The Debacle: (1870-71)

by Emile Zola

  Dr Dalichamp was already in his trap and calling Maurice, who put all his soul into a final embrace with his sister Henriette. She looked at him through silent tears, very pale in her widow’s black.

  ‘I’m putting my brother in your care… Look after him and love him as I do.’

  4

  IT was a big room with a tiled floor and plainly whitewashed, which had formerly been used for storing fruit. You could still smell the good smell of apples and pears, and the only furniture consisted of an iron bedstead, a whitewood table and two chairs and an old walnut chest with cavernous depths containing a whole world of things. But in this room there was a deep peaceful calm, the only sounds to be heard were faint noises from the cowshed nearby, a distant clatter of sabots or lowing of cattle. The sunshine came in through the window which faced south. All that could be seen was part of a hill-slope, a cornfield bordered by some woodland. This private, mysterious room was so well concealed from all eyes that nobody in the world could suspect it was there.

  Henriette quickly settled the routine: it was understood that to avoid suspicion only she and the doctor would go in and see Jean. Silvine was never to go in unless she was asked to. First thing in the morning the two women tidied up, and then all day long the door might have been walled up. If the patient needed something in the night he would only have to knock on the wall, for Henriette’s room was adjoining. And so, after weeks of living in a turbulent mob, Jean suddenly found himself cut off from the world, seeing nobody but this young woman who was so gentle that her light step made no sound. He saw her again just as he had seen her for the first time in Sedan, like a vision, with her rather wide mouth, small, neat features and beautiful hair the colour of ripe grain, looking after him with infinite kindness.

  During the first days he had such a high temperature that Henriette hardly ever left him. Every morning on his rounds Dr Dalichamp looked in, on the pretext of taking her to the hospital, and he examined Jean and dressed his wound. As the bullet had come out again after breaking the tibia, he was surprised at the ugly look of the wound and was afraid that the presence of a splinter of bone, which he could not find with the probe, might necessitate a resection of the bone. He had discussed it with Jean, who was horrified at the thought of a short leg which would make him lame – no, no, he’d rather die than be permanently disabled! And so the doctor, keeping the wound under observation, simply went on dressing it with a pad soaked in olive oil and carbolic, after inserting a drain, a rubber tube to take away the pus. But the doctor had warned him that if he did not intervene it might take a very long time indeed to heal. But by the second week the temperature did go down and things improved so long as complete immobility was maintained.

  And so Jean and Henriette settled down to a regular life together. They fell into a routine and it seemed as though they had never lived any other way and would go on living like this. All the time she was not at the hospital she spent with him, seeing that he ate and drank regularly, helping him to turn over with a strength of wrist one would not have suspected in such slender arms. Sometimes they talked, but more often said nothing, especially in the early days. But they never seemed bored; it was a very peaceful life in this most restful atmosphere – for him, still shattered by the battle, and for her, in her mourning dress, still heartbroken after her recent loss. At first he felt a little awkward because he was aware that she was above him in station, almost a grand lady, while he had never been anything more than a peasant and soldier. He could only just about read and write. But later he felt somewhat reassured when he saw that she treated him without any pride, as an equal, and that gave him the courage to show that he was intelligent in his own way, through his sweet reasonableness. Moreover he himself was amazed to feel that he had become more refined, more agile in mind, with new ideas. Was it something to do with the abominable life he had been leading for two months? He had emerged more delicate-minded from so much physical and moral suffering. But what finally reassured him was that he realized that she did not know all that much more than he did. After the death of her mother she had become at a very early age the Cinderella, the little housewife looking after her three men, as she called them – her grandfather, father and brother – and she had not had time for study. Reading, writing, a bit of spelling and arithmetic was about as far as she could go. The only reason why she still intimidated him and seemed so far above all other women was that he knew that beneath her exterior of an unremarkable little person, occupied with the trivial affairs of daily life, was a woman of the greatest goodness and the utmost courage.

  They were one immediately when they talked about Maurice. She was devoting herself to him in this way because he was the friend, the brother of Maurice, his great help in time of need, and it was her turn to pay a debt of the heart. She was full of gratitude and of an affection which grew as she got to know how upright and wise he was and how reliable. And he, whom she cared for like a child, was also contracting a debt of infinite gratitude and could have kissed her hands for every cup of broth she gave him. This bond of tender understanding grew closer every day in the deep solitude in which they lived and shared the same troubles. When they finished their memories – details she untiringly asked for about their painful march from Rheims to Sedan – the same question always came up: what was Maurice doing now? Why wasn’t he writing? Was Paris completely cut off, that they heard no news? So far they had had only one letter from him, postmarked Rouen three days after his departure, in which he had explained in a few lines how he had found himself in that city after a big detour on the way to Paris. And then nothing for a week, absolute silence. In the mornings Dr Dalichamp, having dressed the wound, liked to linger there for a few minutes. He even came back sometimes in the evening and stayed longer, and thus he was the only link with the world, the great world outside, so convulsed by disasters. News only reached them through him, and his ardent patriotic heart boiled over with anger and grief at every defeat. So he hardly talked about anything except the invading march of the Prussians who since Sedan had been flooding steadily all over France, like a black host. Each day brought its own grief, and he would stay there lost in misery, slumped on one of the two chairs beside the bed, and, waving his trembling hands, tell of an ever worsening situation. Often his pockets were stuffed with Belgian newspapers which he left behind. Thus, weeks after the event, the echo of each disaster reached this hidden room and drew still closer, in a common bond of anguish, the two poor suffering souls shut in there.

  So it was that Henriette read to Jean from old papers the happenings at Metz and the great and heroic battles which had started up afresh three times, after a day’s interval on each occasion. These battles had already happened five weeks ago, but he still knew nothing about them, and his heart ached when he heard of the same miseries and defeats there that he had suffered himself. In the tense silence of that room, as Henriette read in the slightly sing-song voice of a careful schoolgirl dividing the sentences properly, the lamentable tale unfolded itself. After Froeschwiller and Spickeren, at the very time when the vanquished 1st corps was carrying away the 5th in its rout, the other corps, echeloned out from Metz to Bitche, wavered and then fell back in the general consternation caused by these disasters, and finally concentrated in front of the fortified

  area on the right bank of the Moselle. But what valuable time lost, instead of speeding up the retreat on Paris that was to become so difficult later! The Emperor had had to hand over the command to Marshal Bazaine, from whom everybody expected victory. Then, on the 14th, Borny, where the army was attacked exactly when it was at last making up its mind to cross to the left bank, with two German armies against it, that of Steinmetz, standing immovable opposite the fortified camp as a threat, and that of Friedrich Karl, who had crossed the river higher upstream and was coming along the left bank to cut Bazaine off from the rest of France, Borny, the first shots of which were not fired until three in the afternoon, Borny, the victory with no morrow, which left the Frenc
h corps masters of their positions but immobilized them, straddled across the Moselle, and which the turning movement of the second German army had completed. Then on the 16th, Rezonville, all the French army corps now at last on the left bank, with only the 3rd and 4th in the rear, delayed in the appalling traffic-jam at the crossing of the Etain and Mars-la-Tour roads, the daring attack by the Prussian cavalry and artillery, already cutting these roads in the morning, the slow and confused battle which, until two o’clock, Bazaine could have won as he only had to repulse a handful of men in front

  of him, but which in the end he lost owing to his inexplicable fear of being cut off from Metz. The immense struggle covered leagues of hills and plains in which the French, attacked in front and on the flank, had performed miracles so as not to advance, thereby leaving the enemy time to join up and themselves working for the Prussian plan, which was to make them turn back to the other side of the river. And finally on the 18th, after the return to the original position in front of the fortified area, came Saint-Privat, the supreme struggle over a front of thirteen kilometres, two hundred thousand Germans, with seven hundred guns against a hundred and twenty thousand French with only five hundred pieces of equipment, the Germans facing Germany, and the French France, as though the invaders had become the invaded, in this strange pivoting that had come about. From two o’clock onwards there was the most terrible mêlée in which the Prussian Guard was repulsed and cut to pieces and Bazaine was for a long time winning, strong in his unshakable left wing, until towards evening when his weaker right wing was compelled to evacuate Saint-Privat amid horrible carnage, involving

  with it the whole army, defeated, thrown back on Metz and from then onwards locked in a ring of iron.

  Over and over again as Henriette was reading Jean broke in and said:

  ‘Well, and all the way from Rheims we were expecting Bazaine!’

  The dispatch from the marshal dated the 19th, after Saint-Privat, in which he talked of resuming his retreat via Montmédy, and which had determined the advance of the army of Châlons, now appeared to be nothing but the report of a beaten general anxious to tone down his defeat, and only later, on the 29th, when the news of the approach of a rescuing army reached him through the Prussian lines, had he tried one last effort at Noiseville on the right bank, but so half-heartedly that on 1 September, the very day on which the army of Châlons was crushed at Sedan, that of Metz fell back, definitely paralysed and dead as far as France was concerned. By neglecting to move while routes were still open and then being genuinely halted by superior forces, the marshal, who until then might have been an indifferent commander, but nothing worse, from now on, under the influence of his political calculations, was going to become a conspirator and a traitor.

  But in the papers brought by Dr Dalichamp Bazaine was still the great man, the gallant soldier by whom France still expected to be saved. Jean made her re-read certain passages in order to grasp how the third German army, with the Crown Prince of Prussia, had been able to pursue them while the first and second were blocking Metz, both of them so strong in men and guns that it had been possible to take some from them and form this fourth army which, under the command of the Crown Prince of Saxony, had made the disaster of Sedan certain. When at last he understood, on this bed of pain to which his wound pinned him down, he forced himself to go on hoping.

  ‘So that’s it, we weren’t the strongest!… Never mind, they give the figures, Bazaine has got a hundred and fifty thousand men, three hundred thousand rifles and more than five hundred guns, and I bet you he’s got something good for them up his sleeve!’

  Henriette nodded and agreed with his opinion so as not to depress him still more. She was all at sea in these vast troop movements, but she had a presentiment that disaster was inevitable. Her voice stayed clear and bright and she could have gone on reading for hours just for the happiness of interesting him. But sometimes in a report about slaughter her voice would falter and her eyes suddenly fill with tears. No doubt it reminded her of her husband shot out there and kicked against the wall by the Bavarian officer.

  ‘If it upsets you too much,’ said Jean in surprise, ‘don’t go on reading about battles.’

  She recovered her gentle kindness at once.

  ‘No, no, I’m sorry, it really gives me pleasure too.’

  One evening at the beginning of October, while a gale was blowing outside, she returned from the hospital and came into the room in great excitement.

  ‘A letter from Maurice! The doctor has just given it to me.’

  Each morning they had both been increasingly worried because he was not showing any sign of life; and especially as for a good week now it had been rumoured that Paris was completely invested, they were giving up hope of getting any news and were anxiously wondering what could have happened to him since he left Rouen. Now there was an explanation of this silence, for the letter he had sent from Paris addressed to Dr Dalichamp on 18 September, the very day when the last trains left for Havre, had gone an enormous way round and only reached its destination by a miracle, having been mislaid a score of times on the way.

  ‘Oh, good lad!’ beamed Jean. ‘Read it quick.’

  The wind redoubled its fury, banging the window like a battering-ram. Henriette stood the lamp on the table by the bed and began to read, so close to Jean that their hair touched. It was so peaceful and happy in that quiet room with the storm roaring outside.

  It was a long letter of eight pages in which Maurice first explained how as soon as he had arrived on the 16th he had been fortunate enough to get into a regiment of the line which was being brought up to strength. Then he went on to facts and wrote with extraordinary passion about what he had learned of the happenings of that terrible month – Paris coming back to normality after the painful shock of Wissembourg and Froeschwiller and once again relapsing into self-deception and entertaining hopes of a revenge, the legend of the victorious army, Bazaine in command, a mass rising against the foe, imaginary victories, huge slaughters of Prussians which even ministers reported in the Chamber. And then he went on to say how once again a bombshell had burst in Paris on 3 September, and hopes were dashed, and the city, confident in its ignorance, had been overwhelmed by the relentless blows of fate, so that cries of ‘Out! Out!’ were echoing by evening on the boulevards while in the short, doom-laden night sitting Jules Favre had read out the motion for the revolution demanded by the populace. Then the next day was 4 September, the collapse of a world, the Second Empire swept away in the wreckage of its vices and follies, all the people out in the streets, a torrent of half a million men pouring into the Place de la Concorde on that brilliant Sunday, billowing over to the railings of the Legislative Assembly defended by a mere handful of troops with rifle-butts in the air. Then the mob, smashing down doors, invaded the Chamber itself, from which Jules Favre, Gambetta and other deputies of the left were about to leave to proclaim the Republic at the Hôtel de Ville, while a little door of the Louvre, giving on to the Place Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, was opened just enough to let out the Empress-Regent, dressed in black and accompanied by one woman friend, both trembling, fugitives keeping out of sight in a cab they had picked up and which jolted them away from the Tuileries through which the mob was now running. On that same day Napoleon III had left the inn at Bouillon where he had spent his first night in exile en route for Wilhelmshöhe.

  In a serious voice Jean broke in:

  ‘So now we have a republic?… Oh well, all to the good if it helps us beat the Prussians.’

  But he shook his head, for he had always been led to fear a republic when he worked on the land. And besides, in the face of the enemy he didn’t think it was a good thing not to be all of one mind. Anyway there would have to be something else because the Empire was thoroughly corrupt, and nobody wanted any more truck with it.

  Henriette finished reading the letter, which ended by mentioning the approach of the Germans. On the 13th, the very day when a delegation from the Government of Na
tional Defence established itself in Tours, they had been sighted east of Paris, as far forward as Lagny. On the 14th and 15th they were on the outskirts, at Créteil and Joinville-le-Pont. Yet on the morning of the 18th, when he had written, Maurice still did not seem to believe it would be possible to invest Paris completely, and had recovered a superb confidence, considering a siege as an insolent and hazardous gamble which would collapse in less than three weeks, and counting on the relieving armies the provinces would certainly send, to say nothing of the army of Metz, already on the move via Verdun and Rheims. Thus the links in the iron belt had closed up and shut Paris in a gigantic prison for two million living souls, whence nothing came out but the silence of death.

  ‘Oh God!’ murmured Henriette, weighed down by grief. ‘How long is it all going to last, and shall we ever see him again?’

  A squall bowed the trees outside and the old timbers of the farmhouse groaned. If they were in for a hard winter what sufferings there would be for the poor soldiers with no fire, no food and fighting in the snow.

  ‘Ah well,’ Jean concluded, ‘it’s a very nice letter and it’s a pleasure to get news… We mustn’t ever despair.’

  And so day after day the month of October went by, with dreary grey skies and the wind only giving over so as to bring up even darker banks of clouds again soon. Jean’s wound took an endless time to heal. The quality of the fluid coming from the drainage tube would not have justified the doctor’s removing it, and the patient had become very weak but refused to countenance an operation for fear of being a cripple for life. So now the little isolated room seemed to be slumbering in a period of waiting and resignation, sometimes broken by sudden anxieties with no clear cause, and the news that reached there was, remote and vague, like a nightmare from which one is just emerging. The unspeakable war, with its slaughters and disasters, was still going on somewhere out there, but they never knew the real truth or heard anything except the widespread muted clamour of their slaughtered country. The wind carried away the leaves under the dreary sky and there were long, deep silences in the bare countryside, where nothing was heard but the cawing of rooks foretelling a hard winter.