The Debacle: (1870-71)

by Emile Zola

  Prosper, as a veteran African campaigner, felt his heart thumping with helpless rage. Suddenly he nudged Silvine and pointed at two of the passing soldiers. He had recognized Maurice and Jean being taken off with the rest, walking side by side like two brothers, and when the little cart started up again at the tail of the convoy he was able to follow them with his eye as far as Torcy, on the flat road leading to Iges through gardens and small-holdings.

  ‘Ah’, murmured Silvine, glancing towards Honoré’s body and distressed at what she saw, ‘perhaps the dead are happiest!’

  Night caught them at Wadelincourt, and it had been dark for a long time when they got back to Remilly. Seeing the body of his son old Fouchard was overcome with amazement, for he was convinced it would never be found. He had spent the day concluding a nice bit of business. The current price for officer’s horses stolen on the battlefield was twenty francs each, and he had got three for forty-five.

  2

  AS THE column of prisoners was leaving Torcy there was such a crush that Maurice was cut off from Jean. He tried to catch up but got even more lost. By the time he reached the bridge over the canal which cuts across the isthmus of the Iges peninsula, he was mixed up with a lot of Chasseurs d’Afrique and could not get back to his own regiment.

  The bridge was defended by two guns facing the peninsula. Immediately past the canal the Prussian headquarters had set up a post in a large house under an officer responsible for receiving and guarding the prisoners. The formalities were brief, the incoming men were simply counted like sheep as the crowd came through and not much notice was taken of uniforms or numbers, after which the crowds poured in and camped wherever the roads took them.

  Maurice thought he could venture to speak to a Bavarian officer who was calmly smoking as he straddled a chair.

  ‘Which way for the 106th regiment of the line, sir?’

  Was this one of the few officers who did not understand French? Or did he find it amusing to misdirect a poor devil of a soldier? He smiled, raised his hand and pointed straight on.

  Although he belonged to this part of the world, Maurice had never been into the peninsula, so from then onwards he was on a voyage of discovery, as though he had been cast up on a desert island. At first he skirted along the side of La Tour à Glaire on his left, a fine country house with its charming little park on the river Meuse. The road next followed the river, flowing to the right at the foot of steep banks. Gradually the road climbed in wide bends, going round the little hill in the centre of the peninsula, and there were some disused quarry workings with narrow wandering paths. Still further, at water level, was a mill. Then the road turned away and went downhill again to the village of Iges, built on a slope and connected to the opposite bank by a. ferry where the Saint-Albert textile mill was. And finally ploughed fields and meadows stretched out, a great expanse of flat, treeless land enclosed by a bend in the river. Maurice looked carefully among the ups and downs of the hill-slope, but in vain – he could only see cavalry and artillery settling down there. He asked again, this time a corporal in the Chasseurs d’Afrique, but he knew nothing. It was getting dark and he sat down for a moment on a roadside stone because his legs were tired.

  In the sudden fit of depression that came over him he saw on the far side of the Meuse the hated fields where he had fought two days before. In the fading light of this day of rain everything took on a ghastly appearance, a horizon of mud stretching on endless and dismal. The Saint-Albert gap, the narrow road along which the Prussians had come, ran parallel with the bend of the river as far as the whitish screes of some quarries. Beyond the slopes of the Seugnon were the feathery treetops of the Falizette wood. But straight ahead of him, a little further to the left, Saint-Menges stood out, with the road coming down to the ferry, and then the summit of Le Hattoy in the middle. Illy was far away in the distance, Fleigneux buried behind a fold in the land, Floing nearer and to the right. He recognized the field in which he had waited for hours lying among the cabbages, the plateau that the reserve artillery had tried to defend, the crest where he had seen Honoré die on his smashed gun. The abomination of the disaster all came back and filled him with pain and disgust until he felt sick.

  But for fear of being caught in the dark he had to go on with his quest. Perhaps the 106th was encamped in the low-lying part beyond the village, but all he found there was a few characters on the prowl, so he decided to go right round the peninsula, following the loop of the river. As he crossed a field of potatoes he took the precaution of pulling up a few plants and filling his pockets. The potatoes were unripe, but it was all he had, as most unfortunately Jean had insisted on carrying both the loaves Delaherche had given them when they left. What struck him now was the number of horses he met on the bare slopes that went gently down from the little hill in the middle to the Meuse in the Donchery direction. Why had all these animals been brought here, and how were they going to be fed? It was quite dark by the time he came to a little wood by the river, in which he was surprised to find the Emperor’s Household Cavalry already encamped and drying their things round big fires. These gentlemen camping on their own had good tents, bubbling saucepans and a cow tethered to a tree. He at once noticed that they were looking askance at him in his ragged infantry uniform covered with mud. But they did let him bake his potatoes in the ashes, and he withdrew and sat under a tree a hundred metres away to eat them. It had stopped raining, the sky had cleared and the stars were shining very bright in the dark blue vault. He realized that he would be spending the night here and would have to continue his search in the morning. He was collapsing with fatigue, and the tree would at least give him some shelter should the rain start again.

  But he could not get to sleep and was haunted by the thought of the huge prison open to the night air in which he felt shut in. The Prussians had had a really bright idea in herding into this place the eighty thousand men left of the army of Châlons. The peninsula might be three kilometres long by one and a half wide, plenty of room to park the huge rabble of disarmed men. He was well aware of the continuous barrier of water surrounding them, with the loop of the Meuse on three sides and at the base the by-pass canal linking the closest points of the river. Just there was the only way through, the bridge defended by two guns. So it was the simplest thing in the world to guard this camp in spite of its great area. He had already noticed the line of German sentries strung along by the water’s edge on the opposite bank at fifty-pace intervals with orders to shoot any man trying to escape by swimming. Uhlans were patrolling behind, linking the different posts, and further off, scattered over the open country, you could have counted black lines of Prussian soldiers, a threefold living and moving girdle hemming in the imprisoned army.

  Now, with his staring, sleepless eyes, he could see nothing but darkness lit here and there by camp fires. Yet beyond the pale ribbon of the Meuse he could still make out the motionless forms of the sentries. In the starlight they stood there straight and black, and at intervals he could hear their guttural calls – the menacing call of the watch tailing off into the swash of the river. These harsh foreign syllables cutting through a lovely starlit night in France revived in him all the nightmare of two days earlier, in the places he had seen but an hour ago, on the plain of Illy still strewn with dead, and in the horrible outskirts of Sedan where a whole world had collapsed. Lying there with his head on the root of a tree in the dampness of the woodland, he relapsed into the despair that had gripped him the day before on the sofa in Delaherche’s home. What hurt his injured pride still more and tortured him now was the question of the morrow. He felt an urge to measure the extent of the fall and know what sort of ruins yesterday’s world had left. Now that the Emperor had surrendered his sword to King William, didn’t it mean that this hateful war was over? But he recalled what two of the Bavarian soldiers escorting the prisoners to Iges had said to him: ‘Us in France! Us all in Paris!’ In a half-doze he suddenly realized what was happening: the Empire swept away amid universal execrat
ion, a Republic proclaimed in an outburst of patriotic fervour, and the legend of 1792 conjuring up shadowy figures, soldiers in the mass uprising, armies of volunteers purging the homeland of the foreigner. It was all jumbled up in his poor sick head, the extortions of the conquerors, the bitterness of conquest, the determination of the conquered to fight to their last drop of blood, captivity for the eighty thousand men held there, first in this peninsula and later in German fortresses for weeks, months, possibly years. Everything was breaking up and crashing down for ever in endless woe.

  The cry of the sentries gradually grew louder and then burst into a shout right opposite him. Now wide awake, he was turning over on the hard earth when a shot tore through the silence, followed by a splashing sound and the short struggle of a body falling straight down into the water. Presumably some poor devil had been shot through the heart while trying to escape by swimming across the Meuse.

  Maurice was up by sunrise. The weather was still bright and he was anxious to rejoin Jean and the rest of his company. He thought for a moment of searching once again in the middle of the peninsula, but then decided to finish going right round. And as he reached the bank of the canal he saw what was left of the 106th, about a thousand men camping on the towpath and only sheltered by a thin row of poplars. If on the night before he had turned to the left instead of going straight on he would have caught up with his regiment at once. Almost all the regiments of the line were huddled together there along the canal bank from La Tour à Glaire to the Château de Villette, another country house surrounded by a few hovels away in the direction of Donchery; and they had all planted themselves near the bridge, that is near the only .way out, with the same instinct for freedom that makes large flocks of sheep crush each other to death against the gate leading out of the fold.

  Jean shouted for joy:

  ‘Oh, it’s you at last! I thought you were in the river!’

  There he was, with the rest of the squad, Pache and Lapoulle, Loubet and Chouteau. The last two, having slept in a doorway in Sedan, had been brought in again in the big round-up. The whole company had no other leader now but the corporal, death having cut down Sergeant Sapin, Lieutenant Rochas and Captain Beaudoin. Although the conquerors had abolished ranks and decided that prisoners only had to obey German officers, the four of them had still clung to Jean, knowing how sensible and experienced he was and good to follow in difficult circumstances. So that morning harmony and good humour reigned despite the foolishness of some and the bloody-mindedness of others. To begin with, he had found them a fairly dry spot for the night, between two ditches, where they had stretched themselves out, having only one piece of canvas between them. Then he had just got hold of some wood and a pan, in which Loubet had made them some nice hot coffee that cheered them up. It had stopped raining, and the day bade fair to be superb, they still had some biscuit and bacon left, and besides, as Chouteau remarked, it was a pleasure not to have to obey anyone any more but mess about as you liked. They were shut up, no doubt, but there was plenty of room. In any case they would be off in a day or two. So altogether this first day, Sunday the 4th, passed very happily.

  Even Maurice, feeling better now he had rejoined his companions, found nothing much to grumble about except the German bands which played all through the afternoon on the opposite side of the canal. And towards evening there was hymn-singing as well. Beyond the cordon of sentries little groups of soldiers could be seen singing slow and loud to celebrate the Sabbath.

  ‘Oh that music!’ Maurice almost screamed in exasperation. ‘It’s getting under my skin!’

  Jean, more phlegmatic, just shrugged.

  ‘After all, they’ve got their reasons for being pleased. And perhaps they think they’re entertaining us… It hasn’t been a bad day, we mustn’t grumble.’

  But towards dusk it began raining again. That was disastrous. Some soldiers had broken into the few empty houses on the peninsula and a few others had managed to put up tents. But the majority had no protection of any kind, not even a blanket, and had to spend the night in the open with rain pouring down on them.

  At about one in the morning Maurice, who had dozed off exhausted, woke up in an absolute lake. The ditches, swollen by the rain, had overflowed and submerged the ground on which he was lying. Chouteau and Loubet were swearing with rage and Pache was shaking Lapoulle who was sleeping on like a log, lake or no lake. Then Jean remembered the poplars along the canal and ran to take shelter under them with his men, who spent the rest of that fearful night bent nearly double with their backs against the tree trunks and legs bent up under them to avoid the heaviest of the drips.

  The following day and the one after that were really dreadful, with such frequent and heavy showers that their clothes never had time to dry on their bodies. Famine was setting in, with no biscuit, bacon or .coffee left. During these two days, the Monday and the Tuesday, they lived on potatoes stolen from fields near-by, and even these were becoming so scarce by the end of the second day that the soldiers with any money were buying them at five sous each. True, bugles still sounded rations, and the corporal had even hurried off to a big shed at La Tour à Glaire, where it was rumoured that rations of bread were being issued. But the first time he went he had waited there for three hours to no purpose, and the second he had had a row with a Bavarian. If the French officers could do nothing, being powerless to act, had the German headquarters parked the beaten army in the rain with the idea of letting them die of hunger? It didn’t look as though any precaution had been taken or any effort made to feed the eighty thousand men whose death-agony was beginning in this horrible hell the soldiers were beginning to call the Camp of Hell, a name denoting anguish that would haunt even the bravest for ever.

  When he got back from these long fruitless waits in front of the shed, Jean, usually so phlegmatic, lost his temper.

  ‘Are they just pulling our legs, calling when there’s nothing there? Bugger me if I put myself out any more!’

  Yet at the first suggestion of a call he rushed off again. They were inhuman, these regulation bugle calls, and they had another effect which broke Maurice’s heart. Each time the bugles sounded the French horses, abandoned and wandering about on the other side of the canal, tore along and jumped into the water to rejoin their regiments, maddened by these fanfares they recognized and which acted on them like a dig of the spurs. But they were exhausted and so were dragged off by the current, and few of them reached the other side. They struggled pitifully, and so many of them were drowned that their swollen, floating bodies were already blocking the canal. And those that did reach land acted as though they had gone mad and galloped away over the empty fields of the peninsula.

  ‘More meat for the crows!’ Maurice said sadly, remembering the disturbing numbers of horses he had seen. ‘If we stay here a few more days we shall all be devouring each other… Oh, the poor creatures!’

  The night of Tuesday to Wednesday was particularly horrible. Jean, who was beginning to be seriously worried about Maurice’s over-tense state, made him wrap himself up in an old blanket they had bought from a Zouave for ten francs, while he himself, with his cape soaked like a sponge, received the full force of the deluge which went on all night. The position under the poplars was becoming untenable; it was a river of mud, and the saturated earth held the water in deep puddles. The worst of it was that their stomachs were empty, the evening meal having consisted of two beetroots among the six men, and they had not even been able to cook them for want of dry wood, so that the cold sugary taste had soon turned into an intolerable burning sensation; to say nothing of the beginnings of dysentery caused by fatigue, bad food and persistent damp. More than ten times, Jean, propped against the trunk of the same tree, with his legs in the water, had put out his hand to feel whether Maurice had thrown off his covering in his restless sleep. Since his friend had saved him from the Prussians on the plateau of Illy by carrying him in his arms he had been repaying his debt a hundredfold. Without reasoning it out he was giving hi
m his whole being, he was forgetting himself entirely for love of him, and this love was indefinable but imperishable, though he had no words to express what he felt. He had already taken the food out of his own mouth, as the chaps in the squad put it, but now he would have given his own skin to clothe him, protect his shoulders and warm his feet. In the midst of the savage egotism all round him in this corner of suffering humanity maddened by hunger, he probably owed to this total self-abnegation the unlooked-for blessing of keeping his unruffled calm and health of mind, for he was the only one who was still strong and had not lost his head.

  And so, after that horrible night, Jean carried out an idea that had been going round in his head.

  ‘Look here, young fellow-me-lad, as they’re not giving us anything to eat but forgetting all about us in this bloody hole, we’ve got to stir our stumps a bit if we don’t want to peg out… Can you still walk all right?’

  Mercifully the sun had come out and Maurice was quite warmed up.