The Enormous Room

by e. e. cummings

  The planton who suffered all these indignities was a solemn youth with wise eyes situated very far apart in a mealy expressionless ellipse of face,to the lower end of which clung a piece of down,exactly like a feather sticking to an egg. The rest of him was fairly normal with the exception of his hands,which were not mates;the left being considerably larger,and made of wood.

  I was at first somewhat startled by this eccentricity;but soon learned that with the exception of two or three,who formed the Surveillant’s permanent staff and of whom the beefy one was a shining example,all the plantons were supposed to be unhealthy;they were indeed réformés whom le gouvernement français sent from time to time to La Ferté and similar institutions for a little outing,and as soon as they had recovered their health under these salubrious influences they were shipped back to do their bit for world-safety,democracy,freedom,etc.,in the trenches. I also learned that of all the ways of attaining cabi­not by far the simplest was to apply to a planton,particularly to a permanent planton,say the beefy one( who was reputed to be peculiarly touchy on this point )the term embusqué. This method never failed. To its efficacy many of les hommes,and more of the girls( by whom the plantons,owing to their habit of taking advantage of the weaker sex at every opportunity,were even more despised )attested by not infrequent spasms of consumptive coughing,which could be plainly heard from the further end of one cour to the other.

  In a little over two hours I learned an astonishing lot about La Ferté itself : it was a co-educational receiving station whither were sent from various parts of France( a )males suspected of espionage and( b )females of a well-known type qui se trouvaient dans la zone des armées. It was pointed out to me that the task of finding such members of the human race was pas difficile : in the case of the men,any foreigner would do,provided his country was neutral( e.g. Holland ) : as for the girls,inasmuch as the armies of the Allies were continually retreating,the zone des armées( particularly in the case of Belgium )was always including new cities,whose petites femmes became automatically subject to arrest. It was not to be supposed that all the women,of La Ferté were putains;there were a large number of femmes honnêtes,the wives of prisoners,who met their husbands at specified times on the floor below the men’s quarters whither man and woman were duly and separately conducted by plantons. In this case no charges had been preferred against the women;they were voluntary prisoners,who had preferred to freedom this living in proximity to their husbands. Many of them had children;some babies. In addition there were certain femmes honnêtes whose nationality,as in the case of the men,had cost them their liberty;Marguerite the blanchisseuse,for example,was a German.

  La Ferté-Macé was not properly speaking a prison,but a Porte or Camp de Triage : that is to say,persons sent to it were held for a Commission,composed of an official,an avocat,and a capitaine de gendarmerie,which inspected the Camp and passed upon each case in turn for the purpose of determining the guiltiness of the suspected party. If the latter were found guilty by the Commission,he or she was sent off to a regular prison camp pour la durée de la guerre;if not guilty,he or she was( in theory )set free. The Commission came to La Ferté once every three months. It should be added that there were prisonniers who had passed the Commission two,three,four,and even five times,without any appreciable result : there were prisonnières who had remained in La Ferté a year,and even eighteen months.

  The authorities at La Ferté consisted of the Directeur,or general overlord,the Surveillant,who had the plantons under him and was responsible to the Directeur for the administration of the Camp,and the Gestionnaire( who kept the accounts ). As assistant,the Surveillant had a mail clerk who acted as translator on occasion. Twice a week the Camp was visited by a regular French army doctor( médecin major )who was supposed to prescribe in severe cases and to give the women venereal inspection at regular intervals. The daily routine of attending to minor ailments and injuries was in the hands of Monsieur Ree-shar( Richard ),who knew probably less about medicine than any man living and was an ordinary prisonnier like all of us,but whose impeccable conduct merited cosy quarters. A balayeur was appointed from time to time by the Surveillant,acting the Directeur,from the inhabitants of La Ferté;as was also a cook’s assistant. The regular Cook was a fixture,and a boche like other fixtures,Marguerite and Richard. This might seem curious were it not that the manner appearance and actions of the Directeur himself proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was all which the term Boche could possibly imply.

  “He’s a son of a bitch” B said heartily. “They took me up to him when I came two days ago. As soon as he saw me he bellowed : ‘Imbécile et inchrétien!’;then he called me a great lot of other things including Shame of my country,Traitor to the sacred cause of liberty,Contemptible coward and Vile sneaking spy. When he got all through I said ‘Je ne comprends pas français.’ You should have seen him then.”

  Separation of the sexes was enforced,not,it is true,with success,but with a commendable ferocity. The punishments for both men and girls were pain sec and cabinot.

  What on earth is cabinot?” I demanded.

  There were various cabinots : each sex had its regular cabinot,and there were certain extra ones. B knew all about them from Harree and Pompon,who spent nearly all their time in the cabinot. They were rooms about nine feet square and six feet high. There was no light and no floor,and the ground( three were on the ground floor )was always wet and often a good many inches under water. The occupant on entering was searched for tobacco,deprived of his or her paillasse and blanket,and invited to sleep on the ground on some planks. One didn’t need to write a letter to a member of the opposite sex to get cabinot,or even to call a planton embusqué—there was a woman,a foreigner,who,instead of sending a letter to her embassy through the bureau( where all letters were read by the mail clerk to make sure that they said nothing disagreeable about the authorities or conditions of La Ferté )tried to smuggle it outside,and attrapait vingt-huit jours de cabinot. She had previously written three times,handing the letters to the Surveillant,as per regulations,and had received no reply. Fritz,who had no idea why he was arrested and was crazy to get in touch with his embassy,had likewise written several letters,taking the utmost care to state the facts only and always handing them in;but he had never received a word in return. The obvious inference was that letters from a foreigner to his embassy were duly accepted by the Surveillant,but rarely if ever left La Ferté.

  B and I were conversing merrily à propos the God-sent miracle of our escape from Vingt-et-Un,when a benign-faced personage of about fifty with sparse greyish hair and a Benjamin Franklin expression appeared on the other side of the fence,from the direction of the door through which I had passed after bumping the beefy bull. “Planton” it cried heavily to the wooden handed one,“Deux hommes pour aller chercher l’eau.” Harree and Pompom were already at the gate with the archaic water-wagon,the former pushing from behind and the latter in the shafts. The guardian of the cour walked up and opened the gate for them,after ascertaining that another planton was waiting at the corner of the building to escort them on their mission. A little way from the cour,the stone wall which formed one of its boundaries( and which ran parallel to the other stone wall dividing the two cours )met the prison building;and here was a huge double-door,twice padlocked,through which the water-­seekers passed on to the street. There was a sort of hydrant up the street a few hundred yards,I was told. The Cook( Benjamin F. that is )required from three to six wagonfuls of water twice a day,and in reward for the labour involved in its capture was in the habit of giving a cup of coffee to the captors. I resolved that I would seek water at the earliest opportunity.

  Harree and Pompom had completed their third and final trip and returned from the kitchen,smacking their lips and wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands. I was gazing airily into the muddy sky,when a roar issued from the doorway:

  “Montez les hommes!”

 
It was the beefy-necked. We filed from the cour,through the door,past a little window which I was told belonged to the kitchen,down the clammy corridor,up the three flights of stairs,to the door of The Enormous Room. Padlocks were unlocked,chains rattled,and the door thrown open. We entered. The Enormous Room received us in silence. The door was slammed and locked behind us by the planton,whom we could hear descending the gnarled and filthy stairs.

  In the course of a half-hour,which time as I was informed intervened between the just-ended morning promenade and the noon meal which was the next thing on the program,I gleaned considerable information concerning the daily schedule of La Ferté. A typical day was divided by planton-cries as follows :

  (1 )“Café.” At 5.30 every morning a planton or plantons mounted to the room. One man descended to the kitchen,got a pail of coffee,and brought it up.

  (2 )“Corvée d’eau.” From time to time the occupants of the room chose one of their number to be “maître de chambre”,or roughly speaking Boss. When the planton opened the door,allowing the coffee-getter to descend,it was the duty of the maître de chamber to rouse a certain number of men( generally six,the occupants of the room being taken in rotation ),who forthwith carried the pails of urine and excrement to the door. Upon the arrival of coffee,the maître de chambre and his crew “descended” said pails,together with a few clean pails for water,to the ground floor;where planton was in readiness to escort them to a sort of sewer situated a few yards beyond the cour des femmes. Here the full pails were dumped;with the exception,occasionally,of one or two pails urine which the Surveillant might direct to be thrown on the Directeur’s little garden in which it was rumored he was growing a rose for his daughter. From the sewer the corvée gang were escorted to a pump,where they filled their water pails. They then mounted to the room,where the emptied pails were ranged against the wall beside the door,with the exception of one which was returned to the cabinet. The water pails were placed hard by. The door was now locked,and the planton descended.

  While the men selected for corvée had been performing their duties the other occupants had been enjoying coffee. The corvée men now joined them. The maître de chambre usually allowed about fifteen minutes for himself and his crew to consume their breakfast. He then announced:

  (3 )“Nettoyage de Chambre.” Someone sprinkled the floor with water from one of the pails which had been just brought up. The other members of the crew swept the room,fusing their separate piles of filth at the door. This process consumed something like a half hour.

  The sweeping completed,the men had nothing more to do till 7.30,at which hour a planton mounted,announcing

  (4 )“A la promenade les hommes.” The corvée crew now carried down the product of their late labours. The other occupants descended or not directly to the cour,according to their tastes;morning promenade being optional. At 9.30 the planton demanded

  (5 )“Montez les hommes.” Those who had taken advantage of the morning stroll were brought upstairs to the room,the corvée men descended the excrement which had accumulated during promenade,and everybody was thereupon locked in for a half hour,or until 10 o’clock,when a planton again mounted and cried:

  (6 )“A la soupe les hommes.” Everyone descended to a wing of the building opposite the cour des hommes,where the noon meal was enjoyed until 10.30 or thereabouts,when the order

  (7 )“Tout le monde en haut” was given. There was a digestive interval of two and a half hours spent in the room. At 1 o’clock a planton mounted,announcing

  (8 )“Les hommes à la promenade”( in which case the afternoon promenade was a matter of choice )or “Tout le monde en bas”,whereat everyone had to descend,willy-nilly,“éplucher les pommes”—potatoes( which constituted the pièce de resistance of “la soupe” )being peeled and sliced on alternate days by the men and the girls. At 3.30

  (9 )“Tout le monde en haut” was again given,the world mounted,the corvée crew descended excrement,and everyone was then locked in till 4,at which hour a planton arrived to announce

  (10 )“A la soupe”,that is to say the evening meal,or dinner. After dinner anyone who wished might go on promenade for an hour;those who wished might return to the room. At eight o’clock the planton made a final inspection and pronounced :

  (11 )“Lumières éteintes.”

  The most terrible cry of all,and which was not included in the regular program of planton-cries,consisted of the words :

  “A la douche les hommes”—when all,sick dead and dying not excepted,descended to the baths. Although les douches came only once in quinze jours,such was the terror they inspired that it was necessary for the planton to hunt under paillasses for people who would have preferred death itself.

  Upon remarking that corvée d’eau must be excessively disagreeable,I was informed that it had its bright side,viz.,that in going to and from the sewer one could easily exchange a furtive signal with the women who always took pains to be at their windows at that moment. Influenced perhaps by this,Harree and Pompom were in the habit of doing their friends’ corvées for a consideration. The girls,I was further instructed,had their corvée( as well as their meals )just after the men;and the miraculous stupidity of the plantons had been known to result in the coincidence of the two.

  At this point somebody asked me how I had enjoyed my douche?

  I was replying in terms of unmeasured opprobrium when I was interrupted by that gruesome clanking and rattling which announced the opening of the door. A moment later it was thrown wide,and the beefy-neck stood in the doorway,a huge bunch of keys in his paw,and shouted :

  “A la soupe les hommes.”

  The cry was lost in a tremendous confusion,a reckless thither-and-hithering of humanity,everyone trying to be at the door,spoon in hand,before his neighbor. B said calmly,extracting his own spoon from beneath his paillasse on which we were seated : “They’ll give you yours downstairs and when you get it you want to hide it or it’ll be pinched”—and in company with Monsieur Bragard,who had refused the morning promenade,and whose gentility would not permit him to hurry when it was a question of such a low craving as hunger,we joined the dancing roaring throng at the door. I was not too famished myself to be unimpressed by the instantaneous change which had come over The Enormous Room’s occupants. Never did Circe herself cast upon men so bestial an enchantment. Among these faces convulsed with utter animalism I scarcely recognized my various acquaintances. The transformation produced by the planton’s shout was not merely amazing;it was uncanny,and not a little thrilling. These eyes bubbling with lust,obscene grins sprouting from contorted lips,bodies unclenching and clenching in unctuous gestures of complete savagery,convinced me by a certain insane beauty. Before the arbiter of their destinies some thirty creatures,hideous and authentic,poised,cohering in a sole chaos of desire;a fluent and numerous cluster of vital inhumanity. As I contemplated this ferocious and uncouth miracle,this beautiful manifestation of the sinister alchemy of hunger,I felt that the last vestige of individualism was about utterly to disappear,wholly abolished in a gamboling and wallowing throb.

  The beefy-neck bellowed :

  “Est-ce que vous êtes tous ici?”

  A shrill roar of language answered. He looked contemptuously around him,upon the thirty clamoring faces each of which wanted to eat him—puttees,revolver and all. Then he cried:

  “Allez,descendez.”

  Squirming,jostling,fighting,roaring,we poured slowly through the doorway. Ridiculously. Horribly. I felt like a glorious microbe in huge absurd din irrevocably swathed. B was beside me. A little ahead Monsieur Auguste’s voice protested. Count Bragard brought up the rear.

  When we reached the corridor nearly all the breath was knocked out of me. The corridor being wider than the stairs allowed me to inhale and look around. B was yelling in my ear :

  “Look at the Hollanders and the Belgians! They’re always ahead when it comes to food!”

  Sure enough : John the Bathman Harree
and Pompom were leading this extraordinary procession. Fritz was right behind them,however,and pressing the leaders hard. I heard Monsieur Auguste crying in his child’s voice:

  “Si tout-le-monde marche dou-ce-ment nous al-lons ar-ri-ver plus tôt! Il faut pas faire comme ça!”

  Then suddenly the roar ceased. The mêlée integrated. We were marching in orderly ranks. B said :

  “The Surveillant!”

  At the end of the corridor,opposite the kitchen window,there was a flight of stairs. On the third stair from the bottom stood( teetering a little slowly back and forth,his lean hands joined behind him and twitching regularly,a képi tilted forward on his cadaverous head so that its visor almost hid the weak eyes sunkenly peering from under droopy eyebrows,his pompous roosterlike body immaculately attired in a shiny uniform,his puttees sleeked,his croix polished )—the Fencer. There was a renovated look about him which made me laugh. Also his pose was ludicrously suggestive of Napoleon reviewing the armies of France.

  Our column’s first rank moved by him. I expected it to continue ahead through the door and into the open air,as I had myself done in going from les douches to le cour;but it turned a sharp right and then sharp left,and I perceived a short hall,almost hidden by the stairs. In a moment I had passed the Fencer myself and entered the hall. In another moment I was in a room,pretty nearly square,filled with rows of pillars. On turning into the hall the column had come almost to a standstill. I saw now that the reason for this slowing-down lay in the fact that on entering the room every man in turn passed a table and received a piece of bread from the chef. When B and I came opposite the table the dispenser of bread smiled pleasantly and nodded to B,then selected a hunk and pushed it rapidly into B’s hands with an air of doing something which he shouldn’t. B introduced me,whereupon the smile and selection was repeated.