French Literature – Children Books – Émile Zola – The Downfall (La Débâcle) – Contents
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PART II
Chapter IV
A WOMAN’S HEROISM—THE HORRORS OF BAZEILLES
Henriette was at first able to walk rapidly along the road leading to Balan. It was barely more than nine o’clock, and for some distance the broad paved highway, edged with houses and gardens, was still free; though towards the village it was becoming more and more obstructed by the flight of the inhabitants and the movements of the troops. At each fresh stream of the crowd that she encountered, she pressed close against the walls, or glided hither and thither, invariably contriving to pass on, no matter what obstacles there might be. And slight of figure as she was, unobtrusive, too, in her dark dress, with her beautiful fair hair and her little pale face half-hidden by Gilberte’s black lace fichu, she escaped the notice of those she met; and nothing was able to stay her light and silent steps.
At Balan, however, she found the road barred by a regiment of Marine Infantry—a compact mass of men who were waiting for orders, under the shelter of some large trees which hid them from the enemy. She rose on tip-toe, but the column was of such length that she could not even see the end of it. Nevertheless, she tried to slip by, seeking to make herself even smaller than she was. Elbows pushed her back, however; the butt-ends of guns digged her in the sides, and when she had taken a score of steps, loud shouts and protests rose up around her. A captain turned his head and angrily demanded: ‘Here! woman, are you mad? Where are you going?’
‘I am going to Bazeilles.’
‘What! to Bazeilles?’
A general roar of laughter ensued. The men pointed her out to one another, and jested. The captain, whom her answer had also enlivened, exclaimed: ‘Well, if you are going to Bazeilles you ought to take us with you, little one! We were there just now, and I hope we are going to return there. But I warn you that it’s warm.’
‘I am going to Bazeilles to join my husband,’ declared Henriette in a gentle voice, her pale blue eyes retaining their expression of quiet decision.
At this the men ceased laughing; and an old sergeant extricated her from the ranks and compelled her to retrace her steps. ‘You can see very well, my poor child,’ said he, ‘that it is impossible for you to pass. It isn’t a woman’s place to be at Bazeilles just now. You’ll find your husband again later on. Come, be reasonable!’
She had to give way, and step back to the rear of the column; and there she remained standing, at each minute rising upon tip-toe to look along the road; for she was stubbornly bent upon resuming her journey as soon as this became possible. From the talk around her she derived some knowledge of the situation. Several officers were bitterly complaining of the orders to retreat which had caused them to abandon Bazeilles at a quarter-past eight that morning, when General Ducrot on succeeding the marshal had resolved to concentrate the entire army upon the plateau of Illy. The worst was that the First Corps in surrendering the valley of the Givonne to the Germans, had fallen back too soon, so that the Twelfth Corps, already hotly attacked in front, had also been overlapped on the left. And, now that General de Wimpffen had succeeded General Ducrot, the original plan was again in the ascendant, and orders were coming to reconquer Bazeilles at any cost, and to throw the Bavarians into the Meuse. Was it not really idiotic, however, that they should have had to abandon this position, and now have to reconquer it when it was in possession of the enemy? They were quite willing to give their lives, but not for the mere fun of doing so.
All at once there was a great rush of men and horses, and General de Wimpffen galloped up, erect in his stirrups, his face aglow and his voice greatly excited as he shouted: ‘We cannot fall back, my lads; it would be the end of everything. If we must retreat we will retire on Carignan and not on Mézières. But we will win! You beat them this morning, and you will beat them again!’
Then away he galloped, going off by a road that ascended towards La Moncelle; and the rumour spread that he had just had a violent discussion with General Ducrot, during which each had upheld his own plan and attacked the other’s; one declaring that a retreat on Mézières had been an impossibility since the night before, whilst the other predicted that if they did not now retire to the plateau of Illy the entire army would be surrounded before evening. And they also accused one another of knowing neither the district nor the real state of the troops. The worst was, that both of them were in the right.
For a moment or so, pressing as was Henriette’s desire to go forward, her attention had been diverted from her purpose. She had just recognised some fugitives from Bazeilles stranded by the roadside—a family of poor weavers, the husband, the wife and their three girls, the eldest of whom was only nine years old. They were so overcome, so utterly distracted by weariness and despair, that they had been able to go no farther, but had sunk down against a wall. ‘Ah! my dear lady,’ said the woman to Henriette, ‘we have nothing left. Our house, you know, was on the Place de l’Eglise. A shell set it on fire, and I don’t know how the children and we two didn’t leave our lives there.’
At this remembrance the three little girls again began sobbing and shrieking, whilst the mother, with the gestures of one deranged, gave a few particulars of their disaster: ‘I saw the loom burn like a faggot of dry wood,’ said she; ‘the bed, the furniture flamed up faster than straw—and there was the clock too; yes, the clock which I didn’t even have time to carry away with me.’
‘Thunder!’ swore the man, with his eyes full of big tear-drops, ‘what on earth will become of us?’
To tranquillise them, Henriette replied in a voice that quivered slightly: ‘At all events, you are together; neither of you has come to any harm, and you have your little girls with you too. You must not complain.’
Then she began to question them, anxious to know what was taking place at Bazeilles, whether they had seen her husband there, and what had been the condition of her house at the time they came away. In their shivering fright, however, they gave contradictory answers. No, they had not seen Monsieur Weiss. But at this, one of the little girls declared that she had seen him; he was lying on the footway, said she, with a big hole in his head. Her father thereupon gave her a smack to teach her not to tell such stories, for a story it was, undoubtedly. As for the house, that must have been standing when they came away; in fact, they now remembered noticing, as they passed it, that the door and the windows were all carefully closed, as if nobody were there. Besides, at that time, the Bavarians were only in possession of the Place de l’Eglise, and they had to conquer the village, street by street, house by house. Since then, however, they must have made no little progress, and at the present time, no doubt, all Bazeilles was on fire.[27] And the wretched couple continued talking of all these things with fumbling gestures of fear, evoking the whole frightful vision of flaming roofs, flowing blood, and corpses strewing the ground.
‘And my husband?’ repeated Henriette.
They no longer answered her, however; they were sobbing, with their hands before their eyes. And she remained there consumed by atrocious anxiety, but erect and without weakening, merely a faint quiver causing her lips to tremble. What ought she to believe? In vain did she repeat that the child must have been mistaken; still and ever she seemed to see her husband lying across the road with a bullet in his head. Then, too, she was disquieted on thinking of the house where, so it seemed, every shutter was closed. Why was that? Was he no longer there? All at once a conviction that he was dead froze her heart to the core. Perhaps, though, he was only wounded, and at this thought her urgent longing to go there and be with him seized hold of her once more, and so imperiously that she would again have tried to make her way through the ranks of the soldiers had not the bugles at that moment sounded the advance.
Many of the young fellows gathered together here had come from Toulon, Rochefort, or Brest, barely drilled, without ever having fired a shot in their lives, and yet they had been fighting since the morning as bravely and as stoutly as veterans. They, who had marched so badly from Rheims to Mouzon, weighed down by the unwonted task, were proving themselves the best disciplined, the most fraternally united of all the troops—linked together in presence of the enemy by a solid bond of duty and abnegation. The bugles had merely to sound and they were returning to the fight, marching once more to the attack despite all the anger that swelled their veins. Thrice had they been promised the support of a division which did not come, and they felt that they were being abandoned, sacrificed. To send them back to Bazeilles, like this, after making them evacuate the village, was equivalent indeed to asking each one of them for his life. And they all knew it, and they all gave their lives without a thought of revolting. The ranks closed up, and they advanced beyond the trees that screened them, to find themselves once more among the bullets and the shells.
Henriette gave a deep sigh of relief. So at last they were marching! She followed, hoping to reach Bazeilles in company with the troops, and quite prepared to run, should they, on their side, do so. But they had already halted again. The enemy’s projectiles were now fairly raining around them, and to reoccupy Bazeilles each yard of the road had to be conquered, the lanes, houses, and gardens recaptured both on the right and on the left. The men in the first ranks had opened fire, and they now only advanced by fits and starts, long minutes being consumed in overcoming the slightest obstacles. And Henriette soon realised that she would never get there if she continued remaining in the rear waiting for victory. So she made up her mind, and threw herself between two hedges on the right hand, taking a path that descended towards the meadows.
Her project now was to get to Bazeilles by way of those vast pasture-lands skirting the Meuse. But she had no very distinct idea how she should manage this, and all at once she found her way barred by a little sea of still water. It was the inundation, the defensive lake formed by flooding the low ground, which she had altogether forgotten. For a moment she thought of retracing her steps; then, skirting the edge of the water, at the risk of leaving her shoes in the mud, she continued on her way through the drenched grass, in which she sank up to her ankles. This was practicable for a hundred yards or so; but she was then confronted by a garden wall. The ground descended at this spot, and the water washing the wall was quite six feet in depth. So it was impossible to pass that way. She clenched her little fists, and had to put forth all her strength to bear up against this crushing disappointment and refrain from bursting into tears. However, when the first shock was over, she skirted the inclosure and found a lane running along between some scattered houses. And she now thought herself saved, for she was acquainted with that labyrinth, those bits of tangled paths whose skein, perplexing though it was, ended at last at the village.
So far there had been no shells to impede her progress, but all at once, with her blood curdling and her face very pale, she stopped short amid the deafening thunderclap of a frightful explosion, the blast of which enveloped her. A projectile had just burst a few yards ahead. She looked round and examined the heights on the left bank of the river, where the smoke of the German batteries was ascending to the sky; then realising whence the shell had come, she once more started off, with her eyes fixed upon the horizon, watching for the projectiles so as to avoid them. Despite the mad temerity of her journey she retained great sang-froid, all the brave tranquillity that her little housewife’s soul was capable of showing. Her desire was to escape death, to find her husband, and bring him away that they might yet live together and be happy. The shells were now falling without a pause, and she glided along close to the walls, threw herself behind border-stones, and took advantage of every nook that afforded the slightest shelter. But at last there came an open space, a stretch of broken-up road which was already covered with splinters; and she was waiting at the corner of a shed, when all at once, level with the ground, she espied a child’s inquisitive face peeping out of a hole. It was a little boy some ten years old, barefooted, and wearing simply a shirt and a pair of tattered trousers—some ragamuffin of the roads whom the battle was greatly amusing. His narrow black eyes were sparkling with delight, and at each detonation he gleefully exclaimed: ‘Oh! how funny they are! Don’t move, there’s another one coming! Boum! Didn’t that one make a row? Don’t move! Don’t move!’ And, for his own part, he would dive into his hole, reappear raising his wren-like head, and then dive again each time a projectile fell.[28]
Henriette now remarked that the shells were coming from the Liry hill, and that the batteries of Pont-Maugis and Noyers were firing only on Balan. She could distinctly perceive the smoke of each discharge, and almost immediately afterwards she heard the hissing of the shell, followed by the detonation. A short pause must have occurred in the firing, for at last she could only see some light vapour which was slowly dispersing.
‘They must be drinking a glass,’ said the youngster; ‘make haste, give me your hand; we’ll get off.’
He took her hand and forced her to follow him, and bending low they both galloped, side by side, across the open space. At its farther extremity, as they were throwing themselves for shelter behind a rick, they glanced round and saw another shell arrive, which fell right upon the shed, at the very spot where they had been waiting a moment before. The crash was frightful, the shed itself fell in a heap to the ground.
At this spectacle the urchin danced with senseless delight, considering it extremely funny. ‘Bravo! there’s a smash! All the same, it was time we crossed!’
And now Henriette, for a second time, came upon impassable obstacles—garden walls with never a lane between them. Her little companion, however, kept on laughing, and declared that it was easy enough to pass if one chose to do so. Climbing on to the coping of a wall he assisted her over, and they jumped down into a kitchen garden among beds of beans and peas. There were walls all round, and in order to get out again they had to pass through a gardener’s low house. Whistling and swinging his arms, the lad went on ahead, showing no surprise at anything he saw. He opened a door, found himself in a room, and made his way into another one, where an old woman, probably the only living creature who had remained in the place, was standing near a table with a look of stupor. She gazed at these two strangers who were thus passing through her house; but she did not say a word to them, nor did they speak to her. Once out of the house they found themselves in a lane which for a moment they were able to follow. Then, however, came other obstacles, and for half a mile or more, according to the chances of the road they contrived to make for themselves, it was frequently necessary to climb over walls or creep through gaps in hedges, and pass out by cart-shed doors, or ground-floor windows, by way of taking a short cut. They could hear dogs howling, and once they were almost knocked down by a cow, which was fleeing at a mad gallop. However, they must have been getting nigh, for a smell of fire was wafted to them, and large stretches of ruddy smoke were every minute veiling the sun, like light, wavy fragments of crape.
All at once, however, the urchin stopped, and, confronting Henriette, inquired: ‘I say, Madame, pray where are you going like that?’
‘You can see very well. I’m going to Bazeilles.’
He whistled and burst into a shrill laugh, like a scapegrace playing the truant from school, and having a fine time of it: ‘To Bazeilles! Oh! that’s not my direction. I’m going another way. Good day.’
And thereupon he turned on his heels and went off as he had come, and she never knew where he had sprung from or whither he went. She had found him in a hole, and she lost sight of him round a corner, and never set eyes upon him again.
Henriette experienced a singular sensation of fear when she once more found herself alone. No doubt that puny child had scarcely been of any protection, but his chatter had diverted her thoughts. And now she, who was naturally so brave, had begun to tremble. The shells were no longer falling, the Germans had ceased firing on Bazeilles, no doubt for fear of killing their own men, who were masters of the village. But for a few minutes already she had heard the whistling of bullets, that blue-bottle kind of buzzing which she had been told about, and recognised. So confused were all the noises of the rageful fight afar off, so violent was the universal clamour, that she could not distinguish the crackling of the fusillade. All at once, whilst she was turning the corner of a house, a dull thud resounding near her ear abruptly arrested her steps. A bullet had chipped some plaster from the corner of the house-front, and she turned very pale. Then, before she had time to ask herself if she would have sufficient courage to persevere, it seemed to her as though she were struck on the forehead by a blow from a hammer, and she fell on both knees, half stunned. A second bullet, in ricochetting, had grazed her forehead just above the left eyebrow, badly bruising it, and carrying away a strip of skin. And when she withdrew her hands which she had raised to her forehead, she found them red with blood. Beneath her fingers, however, she had felt her skull intact, quite firm; and to encourage herself she repeated aloud: ‘It is nothing, it is nothing. Come, I am surely not frightened; no, I am not frightened.’
And ’twas true; she picked herself up, and henceforth walked on among the bullets with the indifference of one detached from herself, who has ceased to reason and gives her life. And she no longer even sought to protect herself, but went straight before her with her head erect, hastening her steps only because of her desire to reach her destination. The projectiles were falling and flattening around her, and she narrowly missed being killed a score of times without apparently being aware of it. Her lightsome haste, her silent feminine activeness seemed to assist her as it were, to render her so slight and so agile amid the peril that she escaped it. At last she had arrived at Bazeilles, and she at once cut across a field of lucern to reach the high road which passes through the village. Just as she was turning into it, on her right hand, a couple of hundred paces away, she recognised her house, which was burning, the flames not showing in the brilliant sunlight, but the roof already half fallen in, and the windows vomiting big whirling coils of black smoke. Then a gallop carried her along; she ran breathlessly.
At eight o’clock, Weiss had found himself shut up there, separated from the retreating troops. Immediately afterwards it had become impossible for him to return to Sedan, for the Bavarians, streaming forth from the park of Montivilliers, intercepted the road. He was alone, with his gun and his remaining cartridges, when he suddenly espied at his door a small detachment of soldiers, who, parted from their comrades, had remained behind like himself, and were seeking some place of shelter where they might, at any rate, sell their lives dearly. He hastily went down to open the door, and the house henceforth had a garrison: a captain, a corporal, and eight men, all of them beside themselves, quite maddened, and resolved upon no surrender.
‘What! are you one of us, Laurent?’ exclaimed Weiss, surprised to see among the soldiers a young man in blue linen trousers and jacket, who carried a chassepot which he had picked up beside some corpse.
Laurent, a tall, thin fellow, thirty years of age, was a journeyman gardener of the neighbourhood. He had lately lost his mother and his wife, both carried away by the same malignant fever. ‘Why shouldn’t I be one of you?’ he answered. ‘I’ve only my carcase left, and I can very well give it. Besides, it amuses me, you know, for I’m not a bad shot, and it would be good sport to bring down one of those brutes each time I fire.’
Meanwhile, the captain and the corporal had already begun to inspect the house. Nothing could be done on the ground floor, so they contented themselves with pushing a quantity of furniture before the door and the windows, with the view of barricading them as stoutly as possible. Then they organised the defence in the three little rooms on the first floor and the garret up above; approving, by the way, of the preparations that Weiss had already made, the mattresses placed against the shutters, and the loopholes devised in the latter between the transverse laths. Whilst the captain was venturing to peep out to examine the surroundings, he heard a child calling and crying. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
Then Weiss, in his mind’s eye, again espied poor little Auguste in the adjacent dyeworks, his face purple with fever as he lay between his white sheets asking for something to drink, and calling for his mother, who could never more answer him; for she was lying across the tiled threshold with her head smashed to pieces. And as this vision rose up before him he made a sorrowful gesture, and replied: ‘It’s a poor little fellow whose mother has been killed by a shell, and who is crying there, next door.’
‘Thunder!’ muttered Laurent. ‘What a price we shall have to make them pay for it all!’
As yet only some stray bullets had struck the house-front. Weiss and the captain, accompanied by the gardener and two soldiers, had gone up to the garret, whence they could keep watch over the road. They could see it obliquely as far as the Place de l’Eglise, which was now in the possession of the Bavarians, who only continued advancing, however, with great difficulty and extreme caution. A handful of soldiers, at the corner of a lane, kept them at bay during nearly a quarter of an hour, with so galling a fire that there was soon quite a heap of slain. Then, at the other corner, there was a house which they had to secure possession of before proceeding any farther. At one moment, as the smoke blew off, a woman could be espied firing with a gun from one of the windows. It was the house of a baker; some other soldiers had been forgotten there, mingled with the occupants; and when the place was at last captured by the foe, loud shouts resounded, and a frightful scramble whirled to the wall over the way—a rush, amid which the woman’s skirt and a man’s jacket and bristling white hair suddenly appeared to view. Then came the sound of platoon firing, and blood spurted to the coping of the wall. The Germans were inflexible; every person, not belonging to the belligerent forces, who was captured with arms in his hand, was shot down there and then, as having placed himself beyond the pale of the law of nations. And their wrath was rising in presence of the furious resistance offered by the village. The frightful losses they had sustained during nearly five hours’ combat urged them on to atrocious reprisals. The gutters were running red with blood, corpses were barring the streets, and some crossways were like charnel-houses, whence the rattle of death could be heard ascending to the sky. And they were seen to throw lighted straw into each house they carried by force. Some of them ran about with torches, others smeared the walls with petroleum, and soon entire streets were on fire—Bazeilles blazed.
At last, in the central part of the village there only remained Weiss’s house, with its closed shutters, that retained the threatening appearance of a citadel resolved upon no surrender.
‘Attention! here they come,’ exclaimed the captain.
A volley from the garret and the first-floor stretched on the ground three of the Bavarians who were stealthily advancing close to the walls. The others thereupon fell back, placing themselves in ambush at the corners of the road, and the siege of the house began, such a shower of bullets pelting the front that one might have thought there was a hailstorm. For nearly ten minutes this fusillade went on without cessation, denting the plaster without doing much damage. One of the two soldiers, whom the captain had taken with him into the garret, imprudently showed himself, however, at a dormer window, and was instantly killed by a bullet, which struck him full in the forehead.
‘Curse it! that’s one less!’ growled the captain. ‘Be cautious, we are not numerous enough to get ourselves killed for the fun of the thing.’ He himself had taken a chassepot, and was firing from behind a shutter.
Laurent, the gardener, particularly excited his admiration. On his knees, as though he were stalking game, with the barrel of his gun resting in a narrow loophole, the young fellow only fired when he was sure of bringing down his man, and he himself predicted the result of each shot before it took effect. ‘That little blue officer over there,’ said he, ‘in the heart. That other one, the skinny chap, farther off, between the eyes. That fat fellow with the carroty beard—I can’t stand him—in the stomach.’
And the man he named invariably fell, struck in the very spot he had mentioned; and he quietly continued firing, without the least haste, having plenty of work before him, as he said, and requiring, indeed, more time than he could command, to pick them all off in that fashion.
‘Ah! if I could only see,’ Weiss kept on repeating, in a furious voice. He had just broken his spectacles, and was in despair at this untimely accident. Certainly, he still had his eye-glasses, but with the perspiration that was streaming down his face he was unable to fix them firmly on his nose; and in a feverish state, with his hands trembling, he frequently fired quite at random. Increasing passion was now sweeping away all that remained of his accustomed calmness.
‘Don’t be in such a hurry; it does no good,’ remarked Laurent. ‘There! see that one who no longer has his helmet, at the corner by the grocer’s. Aim at him carefully. Why! that’s first rate; you have broken his leg! See how he’s floundering about in his blood.’
Weiss, who was rather pale, looked at the man, and muttered, ‘Finish him off.’
‘Waste a bullet? Not if I know it! Far better bring down another one.’
The attacking party had observed the galling fire directed upon them from the garret windows. Not one of their men could advance without being hit, and accordingly they brought up some fresh troops, who received orders to riddle the roof with bullets. The garret then became altogether untenable. The slates were transpierced as easily as though they had been mere sheets of paper; and, with a buzzing like that of bees, the projectiles flew into the attic here, there, and everywhere. At each moment the defenders were in danger of being killed.
‘Let’s go down,’ said the captain. ‘We can still hold out on the first floor.’ As he was stepping towards the ladder, however, a bullet struck him in the groin and he fell: ‘Too late! Curse it!’ he muttered.
With the help of the remaining soldier, Weiss and Laurent insisted upon carrying him down, although he told them not to waste time in attending on him. His account was settled, he remarked, and he might just as well kick the bucket up there as down below. However, when they had laid him on a bed, in a room on the first floor, he became desirous of still directing the defence.
‘Fire into the lot of them—don’t trouble about anything else. They are too prudent to risk coming forward as long as your fire doesn’t slacken.’
And, indeed, the siege of the little house continued as though it were to last for ever. A score of times it seemed upon the point of being carried by the tempest of lead that assailed it; but through the hurricane and the smoke it again and again appeared to view, still standing, dented, perforated, and lacerated, but none the less vomiting bullets from every aperture. Exasperated at losing so many men, at being kept so long at bay by such a paltry shanty, the assailants were fairly howling with rage, but they continued firing from a distance, lacking the courage to rush forward and burst open the door and windows below.
‘Look out!’ suddenly exclaimed the corporal; ‘a shutter is falling.’
The violence of the bullets had, indeed, torn one of the shutters from its hinges. Weiss, however, darted forward, pushing a wardrobe against the window, and Laurent, in ambush behind it, was able to continue firing. One of the soldiers, whose jaw had been shattered, was lying at his feet losing a great quantity of blood. Another, hit by a bullet in the throat, rolled over to the wall, beside which he lay with a convulsive shudder shaking him from head to foot, whilst from his parted lips escaped an endless rattle. Without counting the captain, who—lying on the bedstead with his back resting against the head of it—was already too weak to speak, but still gave some orders by signs—there were at present only eight of them left. And now the three rooms on the first floor were, like the garret, becoming untenable, for the mattresses had been reduced to shreds, and no longer kept out the projectiles; at each moment bits of plaster fell from the walls and the ceiling, corners were chipped off the articles of furniture, whilst the wardrobe was being slit and rent as though with a hatchet. Worst of all, however, ammunition was failing.
‘What a pity!’ growled Laurent; ‘it’s been going on so well.’
‘Wait a bit!’ replied Weiss, as an idea flashed through his mind.
He had just remembered the dead soldier lying in the garret upstairs, and he went up to search the body and take the cartridges that must be upon it. He found that a large piece of the roof had now fallen in, and he could see the blue sky, a bright sunshiny expanse, at sight of which he was very much astonished. To avoid being killed he dragged himself over the floor on his knees, and when he had secured the cartridges, some thirty or thereabouts, he made all haste and bounded down again.
Whilst he was dividing these new supplies with the gardener, however, one of the soldiers gave a shriek and fell on his knees. There were now only seven, and a moment afterwards there were only six of them left, for the corporal was hit in the left eye by a bullet, which blew out his brains.
From that moment Weiss was no longer conscious of anything. He and the five others continued firing like madmen, consuming the remaining cartridges without a thought even of the possibility of surrendering. The tiled floors of the three little rooms were now littered with remnants of furniture. Corpses blocked the doorways, and in one corner a wounded man was giving vent to a frightful, continuous moan. Wherever they stepped blood stuck to the soles of their shoes; and some of it, after coursing through the rooms, was even trickling down the staircase. Moreover, it was no longer possible to breathe up there; the atmosphere was dense and hot with powder-smoke, a pungent, nauseating dust plunging them into almost complete obscurity, which was streaked, however, by a ruddy flame each time a shot was fired.
‘Thunder!’ exclaimed Weiss; ‘why, they are bringing cannon!’
It was true. Despairing of reducing the handful of madmen, who thus delayed their advance, the Bavarians were now placing a gun in position at the corner of the Place de l’Eglise. And the honour thus shown them, that artillery pointed at them from over yonder, made the besieged furiously mirthful. They jeered contemptuously: Ah! those dirty cowards with their cannon! Laurent, meanwhile, was still on his knees, carefully aiming at the gunners and bringing a man down at each shot he fired, so that for a time the gun could not be worked; in fact, five or six minutes elapsed before the first discharge. And even then, the gun being pointed too high, merely a strip of the roof was carried away.
But the end was at hand. In vain did they search the dead; there was not a cartridge left! Haggard and exhausted, the six men fumbled here and there, seeking for something which they might fling from the windows to crush the enemy. One of them, on showing himself at a window, vociferating and brandishing his fists, was riddled by a volley of lead, and then only five of them were left. What could they do? Go down—try to escape by way of the garden and the meadows? But at that moment there was a loud uproar below, and men streamed furiously up the stairs. The Bavarians had at last crept round the house, broken open the back door, and invaded the ground floor. A terrible mêlée ensued in the little rooms, among the corpses and the shattered furniture. The chest of one of the French soldiers was transpierced by a bayonet thrust, and the two others were taken prisoners, whilst the captain, who had just vented his last gasp, lay there with his mouth open and his arm still raised, as though to give an order.
However, a German officer, a stout, fair man, armed with a revolver, and whose bloodshot eyes seemed to be starting from his head, had caught sight of Weiss and Laurent, the one in his black coat and the other in his blue linen jacket, and savagely asked them in French: ‘Who are you? What the —— are you doing here?’
Then, seeing that they were black with powder, he realised the truth, and stammering with fury, heaped insults upon them in German. He had already raised his weapon to blow their brains out, when the soldiers he commanded rushed forward, caught hold of the two civilians and pushed them before them down the stairs. The two men were carried along by the human wave which flung them upon the road, where they rolled over as far as the opposite wall, amid such vociferous shouts that the voices of the officers could be no longer heard. Then, during two or three minutes which elapsed whilst the stout fair officer was endeavouring to clear a space, in view of proceeding with their execution, they were able to pick themselves up and look about them.
Other houses were now blazing—all Bazeilles was becoming a furnace. Flames were beginning to stream through the lofty windows of the church. Some soldiers were driving an old lady out of her house after compelling her to give them some matches that they might set her bed and her curtains on fire. What with all the lighted wisps of straw flung here and there, and all the petroleum poured upon the walls, the conflagrations were spreading from street to street. It was warfare as waged by savages—savages infuriated by the duration of the struggle, and avenging their dead, their heaps of dead over whom they had to march. Bands of men were yelling amid the smoke and the sparks, amid all the fearful uproar compounded of dying groans and shrieks, falling walls, and discharges of musketry. They could scarcely see one another; large clouds of livid dust, impregnated with an insufferable stench of fat and blood, as though laden indeed with all the abominations of the massacre, flew up, obscuring the sun. And they were still killing, still destroying in every corner; the human beast was let loose, all the idiotic anger, all the furious madness of man preying upon man.
And, at last, in front of him, Weiss could see his own house burning. Soldiers had hurried up with torches, and others were feeding the flames with the remnants of the furniture. The ground floor speedily blazed, and the smoke poured forth from all the gaping wounds of the roof and the front. The adjacent dyeworks, too, were already catching fire; and—oh, the pity of it!—little Auguste, lying in bed, delirious with fever, could still be heard calling for his mother, whose skirts were beginning to burn as her corpse, with its head pounded to pieces, lay there across the threshold.
‘Mother, I’m so thirsty; mother, give me some water.’
But the flames roared, the plaint ceased, and then nothing could be distinguished save the deafening hurrahs of the conquerors!
All at once, however, above every noise, above all the shouting, there arose a terrible cry. It was Henriette arriving—Henriette, who had just espied her husband standing with his back to a wall, in front of a platoon which was loading its weapons.
She sprang upon his neck: ‘My God! what is it? They are not going to kill you!’
Weiss gazed at her in stupefaction. ‘Twas she, his wife whom he had so long desired, whom he had adored with such idolising tenderness. And with a shudder he awoke, distracted, to the awful reality. Why had he tarried there firing upon the foe instead of returning to her, as he had sworn to do? His lost happiness flashed before his dizzy eyes; they were to be torn asunder, parted for evermore. Then he was struck by the sight of the blood upon her forehead, and in a mechanical voice he stammered, ‘Are you wounded? It was madness for you to come——’
With a wild gesture, however, she interrupted him. ‘Oh! me; it’s nothing, a mere scratch—but you, why are they keeping you? I won’t have them shoot you!’
The officer who was struggling in the middle of the obstructed road, trying to clear a space so that the platoon might fall back a few paces, turned round on hearing the sound of voices; and when he perceived the woman hanging on the neck of one of the prisoners, he again savagely shouted in French: ‘No, no—no humbug, please! Where have you come from? What do you want?’
‘I want my husband.’
‘Your husband, that man there? He has been condemned; justice must be done.’
‘I want my husband.’
‘Come, be reasonable—move aside, we don’t wish to do you any harm.’
‘I want my husband.’
Renouncing his attempts at persuasion, the officer was about to give orders that she should be torn from the prisoner’s arms, when Laurent, hitherto silent and impassive, ventured to intervene: ‘I say, captain, it was I who knocked so many of your men over, and it’s right enough that you should shoot me. Besides, I’ve nobody to think of, neither mother, nor wife, nor child—but this gentleman’s married—why not let him go, and settle my affair?’
‘What’s that tomfoolery!’ yelled the captain, quite beside himself; ‘are you making fun of me? Here! a man here to take this woman away.’
He had to repeat the order in German, whereupon a soldier stepped forward, a short, broad-chested Bavarian, whose enormous head was bushy with carroty beard and hair, amidst which one could only distinguish a broad square-shaped nose, and a pair of big blue eyes. He was a frightful object, stained all over with blood, looking like some bear from a mountain cavern—one of those hairy monsters, red with the blood of the prey whose bones they have just been crunching.
‘I want my husband; kill me with my husband!’ repeated Henriette, in a heartrending cry.
But, dealing himself heavy blows on the chest with his clenched fist, the officer declared that he was not a murderer, and that if there were some who slaughtered the innocent, he at all events was not one of them. She had not been condemned, and he would cut off his hand rather than touch a hair of her head.
Then, as the soldier was approaching her, Henriette distractedly coiled her limbs round Weiss: ‘Oh! I beseech you, dear, keep me, let me die with you.’
Weiss was shedding big tears, and without answering was trying to unloosen the unhappy woman’s convulsive grasp upon his shoulder and his loins.
‘Do you no longer care for me,’ she pleaded, ‘that you wish to die without me? Keep me here; it will tire them out, and they will shoot us both.’
He had now succeeded in detaching one of her little hands, and was pressing it to his mouth, covering it with kisses, whilst still striving to loosen the grasp of the other one.
‘No, no! Keep me,’ she cried, ‘I want to die.’
At last, however, after infinite trouble, he held both her hands in his own. And, hitherto silent, having purposely refrained from answering her, he now said but three words: ‘Farewell, dear wife!’
He himself had thrown her into the arms of the Bavarian who carried her away. She struggled and shrieked, whilst the soldier, doubtless for the purpose of calming her, gave vent to a stream of gruff words. With a violent effort she had managed to disengage her head, and she saw everything.
In less than three seconds it was over. Weiss, whose glasses had slipped down while he was parting from his wife, had hastily set them on his nose again, as though he wished to look death full in the face. He stepped back and leant against the wall, with his arms crossed; and this stout peaceable fellow, in his coat torn to shreds, had a wildly excited face, aglow with all the beauty of courage. Near him was Laurent, who had contented himself with shoving his hands into his pockets. The cruel scene, the abominableness of those savages who shot men down before the very eyes of their wives, seemed to fill him with indignation. He drew himself up, scanned the firing party, and in a contemptuous tone spat forth the words: ‘You filthy pigs!’
But the officer had raised his sword, and the two men fell like logs, the gardener with his face on the ground, the book-keeper on his flank, alongside the wall. The latter, before expiring, experienced a final convulsion, his eyelids blinked, his mouth writhed. Then the officer stepped up to him, and stirred him with his foot, desirous of making sure that he was quite dead.
Henriette had seen everything: those dying eyes seeking for her, that frightful quiver of the death-pangs, that big boot pushing the corpse aside. She did not cry out, but she silently, furiously bit at what was near her mouth; and it was a hand that her teeth caught hold of. The Bavarian roared, the pain was so atrocious. He threw her down, almost felling her. Their faces met, and never was she able to forget that red hair and beard splashed with blood, and those blue eyes dilated and swimming with fury.
Later on, Henriette could not clearly remember what had happened after her husband’s death. She, herself, had had but one desire, to return to his corpse, take it, and watch over it. However, as happens in nightmares, all sorts of obstacles rose up before her, staying her course at every step. Again had a brisk fusillade broken out, and there was a great stir among the German troops who occupied Bazeilles. The French Marine Infantry was, at last, again reaching the village, and the engagement began afresh with so much violence that the young woman was thrown into a lane on the left, among a crazed, terrified flock of villagers. There could be no doubt, however, as to the issue of the struggle; it was too late to reconquer the abandoned positions. During another half-hour the men of the Marine Infantry fought with the utmost desperation, sacrificing their lives in a superb, furious transport; but at each moment the foe received reinforcements which streamed forth from all sides, the meadows, the roads, and the park of Montivilliers. Nothing could now have dislodged them from that village, which they had secured at such fearful cost, where several thousands of their men were lying dead amid blood and flames. Destruction was now completing its work, the place had become but a charnel-house of scattered limbs and smoking ruins. Slaughtered, annihilated, Bazeilles was dwindling into ashes.
For a last time did Henriette espy in the distance her little house, the floors of which were falling into a vortex of fiery flakes. And ever, alongside the wall facing the house, could she see her husband’s corpse. But another human stream caught her in its flow, the bugles sounded the retreat, and she was carried away, how she knew not, among the troops as they gradually fell back. And then she became as it were a thing, a mere rolling waif borne onward amid the confused tramping of a multitude that was streaming along the highway. And she was conscious of nothing further, till at last she found herself at Balan, in the house of some strangers, where she sat sobbing in a kitchen, with her head resting upon a table.
< < < Chapter III
Chapter V > > >
French Literature – Children Books – Émile Zola – The Downfall (La Débâcle) – Contents
Copyright holders – Public Domain Book
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