whether they were really in his handwriting, and she believed that the letters being received were forgeries and that her son was dead. Finally, the son got permission from the commandant of our prison-camp to write to his mother in Georgian; but the letter which was to bring the mother the assurance for which she so longed did not reach its destination. The Russian censor considered it necessary to intercept it.

I could write a whole chapter about the mothers' letters. Many of them were solicitous, tender, and comforting. But some were constantly filled with accounts of wrangles with their daughters-in-law. Still others merely kept their sons worried by their nervous dis tress and unnecessary fears. A cavalry officer wrote his mother regularly six times each month. Her replies showed that she received all these letters. In spite of this, she bombarded the Red Cross in Geneva, Copenhagen, and Stockholm with inquiries regarding the condition of her son. That organization would forward these inquiries to the commander of the prison-camp, who answered them all with angelic patience.

In contrast with this was the tolerant, almost mischievous, composure of an old lady whose son was constantly beseeching her for money. She always sent him what he wanted. But, thanks to the postal conditions in Russia, there was such delay that her son would get impatient. 'Am I the son of a cook, or of an estate owner, who is

heir to thousands and thousands of acres?' To this sort of thing the mother would answer gently and with the utmost composure: 'Dear Son: You have probably received the money you mentioned before this. I sent it the very day your letter arrived. But I am worried about your health. Your nerves seem to be in bad condition. Please see the camp physician and get a prescription. Avoid excitement and spare yourself.' Other officers also filled their letters with requests for money. But there were men who begged their families to send as little as possible and to use the money at home. They were the great majority, especially among the married men. For these, the state of their family was the main thing. Their letters showed special concern for their children, who were growing up without a father's care and discipline. They were constantly advising their wives as to the education of the children, and writing to the children themselves, telling them to obey their mother.

The most delightful and touching passages of the letters from officers' wives were those mentioning the children: 'Gulik had a sore throat. We called the doctor. Gulik immediately fell in love with him, and the same evening he mentioned him in his prayers: "Dear God, please give health and happiness to dear papa, dear mamma, all our relatives, the coachman Vasili, the dog Pronka, and the Uncle Doctor." Many touching letters also came from the children: 'Every day I pray dear God that my dear father may come home to us.'

Indeed, all letters from children were well filled with this single wish, often in the wording of a prayer. It was a feeling of course shared with the children by their elders and by the prisoners themselves. 'I cannot really imagine that we shall ever be together again. It is as if life stopped going when I was captured. We prisoners are conscious of the past and the future. The present means nothing; we live in the memory of the days when we were together with our families. I cannot really make myself believe that we shall ever be together again. If I could do so, I believe I should go mad with joy.'

It is late in the evening. The prison yard is brightly illuminated by electric arc-lamps. In the corner Landsturm soldiers stand on guard in long black overcoats, rifle in hand. The windows of the prison barracks are darkened. The occupants are asleep, or perhaps lying awake, open-eyed and dreamy. Their thoughts and dreams are all of their distant homes.

I sit bowed over the little green and gray envelopes, taking them one by one and reading them line by line. A queer feeling creeps over me. It is as if I knew what each individual over there in the barracks is hoping, thinking, dreaming. They seem to pass before me in my office, a varied procession, illustrating every human vanity and weakness. Lofty ideals, nobility of character, and deep sentiment from the soul, all stand revealed in these little green and gray and white envelopes which I must post to-night.

BY JEAN MARQUET

[De la Rizière à la Montagne is the novel which received both the Prix de Littérature Coloniale for 1921, awarded by the French Minister of Colonies, and the Prix Corrard de la Société des Gens de Lettres for the same year. The episode translated here is from the first part of the book, which has received much favorable criticism because of its vivid presentation of life and manners in French Indo-China.]

It was eight o'clock in the evening. Night was falling quickly. Over the fields the shadows were growing heavier, and the half silence of the Tonkin night was beginning. Numberless insects were humming, the buffalo toads sounded their lugubrious moans, the rustle of the rice and the bamboo was like the lament of hovering ghosts. Above everything there floated a sharp odor of the soil, in which was mingled the scent of disintegrating vegetable matter and the fresh perfume of new green plants.

Suddenly, the dull throb of a tomtom, beaten with frantic violence, reached the village of Thuong-cat. What was that? Had the dikes broken? After all the woes caused by the cholera, was the village now to undergo the ravages of flood?

Alas, there could no longer be any doubt. The beating of the drum redoubled. A horseman galloped up, shouting that the Great Red River was menacing the dike of Thuong-cat. The earth banks already were letting the water trickle through. There was no time to lose. At the order of the headman, the public crier dashed here and there through the village streets. At every pathway, in every square, after many a tap-tap-tap on his hollow bamboo drum, he proclaimed:

'Oh! Let all the principal old men, and the young men, come to the common house with picks and shovels to

share among themselves the work on the dike of Thuong-cat!'

"Tap-tap-tap!' went the drum.

For six days and six nights a thousand men, bronzed by the rain and the sun of Annam, labored at the dike. One half the coolies repaired the broken banks while the other half rested in the pagodas and the huts of woven branches. Twice each day rice was doled out to them. Here and there were placed jars of tea, which the workers drank with cocoanut milk, to assuage their thirst. For six days and six nights they worked, the men digging up the clay of the rice-fields, the women and the children carrying it to the gaps where it was needed. Little by little, the leaks of reddish water decreased, and then stopped altogether. The danger was over. The headman, taking up his megaphone, shouted that the coolies of the more distant villages might go home.

Nguyên-van-Nguyên, with his shovel on his shoulder, started home with the rest of the men of his village. Happy at having escaped the terrible danger of the broken dike, they sang, along the forest pathway, merry songs which drew bursts of laughter from the women.

As they came within sight of the village, some one cried, 'Nguyên, what has happened at your hut? All the boys of the village are at your door!'

Nguyên, setting off at a run, burst through the crowd to confront a na

tive tax-collector, who, recognizing the owner of the hut, seized him by the throat. An 'Occidental' and two 'customs-house soldiers' showed him two jars of fermented rice-brandy, hidden under the taros in his garden. Nguyên had never even dreamed of such misfortune.

'Great mandarin,' he cried to the French official, 'it could not be mine. I have just come from working on the broken dike. I will swear to it at the pagoda: I have never broken the laws.'

His wife joined her protestations to his. No doubt, while she was asleep in the night, some enemy had put the jars of brandy beneath the taros.

'It may be,' replied the Frenchman, scarcely understanding the language of the Annamites. You can explain to he judge mandarin. You must come with us to Hanoi.'

How could he abandon his young wife, to go to prison like a thief? While he was gone, who would accomplish the ancestral sacrifices and who would work in the rice-field? Nguyên tried to flee, and in his struggle with the native customs-officer, his elbow struck him by accident on the nose. The officer, with exaggerated zeal, shouted for help. Everyone could see that he was bleeding. Poor Nguyên! He could not resist them all. Bound with his own turban, he was hurried roughly along the street, while the boys ran along behind jeering at him.

Was it his blood, throbbing in his ears, or had he heard clearly? No, he was sure of it, now. As he passed the house of his enemy Thuc, a mocking laugh came from behind a bamboo hedge. Now he understood it all. He was the victim of the vengeance of that dog, Thuc, who had always hated him.

At the prison they gave Nguyên a big piece of paper, covered with char

acters that he did not understand, with a little red piece of paper, which was very expensive, in one corner. When they asked him questions, he was content to reply, 'It was my neighbor Thuc, who hates me.'

Nguyên talked with his companions in the jail. With terror, he found that almost all were under the same accusation as he, and that they all said that the rice-brandy had been left by an enemy. Peasant as he was, Nguyên began to wonder whether they were all telling the truth. And how would the judge tell the innocent ones from the liars?

Some days later, as Nguyên was sweeping off the prison-beds with a sorghum broom, the guard approached and said in a low voice:

'If you give me ten piastres, I will take them to Monsieur Bui. He is the court interpreter. For ten piastres he'll get you off. He's a clever fellow.'

'Oh,' said Nguyên, 'I am innocent. The foreign mandarin will let me go.'

"You think so, do you, you blockhead of a peasant?' snarled the guard. 'Eh bien, you will regret it.'

Then, one sunny morning, they took Nguyên, chained like a pirate, to a big house not far from the prison, with fifty other prisoners. There were a great many people inside and outside, Annamites in long black vests, and Europeans, with their white clothes and white skins. After they had waited for a while, he heard some one shout his name: ‘Nguyên-van-Nguyên, of Ngockieu (the Palanquin of Jade).'

He responded, 'Ya,' and went forward, trembling. In the big room it was so dark that he could not see anything. Some one pushed him into the middle, and finally he saw, at one end, a foreign lord, with a white head, who, he thought, must be the judge mandarin, and at his right, an Annamite in embroidered silk and a black turban,

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