The Debacle: (1870-71)

by Emile Zola

  Meanwhile in the dining-room cook had served bowls of coffee for everybody. Henriette and Gilberte were up, the latter refreshed after a good night’s sleep, with bright face and laughing eyes, and she tenderly embraced her friend Henriette, saying she felt for her from the depths of her heart. Maurice sat next to his sister while Jean, feeling a bit awkward, had to accept coffee, too, and sat opposite Delaherche. Madame Delaherche would not hear of sitting down at table, and she was taken a bowl which she agreed to drink. But the breakfast of the five people there, at first silent, soon livened up. They were all the worse for wear and very hungry, and how could they help being glad to be there alive and well when thousands of poor devils were still lying all over the countryside? In the big cool dining-room the snow-white cloth was a joy to look at, and the piping hot coffee and milk seemed delicious.

  They started talking. Delaherche had recovered the poise of the rich industrialist, and with the patronizing good fellowship of an employer enjoying popularity, who disapproves only of failure, he came back to Napoleon III, whose face had been haunting him for two days as he gaped in curiosity. He addressed Jean, having only this simple man to talk to.

  ‘Oh yes, sir, I can say that the Emperor has been a bitter disappointment to me… It’s all very well for his flatterers to plead extenuating circumstances, but obviously he is the prime cause, the sole cause of our misfortunes.’

  He was already forgetting that as an ardent Bonapartist he had worked for the success of the plebiscite only a few months earlier. He had even given up pitying the man who was to become the Man of Sedan, but laid on him the iniquity of them all.

  ‘An incompetent, as we are bound to agree now, but that in itself would not matter… A mere visionary, a crackpot who seemed to pull things off as long as luck was on his side… No, you see, there’s no point in trying to work up our sympathy for him by saying he’s been deceived and that the Opposition denied him the necessary men and credit. It is he who has deceived us, and his misdeeds have landed us in the awful mess we are in.’

  Maurice did not want to be drawn in, but could not repress a smile, while Jean, embarrassed by this political talk and afraid of saying something silly, merely said:

  ‘But still, they do say he’s a nice man.’

  But these few words, quietly said, made Delaherche sit up. All the fear he had felt and all the worries he had been through burst out in a cry of exasperation turned to hatred.

  ‘A nice man, oh yes, that’s easy to say!… Do you know, sir, that my mill has been hit by three shells, and that it’s no fault of the Emperor’s that it hasn’t been burnt down!… Do you know that I, yes I, am going to lose a hundred thousand francs over this ridiculous business?… Oh no, oh no, France invaded, set on fire, exterminated, industry brought to a standstill, commerce destroyed, it’s too much… A nice man of that kind we’ve had quite enough of, and God save us from him!… He’s down in the mud and blood, let him stay there.’

  With his fist he went through the energetic motions of shoving down some struggling wretch under the water and holding him there. Then he greedily finished off his coffee. Gilberte had involuntarily smiled at Henriette’s sorrowful absent-mindedness as she fed her like a child. When the bowls were empty they lingered in the peaceful and happy atmosphere of the big dining-room.

  At that very time Napoleon III was in the weaver’s humble cottage on the Donchery road. By five in the morning he had insisted on leaving the Sub-Prefecture, feeling ill at ease with Sedan all round him like a reproach and a threat, and moreover he was still tormented by the need to appease his tender heart by obtaining better conditions for his unhappy army. He wanted to see the King of Prussia. He had taken a hired carriage and gone out along the broad main road lined with poplars, on the first stage of exile in the early chill of dawn, conscious of all the lost greatness left behind in his flight. And on that road he had met Bismarck, who had hurried there in an old cap and polished jackboots, with the one object of keeping him occupied and preventing his seeing the King so long as the capitulation was unsigned. The King was still at Vendresse, fourteen kilometres away. Where could they go? Under what roof could they wait? Far away, lost in a storm-cloud, the Tuileries palace had vanished. Sedan already seemed leagues behind and cut off by a river of blood. No more imperial palaces in France, no more official residences, not even a corner in the home of the most humble of his officials where he could dare to sit down. So he elected to end up in the weaver’s home, the humble house he saw by the roadside, with its little cabbage-patch surrounded by a hedge, its one upstairs room and dark little windows. The room upstairs was simply whitewashed, with a tiled floor, and the only furniture was a whitewood table and two wicker chairs. There he tried for hours to possess his soul in patience, first with Bismarck, who smiled when he heard him talking about generosity, and later alone in his misery, with his ashen face glued to the window-panes, still looking at this French soil, this river Meuse flowing along, so lovely, through the broad fertile meadows.

  Then next day and the days after came the other horrible stages: the Château de Bellevue, that desirable upper-class residence with view over the river, in which he spent the night weeping after his interview with King William; the cruel departure, avoiding Sedan for fear of the anger of the defeated and starving, the bridge of boats the Prussians had thrown across the river at Iges, the long detour round the north of the town, the cross-country roads and byways well away from Floing, Fleigneux and Illy, and all this lamentable flight in an open carriage; and then, on the tragic plateau of Illy, strewn with corpses, the legendary meeting of the miserable Emperor, who could not now even bear the motion of the horse, but had cowered in the pain of an attack, perhaps automatically smoking his eternal cigarette, with a party of prisoners, haggard and covered with blood and dust, being taken from Fleigneux to Sedan, moving to one side of the road to let the carriage pass, some silent but others beginning to grumble, and again others getting more and more exasperated and bursting into booing, with fists shaking in a gesture of insult and cursing. After that came still more endless crossings of the battlefield, a league of bumpy roads among the wreckage and the dead staring with wide open, accusing eyes, the bare countryside, great silent forests, the frontier at the top of a rise; then the end of everything, going down on the other side, the road lined with conifers in a narrow valley.

  And what a first night of exile at Bouillon, in an inn, the Hôtel de la Poste, surrounded by such a mob of French refugees and mere sightseers that the Emperor had thought he ought to make an appearance, amid murmurings and catcalls! The room, with three windows on the square and the river Semoy, was the standard kind of room – chairs covered in red damask, mahogany mirror-fronted wardrobe, mantelpiece with spelter clock flanked by seashells and vases of artificial flowers under glass. Small twin beds on either side of the door. The aide-de-camp lay in one and was so tired that he was dead asleep by nine. In the other the Emperor tossed and turned for hours, unable to sleep, and if he got out of bed to relieve the pain by walking about, the only way to take his mind off it was to look at the pictures on the wall each side of the fireplace, one representing Rouget de l’Isle singing the ‘Marseillaise’ and the other the Last Judgement, a furious blast of trumpets by Archangels summoning all the dead from out of the earth, the resurrection of the slaughtered in battle coming up to bear witness before God.

  In Sedan the paraphernalia of the imperial household, the cumbersone, accursed baggage, had remained forlorn behind the sub-prefect’s lilac bushes. Nobody knew how to spirit it all away out of the sight of the poor people dying of hunger, for the look of aggressive insolence it had acquired and the dreadful irony due to defeat were becoming so intolerable. They had to wait for a very dark night. The horses, the carriages, the vans, with their silver casseroles, spits, hampers of vintage wine, took their leave of Sedan in deepest mystery and went off into Belgium too, through dark byways, almost noiselessly, like thieves in the night.

  PART THREE
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  1

  THROUGHOUT the endless day of the battle Silvine had never stopped watching Sedan from the hill on which old Fouchard’s farmhouse stood, and in the thunder and smoke of guns she was tortured by the thought of Honoré. And the following day her anxiety increased because of the impossibility of getting accurate news, with Prussians guarding the roads, refusing to answer questions and in any case knowing nothing themselves. Yesterday’s bright sun had gone and rain showers cast a melancholy gloom over the valley.

  Towards evening old Fouchard, also finding his self-imposed silence a torment and not giving his son much thought, but anxious to know how he might be affected by other people’s troubles, was standing at his door hoping to see something happen when he noticed a tall fellow in a smock, who had been prowling along the road for a minute or two looking very ill at ease. When he recognized him he was so surprised that he called out in spite of three passing Prussians:

  ‘What, is that you, Prosper?’

  The Chasseur d’Afrique frantically signed to him to be quiet, then he approached and said softly:

  ‘Yes, it’s me. I’ve had enough of fighting for nothing, so I’ve sloped off… I say, Pa Fouchard, I suppose you don’t want a farm-hand?’

  At once the old man recovered all his wariness. As a matter of fact he did want one. But there was no point in saying so.

  ‘A new hand, oh dear no, not just now… But come in all the same and have a drink. I’m certainly not going to leave you high and dry in the middle of the road.’

  Indoors, Silvine was putting the stew on the fire and little Chariot was hanging on to her skirt, playing and laughing. At first she did not recognize Prosper, although he had worked with her once, and it was only when she was bringing two glasses and a bottle of wine that she looked at him. She uttered an exclamation, but she was only thinking about Honoré.

  ‘Oh, you’ve come from there, haven’t you? Is Honoré all right?’

  Prosper started to answer, then hesitated. For two days he had been living in a daze, going through a violent sequence of vague things that had left no clear impression on his mind. True, he thought he had seen Honoré’s dead body lying over his gun, but he could no longer vouch for it, and why upset people when you’re not sure?

  ‘Honoré,’ he mused, ‘I don’t know… I can’t say…’

  She looked hard at him and insisted.

  ‘You haven’t seen him, then?’

  He slowly spread his hands and shook his head.

  ‘How do you think I can know? Such a lot of things have happened, such a lot! You see, out of all this bloody battle I should have my work cut out to tell you as much as that! No, not even the places I have been through… It makes you just silly, it really does!’

  He drank off a glass of wine and sat there miserably gazing far away, into the mists of his memory. ‘All I can remember is that night was already falling when I came to… When I had my fall while charging, the sun was high in the sky… I must have been there for hours, with my right leg crushed under poor Zephir, who had had a bullet right in the chest… I can tell you, it wasn’t a bit funny being in that position, with heaps of dead comrades all round and not even a cat about, with the thought that I was going to peg out too unless somebody came and picked me up. I tried very carefully to get my thigh free, but no use, Zephir weighed as much as five hundred thousand devils. He was still warm. I stroked him and talked to him, calling him nice things. And this is what I shall never forget: he opened his eyes again and made an effort to lift up his poor head which was lying on the ground next to mine. So we started talking: “Well, old cock,” I said, “no offence meant, but do you want to see me kick the bucket along with you? Is that why you’re hanging on to me so hard?” Of course he didn’t answer yes, but all the same I could see in his eyes what a terrible thing it was for him to leave me. And I don’t know how it happened, whether he did it on purpose or whether it was just a spasm, but he gave a sudden jerk that shifted him to one side. I was able to stand up, but oh what a state I was in, with my leg like a lump of lead!… Never mind, I took Zephir’s head in my arms and went on saying nice things to him, anything that came from my heart, that he was a good horse, that I was very fond of him, that I would always remember him. He listened and seemed so glad! Then he gave another jerk and died, and his big, blank eyes had never left me. Still, it’s a funny thing, and nobody will believe me, and yet it is the solemn truth that he had big tears in his eyes… Poor Zephir, he was crying just like a man…’

  Prosper had to break off, choked with sorrow and crying himself. He drank another glass of wine, then went on with his story in broken and disconnected sentences. It was getting darker and now there was nothing left but a red streak of light along the horizon over the battlefield, lengthening indefinitely the shadows of dead horses. He must have stayed a long while by his, unable to go away, with his leg gone dead. But then a sudden wave of panic had made him walk in spite of it – a desire not to be alone, to be with friends and not be so frightened. In the same way, from all sides, ditches, thickets and all sorts of odd corners, forgotten wounded men were dragging themselves along, trying to find each other, to get together in groups of four or five, little communities in which it was less terrible to share their last agonies and die. So it was that he had come across two soldiers of the 43rd in the Garenne wood, who had never had a scratch but who had gone to earth there like hares, waiting for nightfall. When they realized that he knew the lie of the land they told him their plan: to clear off into Belgium, reaching the frontier through the woods before daylight. At first he refused to take them, for he would have preferred to head for Remilly at once, knowing he could find refuge there, but where could he get a smock and some trousers from? And besides, from the Garenne wood to Remilly, from one side of the valley to the other, there was no hope of getting through the many Prussian lines. So he did agree to act as a guide to the two comrades. His leg had got some life back into it, and they were fortunate enough to get somebody at a farm to let them have some bread. They heard a distant clock strike nine as they set off again. The only place where

  they got into danger was at La Chapelle, where they ran right into an enemy post which rushed to arms and fired into the darkness, while they for their part tore along on all fours into some bushes amid the whistling of bullets. After that they stayed in the woods, straining their ears and groping their way. As they came round a bend in a path they crept along and then jumped on the shoulders of a lone sentry and slit his throat with a knife. After that the roads were clear and they went on their way laughing and whistling. At about three in the morning they reached a little Belgian village, woke up a kind-hearted farmer who at once let them into his barn where they slept soundly on some bundles of hay.

  The sun was already high in the sky when Prosper woke. Opening his eyes while his mates were still snoring, he saw their host harnessing a horse to a big farm cart loaded with loaves of bread, rice, coffee, sugar and all kinds of provisions, concealed under sacks of charcoal. He found out that the good man had two married daughters in France, at Raucourt, and he was going to take these provisions to them, knowing that they had been left quite destitute after the Bavarians had passed through. He had obtained the necessary safe-conduct first thing that morning. At once Prosper was seized with a mad desire to sit on the seat of that cart as well and go back to the place for which he was already dying of homesickness. Nothing simpler, he could get off at Remilly, which the farmer had to go through in any case. It was all fixed up in three minutes, they lent him the trousers and smock he needed so badly, the farmer gave out everywhere that he was his farm-hand, and by about six he got off at the church, after being stopped only two or three times at German posts.

  ‘No, really, I’d had enough,’ Prosper went on after a pause. ‘I wouldn’t have minded so much if they’d put us to some good use as they did in Africa. But to move left just so as to move back right, to feel you’re absolutely no use, it isn’t any sort of existence a
t all… And now my poor Zephir is dead and I’d be quite alone, so the only thing I can do is go back to the land. Better than being a prisoner with the Prussians, isn’t it?… You’ve got some horses, Monsieur Fouchard, and you’ll see whether I can love them and look after them!’

  The old man’s eyes glittered. He held up his glass once again and concluded the business without undue haste:

  ‘Oh well, as it will help you I don’t mind if I do… I’ll take you on… But as to any wages, can’t discuss that until the war is over, because I don’t really need anybody and times are too hard!’

  Silvine was still sitting there with Chariot on her lap, and she had never taken her eyes off Prosper. When she saw him getting up to go straight off to the stable and get to know the horses, she asked him once again:

  ‘So you haven’t seen Honoré?’

  The question, suddenly hitting him again, made him jump, as though it had shone a sudden ray of light into a dark corner of his memory. He hesitated again and then made up his mind.

  ‘Look, I didn’t want to upset you just now, but I believe Honoré is still out there.’

  ‘Still there? What do you mean?’

  ‘Yes, I think the Prussians have done for him. I saw him lying back over a cannon, with his head held high and a hole under the heart.’

  There was a silence. Silvine turned a ghastly white, and old Fouchard looked stunned, then put his glass back on the table, where he had finished off the bottle.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she gasped.

  ‘Yes of course I am, as sure as you can be of anything you’ve seen… It was on a little mound, near three trees, and I think I could go there with my eyes shut.’