The Debacle: (1870-71)

by Emile Zola

  Weeping with rage, Maurice, now alone with the unconscious Jean, took him in his arms and tried to carry him. But he was indeed too weak, fragile in build as well as overcome with fatigue and suffering. If only he could still see an ambulance man! He searched with desperate eyes, thinking he could make out some of them among the fugitives, and waved wildly. Nobody came back. He summoned all his remaining strength, took hold of Jean again and managed to move some thirty paces, and when a shell burst near them he thought it was all over and that he too was going to die on the body of his friend.

  But he slowly got up again, felt himself all over, nothing wrong, not a scratch. Why not run away? There was still time, he could reach that low wall in a few bounds and would be safe. His fear came back and was turning into panic. He took one leap and was rushing away when he was checked by a bond stronger than death. No, it was impossible, he couldn’t abandon Jean. His whole body would have bled, the brotherly love that had grown up between this peasant and himself went down into the depths of his being, the very root of life itself. Perhaps it went back to the earliest days of the world, and it was as if there were only two men left in existence, and the one could not abandon the other without abandoning himself.

  If Maurice had not eaten that crust of bread under fire an hour before he would never have found the strength to do what he now did. Not that he could remember anything about it later. He must have got Jean up on to his shoulders and then dragged himself along, with a score of failures and fresh starts, through stubble and briars, tripping over every boulder but somehow getting up again. Only invincible will-power kept him going and gave him strength that would have carried a mountain. Behind the low wall he found Rochas and the few men of the squad, still firing, defending the flag which the subaltern was holding under his arm.

  No line of retreat had been indicated to the various army corps in the event of failure. This muddle and lack of foresight left each general free to act as he thought fit, and now they all found themselves being thrown back into Sedan in the formidable clutches of the victorious German armies. The second division of the 7th corps was withdrawing in reasonably good order, but the remnants of the other divisions, intermingled with those of the 1st corps, were already rushing towards the town in a frightful rabble, a torrent of anger and terror sweeping along men and beasts alike.

  And then Maurice saw with joy that Jean’s eyes were opening, and as he ran over to a little stream for water to wash his face, he was very surprised to see once again on his right, down in a quiet valley, sheltered by the steep hills, the same peasant he had seen in the morning, who was still slowly ploughing, guiding his plough behind a big white horse. Why lose a day? They might be fighting, but that was no reason why the corn should stop growing and the world stop living.

  6

  UP on the flat roof where he had gone to take in the situation, Delaherche once again became impatient to know. Of course he could see that the shells were passing over the town and that the three or four which had damaged the roofs of neighbouring houses must be just casual replies to such slow and inefficient fire from the Palatinate fort. But he could not make out anything about the battle itself, and there was inside him an urgent need for information, sharpened by fear of losing his fortune and his life in the catastrophe. So he went down, leaving his telescope trained in the direction where the German batteries were.

  But when he got downstairs he was held for a moment by the state of the central garden of the factory. It was nearly one, and the casualty station was crammed with wounded. The line of vehicles coming through the gateway was endless. Already the regulation two-wheel or four-wheel carts were insufficient, and now artillery ammunition waggons were appearing, forage or supply vans, anything that could be commandeered on the battlefield, and now indeed there were even traps and farm carts taken from farms and hitched to stray horses. Into them had been piled wounded picked up by the first-aid men and given emergency dressings. It was a horrible unloading of poor wretches, some with the greenish pallor of death on them, others purple with congestion, many unconscious, others screaming, some so stupefied that they gave themselves to the orderlies with terrified eyes while others died of shock as soon as they were touched. The crowd was so dense that all the mattresses in the huge low shed were on the point of being used up, and Major Bouroche ordered the straw to be used, a large supply of which he had had put at one end. But so far he and his assistants could cope with the operations. All he had asked for was another table, with a mattress and American cloth over it, in the operating shed. An orderly quickly thrust a towel soaked in chloroform under the patient’s nose. Little steel scissors gleamed, saws made a tiny file-like sound, blood squirted out in sudden jets, to be stopped at once. Patients for operation were brought up and carried away in a rapid shuttle-service, with just time for the American cloth to be wiped with a sponge. At the further end of the lawn, behind a clump of laburnums, into the charnel-house they had had to make there to get the dead out of the way, they also threw amputated legs and arms and all the bits of flesh and bone left on the tables.

  Madame Delaherche and Gilberte were sitting under one of the big trees and could not manage to roll enough bandages. Bouroche, rushing by red-faced and with his apron already red, threw a bundle of linen to Delaherche and shouted:

  ‘Look here, why don’t you do something and make yourself useful!’

  But the mill-owner protested:

  ‘Excuse me, I must go again and find out what the news is. We don’t know whether we’re alive or dead.’

  He touched his wife’s hair with his lips.

  ‘Poor Gilberte, to think that one shell can set fire to all this! It’s terrifying.’

  She was very pale, she looked up and glanced round with a shudder. Then her involuntary, irresistible smile came to her lips.

  ‘Oh yes, terrible, all these men being cut up… It’s funny that I can stick it without fainting.’

  Madame Delaherche had watched her son kiss the young woman’s hair. She made a little movement as though to thrust the thing out of sight, thinking of the other one, the man who must also have kissed that hair last night. Her old hands shook and she murmured:

  ‘Oh God, what suffering! It makes you forget your own.’

  Delaherche went off, saying he would be back in a moment with definite news. Even in the rue Maqua he was surprised by the number of soldiers coming back with no weapons, their uniforms in tatters and filthy with dust. But he could not get any exact details out of those he took the trouble to question: some answered in a daze that they didn’t know, others talked so much and with such a frenzy of gesture and extravagance of words that they might have been mad. So he instinctively made for the Sub-Prefecture again, with the idea that all the news went there. As he was crossing the Place du Collège two cannons, probably the only two left out of a battery, dashed up and were stopped by a kerbstone. In the Grande-Rue he had to admit that the town was beginning to get overcrowded with the first fugitives. Three hussars who had lost their horses were sitting in a doorway and sharing a loaf, two others were slowly leading their horses along by the bridle with no idea where to stable them, officers were frantically running hither and thither, apparently not knowing where they were making for. On the Place Turenne a second lieutenant advised him not to hang about because quite a few shells were coming down, and a fragment had even broken the railing surrounding the statue of the Great Captain, conqueror of the Palatinate. And indeed, as he slipped quickly along the rue de la Sous-Préfecture, he saw two projectiles burst with a terrific noise on the Meuse bridge.

  He was standing in front of the concierge’s lodge trying to think up an excuse to ask for one of the aides-de-camp and question him, when a young voice hailed him:

  ‘Monsieur Delaherche!… Come in quick, this is no time to be outside.’

  It was Rose, his employee, whom he had forgotten. Thanks to her all doors would open for him. He went into the lodge and accepted a seat.

  ‘Jus
t fancy, it’s made Mother ill and she’s gone to bed. As you see, there’s only me because Dad is a National Guard at the citadel. Just now the Emperor wanted to show that he was still brave, and he went out again and managed to get to the end of the street, as far as the bridge. One shell even fell in front of him and the horse of one of his equerries was killed. And then he came back again… Well, what can you expect him to do?’

  ‘So you know how things are… What are these gentlemen saying?’

  She looked at him in amazement. She was still young and fresh and gay, with her pretty hair and childlike eyes, busying herself about the place amid these abominations that she didn’t really understand.

  ‘No, I don’t know anything… At about twelve I took a letter up for Marshal MacMahon. The Emperor was with him… They were shut up together for an hour, the marshal in bed and the Emperor sitting on a chair close to the bed. That I do know because I saw them when somebody opened the door.’

  ‘Well, what were they talking about?’

  She stared at him again and could not help laughing.

  ‘I don’t know, how do you expect me to know? Nobody in the world knows what they said to each other.’

  Of course it was true, and with a gesture he apologized for his silly question. Yet he was haunted by the thought of this fateful conversation: how important it must have been and what decision had they reached?

  ‘Now,’ Rose went on, ‘the Emperor has gone back to his private room where he is in conference with two generals who have just come from the battlefield.’

  She stopped short and glanced at the steps.

  ‘Look, that’s one of them… And there’s the other.’

  He quickly went out and recognized General Douay and General Ducrot, whose horses were waiting. He watched them mount and gallop away. After the evacuation of the plateau of Illy they had hurried separately to warn the Emperor that the battle was lost. They gave him details of the situation; the army and Sedan were from now on hemmed in on all sides, and the disaster would be appalling.

  In his room the Emperor paced up and down in silence for some time, with the faltering step of a sick man. There was only one aide-de-camp there with him, standing silent by a door. He went on walking to and fro between the fireplace and the window, and his haggard face was now drawn up by a nervous tic. His back seemed even more bowed, as though a whole world was collapsing upon it, and his lifeless eyes beneath the heavy lids betokened the resignation of the fatalist who has played his last card against destiny and lost. Yet each time he came back to the open window he paused there and winced.

  At one of these momentary pauses he raised a shaky hand and murmured:

  ‘Oh, those guns, those guns, ever since first thing!’

  Indeed the thunder of the batteries at La Marfée and Frénois was extraordinarily loud at that particular place. The rumbling of the thunder shook windowpanes and the very walls themselves with an obstinate, ceaseless, exasperating din. And he must be thinking that from then onwards the struggle was hopeless and any further resistance criminal. What was the point of any more bloodshed, limbs mangled, heads blown off, still more dead added to the other dead throughout the campaign? Since they were beaten and it was finished, why go on with the massacre? Enough abomination and grief was already crying to high heaven.

  The Emperor came back to the window and again raised his trembling hands:

  ‘Oh those guns, those guns, on and on!’

  Perhaps the terrible vision of his responsibilities rose before him, of the bleeding corpses his misdeeds had strewn over the fields in thousands; perhaps it was just the sentimental pity of a dreamer’s heart, of a good man haunted by humanitarian ideas. In this dreadful blow of fate that broke off and carried away his own fortune like a wisp of straw he could find tears for others, and was horrified at the continuing useless butchery, too weak to bear it any longer. Now this murderous cannonade seemed to hit him in the chest and redouble his pain.

  ‘Oh those guns, those guns, stop them at once, at once!’

  This Emperor without a throne since he had handed over his powers to the Empress-Regent, this commander-in-chief who no longer commanded since he had invested Marshal Bazaine with the supreme command, now had a reawakening of power, an irresistible desire to be master one last time. Ever since Châlons he had effaced himself, had not given a single order, but resigned himself to being a nondescript, useless thing, an embarrassing package transported in the army baggage. The Emperor in him was aroused, but only for defeat, and the first and only order he was still to give, out of a heart filled with terror and pity, was to hoist the white flag over the citadel and ask for an armistice.

  ‘Oh those guns, those guns… Get anything, a sheet, a tablecloth! Hurry and say they must be stopped!’

  The aide-de-camp rushed out and the Emperor went on with his stumbling walk from the fireplace to the window while the batteries thundered on, shaking the whole building.

  Down below Delaherche was still talking to Rose when a duty sergeant rushed in.

  ‘Mademoiselle, we can’t find anything and I can’t run a maid to earth… You don’t happen to have any white material, a piece of white cloth?’

  ‘Would you like a towel?’

  ‘No, no, that’s not big enough… Half a sheet, for example.’

  Rose was already obligingly running to a cupboard.

  ‘But I haven’t got a sheet cut in half!… A big piece of white material? No, I can’t see anything that would do…Oh, but would you like a tablecloth?’

  ‘Yes, that’s fine. That’ll do perfectly.’

  As he went off he added:

  ‘We’re going to make it into a white flag that will be put up over the citadel to ask for peace… Thanks very much, Mademoiselle.’

  Delaherche almost jumped for joy in spite of himself. At last they were going to be quiet! Then, this joy seemed unpatriotic and he checked it. But all the same his heart throbbed with relief, and he saw a colonel, a captain and the sergeant run out of the Sub-Prefecture. The colonel was carrying the rolled cloth under his arm. Delaherche thought he would follow them, and left Rose, who was very proud of having supplied this piece of linen. At that moment it was striking two.

  In front of the Hôtel de Ville Delaherche was pushed about by a stream of scruffy soldiers coming down from the Cassine district. He lost sight of the colonel and set aside his curiosity to see the white flag run up. He would certainly not be allowed to enter the Keep, and besides, as he heard that shells were coming down on the school a new fear came over him – suppose his mill had caught fire since he left it. He hurried along, giving in again to his feverish need to keep on the move and finding relief in the mere fact of rushing about like this. But the streets were blocked by groups of people and there were fresh obstacles at every corner. It was only back in the rue Maqua again that he sighed with pleasure on seeing the monumental front of his house intact, with no smoke or sparks. He went in, shouting from a distance to his mother and his wife:

  ‘Everything’s all right, they’re running up the white flag and there’s going to be a cease fire!’ Then he stopped dead, for the sight of the ambulance station was truly horrifying.

  In the huge drying-shed, the big door of which was left open, not only were all the mattresses occupied, but there was no room even on the straw scattered at the one end. They were beginning to put down straw between the beds, packing the wounded tight against one another. Already there were more than two hundred of them and they were still coming in. A white light from the big windows lit up all this heap of human suffering. Sometimes, if somebody was moved too roughly, there would be an involuntary scream. The hot, damp air was filled with the gasps of the dying. At the far end a soft, almost sing-song whimpering went on and on. Then the silence was deeper still, it was a kind of resigned stupor, the miserable exhaustion of the death-chamber, only relieved by the footsteps or whispers of the orderlies. Wounds hastily dressed on the battlefield, and some even still uncovered,
could be seen in all their distress amid tattered coats and torn trousers. Feet were sticking out with boots still on, but crushed and bleeding. Limbs were dangling loose from knees and elbows that looked as if they had been broken with a hammer. There were crushed hands, fingers almost torn off and only held on by a thread of skin. Fractured legs and arms were the most common things, stiff with pain and heavy as lead. But the most upsetting wounds were gaping stomachs, chests or heads. Some men’s trunks were bleeding through dreadful gashes, and knots of twisted entrails pushed up the skin, vital organs that had been pierced or hacked, twisted men into grotesque attitudes and paroxysms. Lungs had been shot

  right through, some with a hole so tiny that there was no bleeding, but others with an open gash through which the life-blood ebbed away in a red stream, and unseen internal haemorrhages struck men down all of a sudden in raving delirium and turned them black. Heads had suffered even worse things, smashed jaws with tongue and teeth a bleeding mess, eye-sockets driven in and eyes half out, skulls split open with brains visible. All those whose spinal cord or brain had been reached by bullets were like corpses, in a deathlike coma, while the others, those with fractures or feverish temperatures, were softly begging for something to drink.

  Then in the operating shed next door there was a fresh horror. In this first rush only urgent operations were being done, the ones that had to be done because of the desperate condition of the patients. Any danger of haemorrhage made Bouroche decide on immediate amputation. Neither could he stop to look for bullets buried in wounds and remove them if they had lodged in some dangerous place, such as the bottom of the neck, the region of the armpit or groin, or in the elbow or back of the knee. Other wounds that he preferred to leave for observation were just dressed by orderlies under his supervision. Already he had done four amputations, spacing them out by taking ‘rest’ periods, during which he extracted a few bullets, between the major operations, and now he was beginning to tire. There were only two tables, his and one where one of his assistants was working. They had hung up a sheet between the two so that men being operated on could not see each other. However well they were sponged down the tables remained red, and the buckets they emptied a few steps away over a bed of daisies – buckets in which a single glassful of blood was enough to turn the clear water red – looked like pailfuls of pure blood, great sploshes of which covered the flowerbeds in the lawn. Although the fresh air came in freely a revolting stench rose from the tables, bandages and instruments in the sickly smell of chloroform.