The Debacle: (1870-71)

by Emile Zola

  He looked at all three of them with staring eyes full of the fear of death.

  ‘Oh, captain, what are you saying?’ murmured Gilberte, trying to smile through her terror. ‘You’ll be up and about in a month.’

  He shook his head, now looking only at her, and his eyes betrayed an immense longing for life and dismay at going off like this before his time and without exhausting the joys of life.

  ‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die… Oh it’s awful!’

  Then he caught sight of his dirty, torn uniform and black hands and seemed to be embarrassed about being in such a state in front of women. He felt ashamed of letting himself go like this, and the thought that he was lacking in good manners finally gave him back quite a jaunty air. He managed to go on in a joking tone:

  ‘Only, if I die I should like to die with clean hands… Madame, it would be so kind of you if you could moisten a towel and give it to me.’

  Gilberte ran off and came back with the towel and insisted on wiping his hands herself. From then on he displayed very great courage, anxious to end like a man of good breeding. Delaherche said comforting things and helped his wife to make him presentable. As she watched this dying man, and both husband and wife busying themselves for him in this way, old Madame Delaherche felt her resentment melt away. Once again she would hold her peace, though she knew and had sworn to tell her son everything. What was to be gained by casting a blight on the home since death was washing away the sin?

  It was soon over. Captain Beaudoin was losing strength and he relapsed into his exhaustion. His forehead and neck were bathed in icy sweat. He opened his eyes again for a moment and groped as though he were feeling for an imaginary blanket that he began to pull up to his chin with a weak but determined movement of his twisted hands.

  ‘Oh I’m cold, I’m so cold.’

  And he departed, snuffed out with not even a gasp, and his face, calm but drawn, had kept its expression of infinite sadness.

  Delaherche saw to it that the body was placed in a near-by coach-house instead of being thrown on to the heap. He tried to force Gilberte, who was weeping uncontrollably, to go indoors. But she said she would be too frightened now to be alone, and preferred to stay with her mother-in-law amid the activity of the ambulance station, which took her mind off things. In a moment she was off to give a drink to a Chasseur d’Afrique who was wandering in delirium, and then she helped an orderly to bandage the hand of a young soldier, a twenty-year-old recruit, who had walked all the way from the battlefield with a thumb off, and as he was nice and funny, joking about his wound with the detached air of a Parisian wag, she even managed to laugh with him.

  During the death agony of the captain the bombardment seemed to have got still worse, and a second shell had come down in the garden and had snapped one of the century-old trees. Terrified people were screaming that the whole of Sedan was on fire, and indeed a major fire had broken out in the Cassine district. It was the end of everything if this bombardment went on with such violence for long.

  ‘It just isn’t possible, I’m going back!’ said Delaherche, beside himself.

  ‘Where to?’ asked Bouroche.

  ‘The Sub-Prefecture, of course, to find out whether the Emperor is having us on when he talks about running up the white flag.’

  For a few seconds the major remained stunned by this idea of the white flag, defeat, capitulation, coming in the midst of his powerlessness to save all these poor bloodstained devils being brought to him. He made a gesture of furious despair.

  ‘Oh go to the devil! We’re all done for anyway!’

  Outside Delaherche found it more difficult to push his way through the troops who had swelled in numbers. Every minute the streets were getting more crowded with the stream of straggling soldiers. He questioned some of the officers he met and none had seen the white flag over the citadel. Finally a colonel said he had caught a momentary glimpse of it – just being run up and lowered again. That would explain everything, for either the Germans had not had time to see it or, seeing it appear and disappear, they had redoubled their fire realizing that the end was near. There was even a rumour already about the crazy anger of a general who had dashed forward when the white flag appeared, snatched it down with his own hands, breaking the staff and trampling the cloth underfoot. So the Prussian batteries were still firing, shells were raining down on roofs and in the streets, houses were burning and a woman had her head smashed at the corner of the Place Turenne.

  Delaherche did not find Rose in the porter’s lodge at the Sub-Prefecture. Every door was open and the rout was setting in. So he went up the stairs, every person he ran into was in a panic and nobody asked him any questions. As he was hesitating on the first floor he saw the girl.

  ‘Oh, Monsieur Delaherche, it’s all going to pieces… Look sharp if you want to see the Emperor.’

  And indeed to his left a door was ajar, and through the opening the Emperor could be seen once again taking his faltering walk between the fireplace and the window. He kept on walking, never stopping in spite of his intolerable pain.

  An aide-de-camp had gone in, and he it was who had neglected to shut the door after him, so the Emperor could be heard asking in a voice exhausted with grief:

  ‘But why, sir, are they still firing, since I had the white flag run up?’

  This torture had become unbearable, the gunfire never stopping, but increasing in violence every minute. He could not go near the window without being cut to the heart. More blood, more human lives cut off and through his fault! Every minute added more dead to the pile, pointlessly. Tender-hearted dreamer that he was, he could not stand it, and ten times already he had asked his desperate question of people coming in:

  ‘But why are they still firing, since I had the white flag run up?’

  The aide-de-camp muttered some answer Delaherche could not catch. Not that the Emperor had stopped, for he was continually giving in to his compulsive need to go back to that window where the ceaseless thunder of gunfire made him feel faint. His pallor was more marked than ever, and his long, tragic, drawn face, with the morning’s make-up not properly wiped off, betrayed his agony.

  Just then a bustling little man in a dusty uniform, whom Delaherche recognized as General Lebrun, crossed the landing and pushed open the door without having himself announced. At once, yet again, the anguished voice of the Emperor could be heard :

  ‘But, general, why are they still firing, since I had the white flag run up?’

  The aide-de-camp came out and the door was shut, and Delaherche could not hear the general’s reply. The scene had vanished.

  ‘Oh,’ Rose said again, ‘it’s all going to pieces, I can tell from those gentlemen’s faces. Now there’s that cloth of mine, that I shan’t see again! Some of them say it’s been torn up… In all this it’s the Emperor who makes me feel so sorry, for he’s more of a sick man than the marshal, and would be better off in bed than in that room where he’s wearing himself out with always walking up and down.’

  She was deeply moved, and her pretty fair face was full of sincere pity. So Delaherche, whose Bonapartist fervour had been cooling off remarkably for two days, thought she was a bit silly. But downstairs he stayed with her a minute or two longer watching out for General Lebrun’s departure. When he came down again Delaherche followed him.

  General Lebrun had explained to the Emperor that if he wanted to ask for an armistice a letter signed by the commander-in-chief of the French army would have to be delivered to the commander-in-chief of the German forces. Then he had undertaken to write this letter and go in search of General de Wimpffen who would sign it. He was now bearing the letter, but was only too afraid of not finding the general, not knowing whereabouts on the battlefield he might be. Moreover the pack in Sedan was so thick that he had to ride his horse at a walking pace, which enabled Delaherche to keep up with him as far as the Ménil gate.

  Once out on the main road General Lebrun went at a gallop, and he was fortunate enough t
o see General de Wimpffen as soon as he reached Balan. The latter had written only a few minutes before to the Emperor: ‘Sir, come and put yourself at the head of your troops, and they will think it an honour to open up a way for you through the enemy lines.’ And so the very mention of the word armistice threw him into a furious rage. No, no, he wouldn’t sign anything, he was determined to fight! It was then half past three, and it was soon afterwards that the heroic and desperate attempt was made, the last thrust to open up a gap through the Bavarians by marching once again on Bazeilles. So as to put some heart back into the troops they spread a lie by shouting ‘Bazaine is coming, Bazaine is coming!’ Since first thing in the morning this had been the dream of so many who thought they could hear the guns of the army of Metz every time a new battery of the Germans was uncovered. About twelve hundred men were scraped together, stray soldiers from every corps and every arm, and the little column dashed gloriously at full speed along the bullet-swept road. At first it was sublime, falling men did not check the impetus of the rest, and they covered nearly five hundred metres with truly reckless courage. But soon the ranks began thinning, and even the bravest fell back. What could they do against overwhelming odds? It was simply the crazy folly of an army chief who did not want to be beaten. In the end General de Wimpffen found himself alone with General Lebrun on the Balan-Bazeilles road, which they had to abandon for good. There was nothing to be done but retreat into Sedan.

  As soon as he had lost sight of the general, Delaherche hurried back to his mill with but one idea in his head, which was to go up again to his observation post and follow events from a distance. But on reaching home he was held up for a moment by running into Colonel de Vineuil, who was being brought in with his blood-soaked boot, half unconscious on some hay in the bottom of a farm cart. The colonel had insisted on trying to rally the remnants of his regiment until he had fallen off his horse. He was taken straight up to a first-floor room, and Bouroche hurried up but found it was only a cracked ankle-bone and so merely bandaged the wound after extracting bits of boot-leather. He was overwhelmed and at the end of his tether, and rushed down again shouting that he would rather cut off one of his own legs than go on doing his job in such a messy way, without proper materials or the essential assistance. And indeed down below they had reached the stage of not knowing where to put the wounded, and had decided to put them on the lawn, in the grass. There were already two rows of them waiting and loudly complaining in the open air, with shells still coming down. The number of men brought in to the station since noon was over four hundred, and the major had asked for more surgeons, but all they had sent was one young doctor from the town. He simply could not cope with it, and he examined, cut through flesh, sawed through bones and sewed up again almost beside himself and in despair at seeing more work being brought than he was getting through. Gilberte was sick with horror and overcome with nausea at so much blood and tears, and she had stayed with her uncle the colonel, leaving Madame Delaherche down below to give drinks to the fevered and wipe the sweating faces of the dying.

  Up on his flat roof Delaherche tried to get a quick impression of the situation. The town had been less damaged than had been feared and only one fire was sending up thick black smoke in the Cassine district. The Palatinate fort had stopped firing, having probably run out of ammunition. Only the guns at the Paris gate were still firing an odd round now and again. What interested him immediately was that they had once again run up the white flag over the Keep, but they couldn’t be seeing it from the battlefield, for the firing was still as heavy as ever. Some roofs in the foreground concealed the Balan road and he could not follow the movements of troops there. Moreover, having put his eye to the telescope which was still trained in that direction, he once again had picked out the German Headquarters which he had already seen there at noon. The master, that diminutive tin soldier, as big as half your little finger, in whom he thought he had recognized the King of Prussia, was still standing there in his dark uniform, in front of the other officers, most of whom were lying on the grass and all shining with gold braid. There were foreign officers there, aides-de-camp, generals, court officials, princes, all provided with field glasses, and since early morning they had been following the death-struggles of the French army like a play. And now the terrible drama was drawing to its close.

  From these wooded heights of La Marfée King William had just witnessed the conjunction of his troops. It was all over, the third army, under the command of his son the Crown Prince of Prussia, which had come via Saint-Menges and Fleigneux, was taking possession of the plateau of Illy, whilst the fourth, commanded by the Crown Prince of Saxony, was reaching the rendezvous through Daigny and Givonne, by means of a detour round the Garenne woods. The XIth corps and the Vth thus joined hands with the XIIth corps and the Prussian Guard. The supreme effort to break out of this circle as it was closing, the useless and glorious charge of the Margueritte division, had torn from the King a cry of admiration: ‘Oh, what brave fellows!’ Now the inexorable, mathematical enveloping movement was nearly complete, the jaws of the vice had come together and he could take in at a glance the immense wall of men and guns hemming in the defeated army. To the north the embrace was tightening and driving fugitives back into Sedan before the ceaseless fire from batteries in an unbroken line all along the horizon. To the south, Bazeilles, conquered, deserted and tragic, was burning itself out, sending up clouds of smoke and sparks, while the Bavarians, now occupying Balan, were levelling their guns three hundred metres from the town gates. And the other batteries along the left bank at Pont-Maugis, Noyers, Frénois, Wadelincourt, which had been firing non-stop for nearly twelve hours, were thundering louder than ever and completing the impassable girdle of fire right to below where the King was standing.

  King William, who was getting tired, gave up using his field glasses for a minute and went on watching with the naked eye. The slanting sun was descending towards the woods and was about to set in a pure cloudless sky. It gilded the whole vast panorama, and shed on it such a clear light that the smallest details stood out with striking clarity. He could pick out the houses of Sedan, with their little black bars across the windows, the ramparts, the fortress, the complicated defensive system with its ridges in high relief. And scattered all round in the countryside, the fresh, gaily-painted villages looked like toy farms, Donchery to his left, on the edge of its flat plain, Douzy and Carignan to his right in the meadows. You could almost have counted the trees of the forest of the Ardennes, and its ocean of green stretched out of sight to the frontier. In this horizontal light the Meuse, with its meanderings, had become a river of pure gold. The atrocious, bloody battle itself, seen from such a height in the setting sun, was like a delicate painting: dead horsemen and disembowelled horses flecked the plateau of Floing with gay splashes of colour; further to the right, towards Givonne, the final scramble of the retreat made an interesting picture with the whirling of black dots running about and falling over themselves; and again in the Iges peninsula to the left a Bavarian battery with its guns the size of matches looked like a piece of nicely adjusted mechanism, for the eye could follow its regular, clockwork movements. It was unhoped-for, overwhelming victory, and the King had no remorse, faced as he was by these tiny corpses, these thousands of men less than the dust on the roads, the great vale in which the fires of Bazeilles, the slaughter of Illy, the anguish of Sedan, could not prevent unfeeling nature from being beautiful at this serene end of a perfect day.

  Then suddenly Delaherche saw, climbing the slopes of La Marfée, a French general in a blue tunic on a black horse, preceded by a hussar with a white flag. It was General Reille, detailed by the Emperor to bear this letter to the King of Prussia:

  Sir, my Brother,

  Not having been able to die among my troops, it only remains for me to put my sword in Your Majesty’s hands.

  Truly Your Majesty’s brother, Napoleon.’

  In his anxiety to stop the killing, since he was no longer master, the Emperor w
as giving himself up, hoping to touch the conqueror’s heart. Delaherche saw General Reille halt ten paces from the King, dismount and go forward to hand over the letter, unarmed and with only a riding-whip. The sun was going down in a great pink radiance, the King sat down on a chair, leaned against the back of another chair which was held by a secretary, and answered that he accepted the sword and would be waiting for an officer to be sent to negotiate the terms of the capitulation.

  7

  Now all round Sedan, from all the lost positions – Floing, the plateau of Illy, the Garenne woods and the valley of the Givonne, the Bazeilles road – a panic-stricken flood of men, horses and cannon was pouring towards the town. This fortress, on which they had had the disastrous idea of depending, was proving to be a terrible snare, a shelter for fugitives, a sanctuary into which even the bravest men let themselves be lured in the general demoralization and panic. Behind those ramparts they imagined they would at last escape from the terrible artillery which had been thundering for nearly twelve hours; all conscience and reason had fled, the animal had run away with the human and there was nothing left but the mad rush of instinct stampeding for the hole in which to go to earth and sleep.

  At the foot of the little wall, when Maurice bathed Jean’s face with the cold water and saw him open his eyes, he cried out with joy:

  ‘Oh, dear old sod, I thought you were done for… And no offence meant, but you weigh a ton!’

  Still dazed, Jean seemed to be waking out of a dream. Then he must have realized and remembered, for two big tears ran down his cheeks. So this Maurice, this puny boy he loved and looked after like a child, had in this surge of affection found enough strength in his arms to carry him as far as here!

  ‘Half a mo, let me have a look at that cranium of yours.’

  The wound was nothing much, just a grazing of the scalp, which had bled a lot. The hair, now matted with blood, had acted as a pad. So he took care not to wet it, so as not to reopen the place.