The Debacle: (1870-71)

by Emile Zola

  ‘There’s a lot of tuppeny-ha’penny generals for you, all going this way and that! You can see our legs don’t cost them nothing.’

  They were all losing their tempers. You don’t wear men out like this just for the fun of walking them about. Over the bare plain between the gentle ups and downs, they moved on in column in two lines, one on each side of the road, between which the officers move up and down. But gone was the time, as in Champagne the day after Rheims, when the march was cheered with jokes and songs, when their packs were carried gaily and the load on their shoulders was lightened by the hope of racing the Prussians and beating them. Now they dragged their feet in angry silence, hating their rifles which bruised their shoulders and the packs that weighed them down, having lost all faith in their commanders and giving way to such hopelessness that they were only marching ahead like a herd of cattle lashed by the whip of fate. The wretched army was beginning to climb its hill of Calvary.

  Meanwhile Maurice had been very interested for the last few minutes because over to the left, where there rose some low hills, he had seen a horseman emerge from a clump of trees in the distance. Almost at once another appeared, and then another. All three stood there motionless, no bigger than your fist, looking as small and as clear-cut as toy soldiers. The thought was passing through his mind that it must be an isolated detachment of hussars, some reconnaissance on its way back, when he was astonished to see shining points on their shoulders, probably the light catching gold epaulettes.

  ‘Look over there!’ he said, nudging Jean who was next to him. ‘Uhlans!’

  The corporal opened his eyes wide.

  ‘Well I’ll be damned!’

  And Uhlans they were – the first Prussians the 106th had seen. Jean had been campaigning for nearly six weeks now, and not only had he not fired a single round, but so far he hadn’t seen an enemy either. Word ran round, all heads were turned and curiosity grew. They looked very nice, those Uhlans.

  ‘One of them looks jolly fat,’ remarked Loubet.

  But to the left of the little wood, on a piece of level ground, a whole squadron appeared. In view of this threatening appearance a halt was called in the column. Orders came along and the 106th took up a position behind the trees by a stream. Already the artillery was dashing back and establishing itself on a hillock. Then for nearly two hours they stayed there in battle formation and killed time, but nothing else happened. On the horizon the mass of enemy cavalry stood motionless. Realizing at last that precious time was being lost, the army resumed its march.

  ‘Ah well,’ Jean murmured regretfully, ‘it won’t be this time!’

  Maurice too felt his hands itching with the desire to fire at least one shot. Once again he went over the mistake that had been made the day before by not going to support the 5th corps. If the Prussians were not attacking it must be because they still had not enough infantry at their disposal, which meant that their displays of cavalry in the distance could have no other object than to delay the movement of the French army corps. Once again they had fallen into the trap. And as a matter of fact from that moment onwards the 106th constantly spotted Uhlans to the left on every bit of high ground, following them, keeping an eye on them, disappearing behind a farmhouse only to reappear round the tip of a wood.

  Gradually the soldiers’ nerves got frayed as they saw themselves ensnared at a distance as though in the meshes of some invisible net.

  Even Pache and Lapoulle were saying: ‘They’re beginning to get us down and it would do us good to slosh ’em one or two!’

  But still they went on marching and marching, painfully, with dragging steps that quickly got tired. During this uncomfortable day’s march they felt the enemy drawing nearer on all sides, as you are conscious of a thunderstorm on the way before it appears over the horizon. Strict orders had been issued about the proper conduct of the rearguard, and there were no more laggards because it was certain that the Prussians behind would snap up everything and everybody. Their infantry was coming up at a terrific speed while the French regiments, harassed and paralysed, were marking time.

  At Authe the sky cleared, and Maurice, taking his bearings by the sun, realized that instead of going on towards Le Chêne, a good three leagues further on, they were turning to march due east. It was two o’clock and now they were suffering from unbearable heat after shivering in the rain for two days. The very circuitous road climbed across barren plains. Not a house or a living soul, nothing but a few widely scattered dismal little woods to break the dreariness of the wilderness, and the depressing silence of these solitary places made itself felt on the soldiers who were trudging along, heads down and sweating. At length Saint-Pierremont came into sight, a few deserted houses on a little hill. They did not go through the village, and Maurice noted that they were immediately turning left and reverting to the northerly course towards La Besace. Now he understood that the route had been chosen in an attempt to reach Mouzon before the Prussians. But could they pull it off with such weary and demoralized troops? At Saint-Pierrement the three Uhlans had reappeared far away at a bend in the road from Buzancy, and as the rearguard was leaving the village a battery was disclosed and a few shells came over but did no harm. They did not reply, but went on marching more and more wearily.

  From Saint-Pierremont to La Besace is a good three leagues, and when Maurice said so to Jean he made a gesture of despair: the men would never do twelve kilometres, he could tell by infallible signs, they were out of breath and their faces looked desperate. The road was still climbing between two slopes which were gradually closing in. They had to call a halt. But this rest made their limbs ache still more, and when they had to set off again it was worse than ever: the regiments were not making any progress and men were falling by the wayside. Seeing Maurice looking paler and paler and rolling his eyes with exhaustion, Jean uncharacteristically chattered away, trying to take his mind off it all with a torrent of words and keep him awake in the automatic marching movement which had become just instinctive.

  ‘So your sister lives in Sedan, does she? We may go that way.’

  ‘Sedan, never! That’s not our way, that would be crazy.’

  ‘Is she young, your sister?’

  ‘But she is the same age as I am. I told you we were twins.’

  ‘Is she like you?’

  ‘Oh well, she’s fair just the same. Oh, such soft, curly hair!… Very small, thin face, and not at all the boisterous kind, oh dear no! Dear Henriette!’

  ‘You are very close to each other?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  There was a pause, and glancing at Maurice Jean saw that his eyes were closing and that he was on the point of falling down.

  ‘Now, now lad… Hold yourself up, for God’s sake… Give me your gun a minute, that’ll give you a rest… We’re going to leave half the blokes on the road, and it isn’t possible to go much further today, God knows!’

  Straight ahead he had just caught sight of Oches, with its few miserable hovels terraced on a hillside. It is dominated by the church, all yellow and perched up high among the trees.

  ‘That’s where we’re going to sleep tonight, for certain.’

  He had guessed right. General Douay, seeing the exhaustion of his troops, gave up hope of ever making La Besace that day. But what settled it for him was the arrival of the supply train, this damned convoy he had been dragging after him ever since Rheims, the three leagues of which – vehicles and animals – so terribly hampered his march. From Quatre-Champs he had ordered it to be sent straight on to Saint-Pierremont, and it was only at Oches that the vehicles rejoined the main body, and in such a state of exhaustion that the horses were refusing to move. It was five o’clock already and fearing to get involved in the gorge of Stonne, the general thought he should give up the idea of finishing the day’s march laid down by the marshal. So they stopped and camped, the baggage down below in the meadows, guarded by one division, while the artillery took up a position behind on the higher ground, and the brigade
that was to act as rearguard the next day stayed on a bluff opposite Saint-Pierremont. Another division, of which the Bourgain-Desfeuilles brigade was a part, bivouacked behind the church on a broad plateau flanked by an oak wood.

  Night was already falling when at last the 106th could settle down on the edge of this wood, for there had been so much confusion about the choice and allocation of sites.

  ‘To hell with it!’ Chouteau said furiously, ‘I’m not going to eat anything, I’m going to sleep!’

  That was the universal chorus. Many of them hadn’t the strength to put up their tents, and went off to sleep where they fell, like inert lumps. And besides, before you could eat you would have to have an issue from the commissariat, and the commissariat, which was waiting for the 7th at La Besace, was not at Oches. In the general break-up and loss of control there was not even the bugle call for orderly corporals. Food was just catch as catch can. From that time on there were no more regular issues, and soldiers had to live on the rations they were supposed to have in their packs, and their packs were empty, very few could find a crust or even the crumbs of the abundance they had contrived to live on at Vouziers. There was some coffee left and so the less tired still had some sugarless coffee.

  When Jean wanted to share by eating one of his biscuits and giving Maurice the other, he saw that he was fast asleep. It crossed his mind to wake him up, but then he stoically put the biscuits back in his pack, with infinite care as though he were hiding some gold, and he himself made do with coffee like the others. He had insisted on the tent being put up and in it they were all lying flat out when Loubet came back from an expedition bringing some carrots from a nearby field. There was no possibility of cooking them, so they munched them raw, but that only aggravated their hunger. They made Pache quite ill.

  ‘No, no, let him sleep on,’ Jean said to Chouteau who was shaking Maurice to give him his share.

  ‘Ah,’ said Lapoulle, ‘tomorrow, when we are in Angoulême, we shall get some bread… I once had a cousin who was a soldier in Angoulême. Good garrison there.’

  There was general stupefaction. Chouteau shouted:

  ‘Angoulême, what do you mean?… That silly sod thinks he’s in Angoulême!’

  It was impossible to get any explanation out of Lapoulle. No, he thought they were going to Angoulême. He was the one who, when they had sighted Uhlans that morning, had maintained that they were Bazaine’s men.

  The camp fell into inky blackness and a deathly silence. Although the night was chilly fires had been forbidden. The Prussians were known to be only a few kilometres away, and even noise was kept down for fear of alerting them. The officers had already warned the men that they were setting off at about four in the morning to make up for lost time, and everybody was greedily snatching some sleep and dead to the world. The heavy breathing of these multitudes rose up in the darkness above the far-flung encampments, like the breathing of the earth itself.

  A sudden shot woke up the squad. It was still pitch dark, it might be about three. They all leaped to their feet, the alert ran along the lines and it was believed to be an enemy attack. But it was only Loubet, who couldn’t sleep any more and so had thought of going into the oak wood where there might be rabbits. What a binge they would have if he brought back a pair of rabbits for his mates at dawn! But as he was looking for a good place to shoot from he heard some men coming towards him, snapping twigs and talking, and he panicked and fired his shot, thinking he had got some Prussians to deal with.

  Maurice, Jean and others were already running up when a hoarse voice croaked:

  ‘Don’t fire, for God’s sake!’

  On the edge of the wood was a tall, gaunt man whose thick, bushy beard could just be made out. He had on a grey smock pulled in at the waist with a red belt, and carried a rifle slung over his shoulder. He at once explained that he was French, a sergeant in the guerrillas, and that he had come with two of his men from the Dieulet woods to bring some information to the general.

  ‘Here, Cabasse, Ducat!’ he shouted behind him. ‘Come on, you lazy buggers!’

  The two men had probably been scared, but now they came up. Ducat was short and stocky, pasty-looking with thinning hair, Cabasse tall and wiry, swarthy faced with a long, thin nose.

  By now Maurice had had a close look at the sergeant, which gave him a shock, and now he asked:

  ‘Tell me, aren’t you Guillaume Sambuc, from Remilly?’

  When after some hesitation the man nervously admitted that he was, Maurice recoiled slightly, because this Sambuc was said to be a terrible scoundrel, a worthy son of a family of woodcutters who had gone to the bad – the father, a drunkard, had been found one night in a wood with his throat cut, the mother and daughter had taken to begging and thieving and ended up in some brothel. This one, Guillaume, was a poacher and did a bit of smuggling. Only one whelp out of this litter of wolves had grown up to be respectable, Prosper, of the African Cavalry, who before he was lucky enough to get into the army had become a farm-hand because he hated the forest.

  ‘I saw your brother in Rheims and at Vouziers,’ Maurice went on. ‘He is quite well.’

  Sambuc did not answer, but to cut things short:

  ‘Take me to the general. Tell him it’s the guerrillas from the Dieulet woods who have an important message to deliver.’

  On their way back to camp Maurice thought about these freelance companies on whom so many hopes had been built, and who already were giving rise to complaints on all sides. They were supposed to carry on guerrilla warfare, lie in wait for the enemy behind hedges, harass him, pick off his sentries and keep an eye on the woods from which no Prussian would ever get out alive. But the truth of the matter was that they were becoming the terror of the peasants, whom they were not defending at all and whose fields they were plundering. Out of hatred for regular military service all the drop-outs were rushing to join these gangs and enjoy freedom from discipline, roam at large like a lot of bandits out on the spree, sleeping and guzzling any old where. The recruits in some of these companies were deplorable types.

  ‘Cabasse! Ducat!’ Sambuc went on shouting, looking behind at every step. ‘Come on, you lazy devils!’

  Maurice felt that these two were just as terrible. Cabasse, the tall, wiry one, a native of Toulon, had once been a waiter in a Marseilles café and ended up in Sedan as an agent for produce from the south, and had almost been run in over some story of theft which remained obscure. Ducat, the short, fat one, had been a process-server at Blainville, but had been forced to sell out after some unsavoury adventures with little girls, and only recently had again narrowly escaped the assizes for the same disgusting behaviour at Raucourt, where he worked as a book-keeper in a factory. He could bandy Latin quotations, whereas the other one could hardly read, but they made a nice pair, a disturbing pair of shady customers.

  The camp was already awake. Jean and Maurice took the men to Captain Beaudoin, who took them to Colonel de Vineuil. The latter interrogated them, but Sambuc, conscious of his own importance, was determined to see the general, and as General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, who had slept at the house of the parish priest of Oches, had just appeared at the presbytery door, very put out at being woken up in the middle of the night to face another day of famine and fatigue, he gave these men a furious reception.

  ‘Where have they come from? What do they want? Oh, it’s you, the guerrillas! Another lot of Weary Willies, eh?’

  ‘Sir,’ explained Sambuc, quite unruffled, ‘we and the others hold the Dieulet woods.’

  ‘Dieulet woods, where’s that?’

  ‘Between Stenay and Mouzon, sir.’

  ‘Stenay, Mouzon, never heard of them! How do you expect me to know where I am with all these new names?’

  Colonel de Vineuil, feeling embarrassed, intervened discreetly to remind him that Stenay and Mouzon were on the Meuse, and that as the Germans had cut off the first of these towns they were going to attempt to cross the river by the bridge at the second, further north.
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  ‘Anyway, sir,’ Sambuc went on, ‘we’ve come to warn you that the Dieulet woods are now full of Prussians… Yesterday, as the 5th corps was leaving Bois-les-Dames, it was engaged near Nouart….’

  ‘What, was there fighting yesterday?’

  ‘There certainly was, sir. The 5th corps was in a battle and withdrew, and it must be at Beaumont tonight… So while some of our comrades have gone to tell them about the enemy movements, we thought we would come and tell you what the situation is so that you can go to their aid, for they are certainly going to be up against sixty thousand men tomorrow morning.’

  This figure made General Bourgain-Desfeuilles shrug his shoulders.

  ‘Sixty thousand men! Hang it all, why not a hundred thousand?… You’re dreaming, my dear fellow. Fear has made you see double. There can’t be sixty thousand men so near us. We should know if there were!’

  He would not be persuaded. In vain Sambuc called on Ducat and Cabasse for corroboration.

  ‘We have seen the cannons,’ the southerner affirmed, ‘and those buggers must be crazy to risk them on those forest tracks where you sink in up to your shins on account of the rain there’s been these last few days.’

  ‘Somebody is guiding them, for sure,’ declared Ducat.

  But since Vouziers the general had given up believing in this concentration of the two German armies which everybody, he said, had been dinning into his ears. He did not even think it worth while having the men taken to the commander of the 7th corps – to whom, actually, they thought they had been talking. If one had paid attention to all the yokels and tramps who brought so-called information, one wouldn’t have advanced a single step without being shunted right and left into absurd adventures. However, he did order the three men to stay and travel with the column because of their local knowledge.

  ‘All the same,’ Jean said to Maurice as they went back to fold the tent, ‘those three are decent blokes to have done four leagues cross-country to warn us.’

  Maurice agreed, and he knew the men were right, for he too knew the district, and he was just as much a prey to deadly anxiety at the thought that the Prussians were in the Dieulet woods and on the move towards Sommauthe and Beaumont. He was sitting down now, already feeling wretched before the march had even begun, his stomach empty and his heart sick with anguish at the dawn of a day he felt was bound to be terrible.