French Literature – Children Books – Émile Zola – The Downfall (La Débâcle) – Contents
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PART III Chapter I > > >
PART II
Chapter VIII
TRUCE AND SURRENDER
At about half-past five, before the gates were closed, Delaherche, anxious with regard to the consequences, now that he knew the battle to be lost, again returned to the Sub-Prefecture. He remained there during nearly three hours, pacing across the paved courtyard, watching and questioning the officers who passed; and it was thus that he became acquainted with the rapid march of events:—General de Wimpffen’s resignation tendered, then withdrawn, full powers conferred upon him by the Emperor to repair to the Prussian headquarters and obtain the least grievous conditions possible for the vanquished army, and finally, the assembling of a council of war, to decide whether they might try to continue the struggle by defending the fortress. During the sitting of this council, which was composed of some twenty commanding officers, and seemed to last an eternity, the manufacturer climbed the house-steps more than a score of times. And all at once, at a quarter past eight, he saw General de Wimpffen come down them, very red and with swollen eyes. He was followed by a colonel and two other generals, and they all leaped into the saddle and went off by the bridge over the Meuse. So capitulation had been resolved upon, had become inevitable!
Tranquillised by this, Delaherche reflected that he was very hungry, and resolved to return home. As soon as he was out of the courtyard, however, he hesitated at sight of the frightful obstruction that had meantime been reaching a climax. The streets, the squares were gorged, crammed, filled with men, horses, and guns to such a point that it seemed as though the compact mass had been forcibly driven into the town by means of some gigantic ram. Whilst the regiments which had fallen back in good order were bivouacking on the ramparts, the scattered remnants of all the various corps, the fugitives of every arm, the whole swarming herd had fairly submerged Sedan, and such was now the accumulation, so dense had this motionless crowd become, that in its midst one could no longer move either arm or leg. The wheels of the guns, of the caissons and other innumerable vehicles were locked together, the horses which had been lashed and urged in every direction, had room neither to advance nor to step back, and the men, deaf to every threat, were invading the houses, devouring whatever they found, lying down wherever they could, both in the rooms and in the cellars. Many too had fallen on the doorsteps, blocking up the vestibules; whilst others, lacking the strength to go any farther, were stretched upon the footways, sound asleep there, not even rising when their limbs were trampled upon, preferring as it were to lie there and be crushed rather than take the trouble of going elsewhere.
Delaherche then understood the necessity of surrender. At some crossways artillery caissons stood so close together, that if a single German shell had fallen upon anyone of them, all would have exploded, and Sedan would then have flared from rampart to rampart. And, besides, what could be done with such a heap of wretches, overwhelmed with hunger and weariness, without cartridges and without food? An entire day would have been needed merely to clear the streets. Then, too, the fortress itself was not armed, the town was not provisioned. All this had been pointed out at the council of war, by those who were of sensible mind, those who retained an accurate perception of the situation in the midst of their deep, patriotic grief; and the boldest officers, those who quivered and exclaimed that it was impossible for an army to surrender in this fashion, had been obliged to bow their heads, unable to devise any practical means of renewing the struggle on the morrow.
Delaherche managed with great difficulty to make his way through the mob on the Place Turenne and the Place du Rivage. As he passed in front of the Golden Cross Hotel he caught sight of its mournful dining-room, where some general officers sat in silence at the bare table. There was nothing left—not even any bread. General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, who could be heard roaring in the kitchen, must, however, have managed to discover a few scraps, for he suddenly became silent, and darted upstairs embarrassed with something wrapped in a greasy paper. There was such a crowd outside, looking through the windows at that lugubrious table d’hôte, swept bare by sudden famine, that Delaherche, stuck fast in its midst, had to use his elbows vigorously, and even then, such was the pushing, that he occasionally lost all the ground he had managed to gain. In the High Street the block appeared so impassable that for a moment he despaired of ever getting home again. All the guns of a battery seemed to have been thrown there, pell-mell, one atop of another. Eventually he made up his mind to climb on to the carriages, whence striding over the pieces he jumped from wheel to wheel, at the risk of breaking his legs. Then the horses barred his way, and he had to stoop, glide between the legs and under the bellies of these wretched animals who were dying of inanition. The obstacles became more and more formidable, and so frightened him at last, that when, after a quarter of an hour of repeated efforts, he had got as far as the Rue St. Michel, he resolved to turn into that street and work his way round by the Rue des Laboureurs, hoping that these out-of-the-way thoroughfares would be less obstructed than the High Street. Unluckily, however, there happened to be there a house of evil repute, which a band of drunken soldiers was besieging; and fearing that he might get some nasty blow in the brawl, he retraced his steps. Thenceforth he became obstinate, and pushed on to the end of the High Street, at times balancing himself on the shafts of vehicles and at others climbing over vans. On the Place du Collège he was passed along on men’s shoulders for some thirty steps; then, falling, he narrowly missed having his ribs broken, and only saved himself by catching hold of the iron bars of a railing. And more than an hour had elapsed since his departure from the Sub-Prefecture when he at last reached the Rue Maqua, sweating, in tatters, and quite exhausted. Yet, as a rule, he could walk from one place to the other in less than five minutes.
Desirous of preventing the ambulance and the garden from being invaded, Major Bouroche had taken the precaution to have two sentries placed at the entrance of the premises. This was a great relief to Delaherche, to whom the idea had suddenly occurred that his house was perhaps being pillaged. On reaching the garden the sight of the ambulance, faintly lighted up by a few lanterns, and exhaling the foul breath of fever, again sent a shiver to his heart. Then, on stumbling against a soldier who was lying on the paving-stones, he suddenly remembered the Seventh Corps’ treasury-chest which this man had been guarding since the morning, forgotten, no doubt, by his officers, and at last so overcome by fatigue that he had stretched himself there to sleep.
The house itself seemed to be empty, all was black on the ground floor, where the doors were wide open. The servants must have remained in the ambulance, for he found nobody in the kitchen, where a dim little lamp was smoking. Having lighted a candle, he went as softly as he could up the stairs in order not to wake his mother and his wife. Before returning to the Sub-Prefecture he had begged that they would go to bed early, after so laborious a day, fraught with such terrible emotions.
On entering his private room, however, he had a surprise. A soldier was lying upon the sofa where Captain Beaudoin had slept for a few hours the day before, and it was only when he recognised him to be Henriette’s brother, Maurice, that he understood his presence there, the more so as, on turning round, he had perceived another soldier—that fellow Jean whom he had seen prior to the battle, and who, wrapped in a blanket, was now lying on a rug. Utterly overcome with weariness, they both looked like dead men. Delaherche did not tarry, but went to his wife’s room close by. A lamp, standing on the corner of a table, was burning there amid a quivering silence. Gilberte had simply thrown herself across the bed, in fear, no doubt, of some catastrophe. She was sleeping very calmly, however, whilst Henriette, seated near her on a chair, with merely her head resting on the edge of the mattress, was also slumbering; but her sleep was disturbed by nightmares, and big tears were welling under her eyelids. Delaherche looked at them both for a moment, and was tempted to rouse Henriette to inquire what she had done. Had she been to Bazeilles? Perhaps, if he questioned her, she would be able to give him some news of his dyeworks. However, he took pity on her, and was on the point of leaving the room when his mother appeared on the threshold, and, without a word, signed to him to follow her.
As they crossed the dining-room he gave vent to his astonishment: ‘What, haven’t you gone to bed?’
She shook her head; and then, in an undertone, she said: ‘I cannot sleep. I have been sitting in an armchair near the colonel. He’s in a burning fever, and wakes up every moment and questions me. I don’t know what to answer him. Come in and see him.’
M. de Vineuil had already fallen asleep again. His long, red face—which his moustaches streaked with wavy snow—could scarcely be distinguished on the pillow, for Madame Delaherche had placed a newspaper before the lamp, so that the head of the bed was obscured. The bright light fell upon herself as she sat rigidly in the armchair, with her hands inertly resting in her lap, and her eyes gazing afar, in a tragic reverie.
‘Wait a moment,’ she murmured. ‘I think he heard you come in. Yes, he is waking again.’
The colonel was, indeed, opening his eyes and fixing them on Delaherche without moving his head. He recognised the manufacturer, and in a voice which trembled with fever, he inquired: ‘It’s all over, isn’t it? They are capitulating?’
Espying a glance which his mother gave him, Delaherche was on the point of telling an untruth. But what would be the good of it? And so, with a gesture of discouragement, he replied: ‘What would you have them do? If you could only see the streets of the town. General de Wimpffen has just started for the German headquarters to discuss the conditions.’
M. de Vineuil’s eyes had closed again, and a long shudder convulsed him, whilst from his lips escaped a hollow lamentation: ‘Ah! my God! my God!’ And without opening his eyes he continued in a spasmodical voice: ‘Ah! it was yesterday that what I wanted ought to have been done. Yes, I know the district. I told the general what I feared; but they wouldn’t even listen to him—all the heights up there, up above St. Menges, as far as Fleigneux, occupied by our men—the army commanding Sedan, and holding the defile of St. Albert. We wait there, our positions are impregnable, the road to Mézières remains open——’
Then his speech became embarrassed, and he could only stammer a few unintelligible words, whilst the fever-born vision of the battle slowly faded away, carried off by sleep. He slumbered, possibly still dreaming of victory.
‘Does the major answer for him?’ Delaherche asked, in a low voice. The old lady nodded affirmatively. ‘All the same those wounds in the foot are terrible,’ he resumed. ‘He will be laid up for a long while, I suppose?’
This time she made no reply; she herself was absorbed in the great grief of the defeat. She belonged to another age, to those old, rough frontier-burgesses of bygone times, so ardent in defending their cities. The bright lamp-light fell upon her stern face, which with its sharp nose and thin lips bespoke all her anger and suffering, all the feeling of revolt that prevented her from sleeping.
Then Delaherche felt isolated and frightfully wretched. His hunger was returning, becoming quite intolerable, and he thought it was weakness alone that thus deprived him of all courage. So he left the room on tip-toe and went down into the kitchen again with the candlestick. But here everything was still more dreary: with the fire out, the sideboard empty, and the dishcloths flung about in disorder, it seemed as though the blast of the disaster had swept even through this room and carried away all the substantial gaiety of creature comforts. He thought at first that he should not be able to find even a crust, the bread having been taken for the soupe at the ambulance. In the depths of a cupboard, however, he at last came upon some haricot beans, left from the previous day, and forgotten there. And he ate them as they were, cold, without butter and without bread, standing at the table there, for he did not like to go upstairs to partake of such a meal as this, though on the other hand he made all haste to get out of that dismal kitchen, where the little vacillating lamp was infecting the atmosphere with a horrible stench of petroleum.
It was now scarcely more than ten o’clock, and Delaherche remained with nothing to do pending the time when he should know whether the capitulation was really to be signed or not. He still experienced a feeling of anxiety, a fear lest the struggle should be resumed, a dreadful terror of what might then happen, which he did not speak of, but which weighed covertly upon his heart. When he had again returned to his private room, where neither Maurice nor Jean had stirred, he tried to lie back in an arm-chair and get to sleep there; but sleep would not come to him, a noise of exploding shells made him start to his feet each time that he was on the point of losing consciousness. It was the uproar of the frightful cannonade of the daytime still lingering in his ears; and whenever he was roused by it he would listen for a moment, quite scared, and tremble at the deep silence which surrounded him. Being unable to sleep, he preferred to remain on his legs, and began wandering about the dark rooms, carefully avoiding the chamber where his mother was watching over the colonel, for the fixed stare with which she gazed at him made him feel quite uncomfortable. However, he twice went to see if Henriette had awakened, and paused at sight of his wife’s calm, peaceful face. Not knowing what to do with himself, he kept on going up and down, moving hither and thither, until two o’clock in the morning.
He could then bear it no longer, and resolved upon again returning to the Sub-Prefecture, fully realising that until he knew what to expect it would be impossible for him to obtain any repose. Down below, however, at sight of the obstructed street, he was seized with despair, feeling that he would never have the strength to go and return through all those obstacles, the mere recollection of which made his limbs ache. And he stood there hesitating, when he saw Major Bouroche approach, panting and swearing: ‘Thunder! I thought I should have left my legs behind me.’
The major had been obliged to repair to the town-hall to beg the mayor to requisition some chloroform, and send it to him at daybreak, for his own supply was exhausted. He still had several urgent operations to perform, and feared, so he put it, that he might be obliged to chop the poor devils up without anæsthetising them.
‘Well?’ asked Delaherche.
‘Well, they don’t even know whether the chemists have any left!’
But the manufacturer did not care a rap about the chloroform. ‘No, no,’ said he, ‘is it finished over there? Have they signed with the Prussians?’
The major waved his arm violently. ‘Nothing’s done!’ he cried. ‘Wimpffen has just come back. Those beggars, it seems, are that exacting they deserve to have their ears boxed! Well, well, let us begin again and kick the bucket all of us; that’s the best thing to do!’
Delaherche turned pale as he listened. ‘But is what you tell me quite certain?’
‘I had it from those people of the Municipal Council who are sitting over there en permanence. An officer came from the Sub-Prefecture to inform them of everything.’
Then he gave some details. The interview between General de Wimpffen, General von Moltke, and Bismarck had taken place at the château of Bellevue, near Donchery. A terrible man that General von Moltke, stern and hard, with the glabrous face of a mathematical chemist; a man who won battles by working out algebraical calculations in his study! He had immediately been desirous of showing that he was fully acquainted with the hopeless situation of the French army: it had no provisions and no ammunition, said he, it was a prey to demoralisation and disorder, and there was no possibility whatever of its breaking the iron circle that shut it in; whilst the German armies occupied by far the stronger positions, and could burn down the town in a couple of hours. Then he coldly dictated his will, which was the surrender of the entire French army, with arms and baggage.
On his side, Bismarck simply supported Moltke with the air of a good-natured bloodhound. And, thereupon, General de Wimpffen exhausted himself in combating these conditions, the most harsh that were ever imposed upon a beaten army. He spoke of his ill-luck, the heroism of the soldiers, and the danger of exasperating a proud people beyond endurance; he threatened, begged, talked during three hours with despairing, superb eloquence, asking that the vanquished army might simply be interned in some far-off region of France, or, if preferred, in Algeria; but, after all, the only concession made by the victor was that those of the officers who would give an engagement in writing, and pledge their honour not to serve again during the war, might return to their homes. Finally, the truce was prolonged until ten o’clock on the following morning, and if at that hour the conditions had not been accepted, the Prussian batteries would again open fire and burn down the town.
‘But it’s idiotic!’ exclaimed Delaherche; ‘you don’t burn down a town that has done nothing to deserve it.’
The major, however, put the finishing touch to his alarm by adding that he had just seen some officers at the Hôtel de l’Europe who were talking of a sortie en masse before daybreak. Since the German exactions had become known, extreme excitement was being manifested, and the most extravagant plans were broached. Nobody was deterred by the idea that it would not be loyal to break the truce without a word of warning, under cover of the darkness, and all sorts of mad plans were indulged in:—A midnight march on Carignan through the ranks of the Bavarians, the recapture of the plateau of Illy, by means of a surprise, and the opening up of the road to Mézières; or else an irresistible rush, which at one bound would land them in Belgium. Others, it is true, said nothing, but realised the fatality of the disaster, and would have accepted and signed anything with a glad cry of relief, so as to have done at once with the whole business.
‘Well, good night,’ added Bouroche. ‘I must try to sleep for a couple of hours. I need it.’
Thereupon he went off, leaving Delaherche suffocating. What? It was true, then; they were going to begin fighting again; they were going to burn and raze Sedan to the ground! It was becoming inevitable; this frightful thing would assuredly take place as soon as the sun had risen high enough above the hills to illumine the horror of the massacre. In a mechanical way he once more climbed the steep garret-stairs, and found himself again among the chimney stacks at the edge of the narrow terrace overlooking the town. But now he was in the midst of darkness, an infinite rolling sea of huge black waves, among which he was at first unable to distinguish anything. The factory buildings below him were the first to stand out in the gloom, in confused masses which he recognised; the engine-room, the loom-shops, the drying-rooms, the warehouses; and the view of all that huge pile of building, his pride and his wealth, overwhelmed him with pity for himself at the thought that in a few hours’ time there would only be some ashes of it left. He raised his eyes towards the horizon and looked all around that black immensity, where the menace of the morrow was sleeping. On the south, in the direction of Bazeilles, some flakes of fire were flying skyward above the houses sinking into cinders; whilst, towards the north, the farm of the wood of La Garenne, set on fire during the evening, was still burning, ensanguining the trees with a great red glow. There were no other fires, nothing but those two blazes; all the rest was a fathomless abyss traversed only by scattered, terrifying noises. Some one was weeping over yonder, perhaps far away, perhaps upon the ramparts. In vain did he try to penetrate the veil, to discern the Liry and Marfée hills, the Frénois and Wadelincourt batteries, all the long belt of bronze beasts, with outstretched necks and open muzzles, whose presence he divined there. And as he lowered his eyes upon the town around him, he heard its pant of anguish—not merely the restless slumber of the soldiers fallen in the streets, the dull rustling of that mass of men, animals, and guns, but also, at least he fancied so, the anxious insomnia of the citizens, his neighbours, who, like himself, were unable to sleep, consumed by fever whilst they waited for the dawn. They all must know that the capitulation was not signed; they all must be counting the hours, shivering at the idea that if it were not signed nothing would remain for them but to go down into their cellars to die there, blocked up, crushed beneath the ruins of their homes. Then, all at once it seemed to him as though a desperate voice were ascending from the Rue des Voyards, crying ‘Murder!’ amid a sudden clank of arms. And thereupon he leant over the terrace railing and remained there listening in the dense night, lost amid the misty, starless sky, and seized from head to foot with such a shuddering that every hair upon his skin stood up.
Maurice awoke on the sofa at the first gleam of light. He was aching all over and did not stir, but lay there with his eyes fixed on the window panes, whilst they were slowly whitened by a livid dawn. In the acute lucidity of those waking moments, all the abominable memories returned to him, the battle of the day before, the flight, the disaster. Everything again passed before his eyes, even to the slightest details, and he experienced frightful suffering at the thought of that defeat, the crying shame of which penetrated to the very roots of his being, as though he had felt himself the culprit. And he reasoned his sufferings, analysed himself, finding the faculty of devouring himself quickened by what had happened. Was he not, after all, the first comer, a mere passer-by of the period, certainly of brilliant education, but at the same time crassly ignorant of all that he ought to have known, vain, too, even to blindness, and perverted by impatience for enjoyment, and by the lying prosperity of the reign? Then came another evocation as it were; he pictured his grandfather, born in 1780, one of the heroes of the Grand Army, one of the victors of Austerlitz, Wagram, and Friedland; next his father, born in 1811, fallen into bureaucracy, a petty official of indifferent ability, receiver of taxes at Le Chêne Populeux, where he had worn himself away; then himself, born in 1841, brought up as a gentleman, called to the bar, capable of the worst folly and of the greatest enthusiasm, vanquished at Sedan, in what he realised was an immense catastrophe, the end, indeed, of a world; and this degeneration of the race, which explained how it had become possible that France, victorious with the grandfathers, should be defeated in the person of the grandsons, crushed his heart as though it were some slowly aggravated family complaint, culminating in the fatal catastrophe when the appointed hour had struck. He would have felt so brave and triumphant had they been victorious! But in presence of defeat he was seized with the nervous weakness of a woman, and gave way to one of those fits of immense despair, during which it seemed to him as though the whole world were foundering. There was nothing left, France was dead. Sobs stifled him, and he wept, joining his hands together and stammering once more the prayers of infancy: ‘Take me, my God! Take all these poor suffering wretches!’
Jean, rolled up in the blanket on the floor, heard him, and began to stir. ‘What is the matter, youngster? Are you ill?’ asked the corporal, eventually sitting up and feeling greatly astonished. Then, realising that Maurice had been taken again with those peculiar ideas of his, he spoke to him in a fatherly way: ‘Come, what is the matter? You shouldn’t worry yourself like that for nothing.’
‘Ah!’ exclaimed Maurice, ‘it’s all up; we can prepare ourselves to become Prussians.’
Jean, illiterate peasant that he was, with a hard skull, expressed great astonishment on hearing this, whereupon Maurice tried to make him understand that the race was exhausted, and must disappear and make room for the necessary stream of new blood. With an obstinate shake of the head, however, the corporal refused to accept the explanation: ‘What! my field no longer belong to me? I should allow the Prussians to take it when I’m not yet dead and still have my two arms left? Come, come!’
Then, in his turn, he gave utterance to his ideas, expressing himself laboriously in such words as he could think of. They had had a fearful licking; that was certain. But they were not all dead, yet; there were still some left, and these would suffice to build the house afresh, provided they were good fellows and hard-workers, and didn’t drink all they earned. In a family, now, when its members take proper care and put a bit of money by, they always manage to pull through even the worst stretches of bad luck. And besides, a blow sometimes does a man good: it makes him reflect. And then, too, if it were true there was some rottenness somewhere, some putrid limbs or other, far better lop them off with an axe and have done with them, than keep them until they killed you, like the cholera. ‘Exhausted, done for? No, no,’ he repeated again and again. ‘I’m not done for. I don’t feel that way at all.’
And stiff and lame though he was, with his hair still matted together by the blood from his torn scalp, he drew himself up, full of a vivacious need of life, ready to take a tool, to drive a plough, to build the house afresh as he expressed it. He belonged to the old, stubborn, sober stratum, the sensible, hard-working, and thrifty France.
‘All the same,’ he resumed, ‘I’m sorry for the Emperor. Trade seemed to be in a fair way, wheat sold well. But, sure enough, he has been very stupid. No sensible chap would get himself into such a mess as this.’
Maurice, who still remained quite overwhelmed, made another distressful gesture: ‘Ah! the Emperor; I liked him at bottom in spite of my ideas of liberty and a Republic. Yes, I had it in my blood, on account of my grandfather, no doubt. And now you see everything’s rotten, even in that direction. Ah! what will become of us?’
A wild look was glimmering in his eyes, and he raised so grievous a plaint that Jean felt anxious and was about to rise, when the door opened and Henriette came in. The sound of their voices had just awakened her in the adjoining bedchamber. A pale light was now brightening the room.
‘You’ve come just in time to scold him,’ said Jean, pretending to laugh. ‘He’s not behaving as he ought.’
However, the sight of his sister, so pale and afflicted, had induced a salutary crisis of sensibility. Maurice opened his arms, called her to his heart, and when she had flung her arms around his neck, a great appeasement penetrated him. She herself was weeping, and their tears mingled. ‘Ah! my poor, poor darling. I’m angry with myself that I haven’t more courage to console you! That good fellow Weiss—your husband who was so fond of you—what will become of you? You have always been the victim, and yet you never complained. What a deal of grief I, myself, have caused you already, and who knows whether I sha’n’t cause you even more——’
She was silencing him, placing her hand before his mouth, when in came Delaherche half out of his senses. Again feeling frightfully hungry, with one of those nervous hungers which fatigue exasperates, he had at last come down from the terrace, and on going to the kitchen to get something warm to drink, he had there found the cook with one of her relatives, a carpenter of Bazeilles, to whom she was just serving some mulled wine. Thereupon, this man, one of the last to remain in the village amid the conflagration, had told him that his dyeworks were utterly destroyed, reduced to a heap of cinders.
‘Ah! the brigands, would you believe it?’ stammered the manufacturer, addressing Jean and Maurice. ‘Everything is lost. They are going to burn down Sedan this morning as they burnt down Bazeilles yesterday—I am ruined, ruined!’
Struck all at once by the scar which he observed on Henriette’s forehead, he remembered that he had not yet been able to speak with her. ‘It’s true, then,’ he added, ‘you went there, and got hurt like that? Ah! poor Weiss!’ And then, understanding by the young woman’s red eyes that she knew of her husband’s death, he blurted out a fearful detail which he had just learnt from the carpenter: ‘That poor Weiss! It appears they burned him! Yes, they threw the bodies of the inhabitants they had shot into the flames of a blazing house, which they had smeared with petroleum.'[34]
Henriette listened, struck with horror. Good Lord! So she would not even have the consolation of recovering and burying her dear husband, whose ashes would be swept away by the wind! Maurice had again pressed her to his heart, and in a caressing voice was calling her his poor Cinderella, and beseeching her not to give way to so much grief, she who was so brave.
After an interval of silence, during which Delaherche stood at the window observing the brightening of the light, he hastily turned and said to the two soldiers: ‘By the way, I was forgetting, but I came to tell you that downstairs, in the coach-house, where the treasury-chest is deposited, there is an officer distributing the money among the men, so that the Prussians may not get it. You ought to go down, for money may be useful if we are not all of us dead to-night.’
The advice was good, and Maurice and Jean went down, as soon as Henriette had consented to take her brother’s place on the sofa. Delaherche, meantime, passed into the adjoining room, where he found Gilberte, still with her face quite calm, and sleeping as peacefully as a child; neither the loud talking nor the sobs having caused so much as a change in her position. And thence he peeped into the room where his mother was watching over M. de Vineuil, and found that she had dozed off in her armchair, whilst the colonel, whose eyes were closed, had not stirred, being utterly prostrated by fever. All at once, however, he opened his eyes widely, and asked: ‘Well, it is finished, isn’t it?’
Vexed by this question, which detained him just when he wished to take himself off, Delaherche made an angry gesture, whilst deadening his voice to answer: ‘Ah, yes, finished, till it begins again! Nothing has been signed.’
A prey to incipient delirium, the colonel continued in faint tones: ‘My God, may I die before the finish! I don’t hear the guns. Why are they no longer firing? Up at St. Menges and Fleigneux we command all the roads; we will fling the Prussians into the Meuse should they venture to turn Sedan, to attack us. The town is at our feet between them and us, like an obstacle which strengthens our position. March! the Seventh Corps will take the lead, the Twelfth will cover the retreat——’
His hands jogged up and down on the sheet as though in unison with the trot of the horse, which, in his dream, was carrying him along. Little by little, however, as his words fell more heavily from his lips and he sank asleep, their movement became slower, till at last it altogether ceased, and he lay there, without a breath, overwhelmed.
‘Rest yourself,’ Delaherche had whispered, ‘I will come back as soon as I have some news.’ Then, after making sure that he had not awakened his mother, he slipped out of the room and disappeared.
Seated on a kitchen chair in the coach-house down below, Jean and Maurice had found a paymaster who was distributing fortunes there, screened merely by a little deal table placed in front of him, and without having recourse to pens, receipt forms, or papers of any kind. He simply dipped his hand into the bags overflowing with gold coins, and without even taking the trouble to count them, rapidly dropped a handful into the cap of each sergeant of the Seventh Corps who defiled before him. It was understood that the sergeants were to divide the sums given them among the men of their half-section. They all received the money with an awkward air, as though it had been some ration of meat or coffee, and then went off in embarrassment, emptying their képis into their pockets, so that they might not find themselves in the streets with all that gold displayed to view. And not a word was spoken. The only sound was the crystalline chinking of the coins amid the stupefaction which these poor devils experienced at finding themselves laden with all this wealth when there was no longer a loaf of bread or a quart of wine to be purchased in the whole town.
When Jean and Maurice stepped forward, the paymaster at first withdrew the handful of gold which he had ready, and exclaimed: ‘Neither of you is a sergeant. Only the sergeants have a right to receive——’ Then, tired already, and anxious to have done with it, he added: ‘Here, corporal, you can take some all the same. Quick there, whose turn next?’
He had let the coins drop into the képi which Jean held out to him; and the corporal, stirred at sight of the amount, nearly six hundred francs, immediately desired Maurice to take half of it. There was no telling, said he; it was quite possible that they might be suddenly separated from one another. They accordingly divided the money in the garden in front of the ambulance, which they afterwards entered, having noticed their company’s drummer, a gay, fat fellow named Bastian, lying on the straw near the entry. At about five o’clock on the previous evening, when the battle was over, he had been unluckily wounded in the groin by a stray bullet.
The spectacle which the ambulance presented in the white morning twilight, at this moment of the reveille, fairly froze their hearts. Three more of the wounded had died, unperceived, during the night, and now the attendants were hastily making room for others by carrying the corpses away. Every now and then the men amputated on the previous day, lying there in a somnolent state, would abruptly open their eyes and gaze with stupor on the vast dormitory of suffering in which they found themselves, and where, as in the shambles, a half-slaughtered flock lay prone upon the straw. The attendants had certainly swept and somewhat tidied the place on the previous evening, after all the bloody cuisine of the operations; but here and there trails of blood could be seen on the badly wiped floor, whilst a large red-spotted sponge, looking not unlike a human brain, was floating in a pail, and a forgotten hand, with broken fingers, was lying just outside the door, under the shed. These were the crumbs as it were of the butchery, the frightful scraps of the morrow of a day of massacre, dimly seen in the mournful rising of the dawn. And all the agitation and turbulent assertion of life of the earlier hours had, under the heavy weight of fever, given way to prostration. Scarcely a stammered plaint, deadened by sleepiness, disturbed the moist silence. A scared look came into the sufferer’s glassy eyes as they again encountered the daylight; their clammy mouths exhaled foul breath; the whole hall was sinking into the succession of endless, livid, nauseous, death-sprinkled days which were now reserved to those wretched, mutilated men, who, at the end of two or three months, might possibly get over it, but at the cost of one of their limbs.
Bouroche, who was beginning his round, after a few hours’ repose, paused for an instant in front of Drummer Bastian, and then passed on with a scarcely perceptible shrug of the shoulders. Nothing could be done for that poor devil. The drummer, however, had opened his eyes, and, as though resuscitated, was keenly watching a sergeant, who, with his cap full of gold, had come to see whether some of his men were among the wounded. It so happened that there were a couple, and he gave each of them twenty francs. Other sergeants now arrived; gold began to rain upon the straw, and Bastian, who had succeeded in sitting up, held out both his hands, which the death pangs were already shaking, and stammered: ‘For me! For me!’
The sergeant intended to pass on, as Bouroche had done. What, indeed, could be the use of money to a dying man? Suddenly yielding, however, to a good-natured impulse, he dropped some coins, without counting them, into the drummer’s hands, which were already icy cold. ‘For me! For me!’ gasped Bastian once more. He had fallen back again, and fumbled for some time with his stiffened fingers, endeavouring to recover the gold which slipped from his grasp. Then he expired.
‘Good night! The gent has blown his candle out!’ said a dark, lean, little Zouave, who was lying near by. ‘It’s vexing all the same, just as one’s got the brass to pay for a drink.’
The Zouave had his left foot bandaged; nevertheless he managed to raise himself and crawl on his knees and elbows to the side of the corpse, when he picked up all the money, searching both the drummer’s hands and the folds of his great-coat. And noticing, when he had returned to his place with the cash, that the others were looking at him, he contented himself with remarking: ‘Needn’t let it be lost, eh?’
Maurice, whom this atmosphere of human misery suffocated, had made all haste to draw Jean outside again. As they were once more passing through the operating-shed they saw Bouroche there. He was exasperated at not having been able to procure any chloroform, but was all the same making up his mind to amputate the leg of a little fellow of twenty. Jean and Maurice fled, so as not to hear the poor devil’s shrieks.
At that moment Delaherche came in from the street, and waving his arm to them, called out: ‘Come upstairs, come at once. We are going to have some breakfast; the cook has managed to get some milk. It’s very fortunate, for we need something warm.’
Despite the effort he was making, he could not conceal his exultant delight, and as the others approached him, he lowered his voice and added, with a radiant face: ‘This time it’s settled. General de Wimpffen has gone back to sign the capitulation.’
Ah! what an immense relief; his factory saved, the atrocious nightmare dissipated, life coming back again, full of pain and sorrow, no doubt; but for all that life, yes, life! Nine o’clock was now striking, and little Rose, whom he had met in the neighbourhood, had just told him what had taken place during the early morning at the Sub-Prefecture. She had made her way to this part of the town, through the somewhat less crowded streets, with the view of trying to obtain some bread from an aunt, who kept a baker’s shop. At eight o’clock, said she, General de Wimpffen had assembled a fresh council of war, composed of more than thirty generals, whom he had informed of the result of the step he had taken, of the futility of his efforts, and of the harsh exactions of the victorious enemy. His hands trembled whilst he described the interview, violent emotion filled his eyes with tears; and he was still speaking when a colonel of the Prussian staff presented himself as a parlementaire, in General von Moltke’s name, with a reminder that if a decision had not been come to by ten o’clock the German fire would reopen on the town of Sedan. Thereupon, in this extreme, frightful necessity, the council had adopted the only course that was open to it, that of authorising General de Wimpffen to return to the château of Bellevue to accept everything. The general must have already arrived there, and the entire French army was surrendering.
Rose next launched out into a variety of details concerning the extraordinary agitation which the news was exciting in the town. At the Sub-Prefecture she had seen some officers tearing off their epaulettes, and bursting into tears like children. Cuirassiers flung their sabres into the Meuse from the bridge, over which an entire regiment had defiled, man after man throwing away his weapon and gazing on the water as it spurted and then closed up. In the streets, too, the soldiers took hold of their chassepots by the barrels, and broke the butts against the house-walls, whilst artillerymen removed the pieces of mechanism from the mitrailleuses, and consigned them to the sewers. There were some soldiers, also, who buried, and others who burned the flags. On the Place Turenne she had seen an old sergeant climb upon a corner stone, and as though seized with sudden madness, heap insults upon the commanders and taunt them with cowardice. Other men seemed stultified and wept big silent tears. And, it must be said, there were others, the greater number too, whose eyes smiled with gladness, whose persons from head to foot denoted enraptured relief. So at last there was to be an end to their misery; they were prisoners, and there would be no more fighting. They had for so many days been suffering from excessive marching and lack of food. Besides, what was the use of fighting since they were not the stronger? So much the better if the commanders had sold them, so as to have done with the business at once. It was so delightful to think that they would soon have white bread again and sleep in beds.
As Delaherche was entering the dining-room upstairs with Maurice and Jean, his mother called him: ‘Come here a moment. I’m anxious about the colonel.’
With open eyes, M. de Vineuil was once more venting aloud the panting dream of his feverish delirium: ‘What matters it? If the Prussians do cut us off from Mézières——’ he gasped; ‘here come some of them turning the wood of La Falizette, whilst others are coming up along the valley of the Givonne. But the frontier is behind us, and we can cross it at a bound, as soon as we have killed as many of them as possible—that was what I wanted yesterday——’
His ardent eyes, however, had just caught sight of Delaherche. He recognised him, and seemed to come to his senses, to emerge from his hallucinatory somnolence; and as he thus returned to a consciousness of the terrible reality, he asked for the third time; ‘It’s finished, eh?’
And this time, the manufacturer was quite unable to restrain the outburst of his satisfaction: ‘Yes, thank heavens! quite finished! The capitulation must now be signed.’
On hearing this, the colonel, despite his bandaged foot, rose violently from the bed, and taking his sword, which had remained lying on a chair, he made an effort to break it. But his hands were trembling, and the blade slipped.
‘Take care! he’ll hurt himself,’ cried Delaherche. ‘Take it out of his hands; it’s dangerous!’
Old Madame Delaherche seized hold of the sword, but at sight of M. de Vineuil’s despair she did not hide it, as her son advised her to do. Putting forth strength extraordinary in one so old, and of which she herself would not have thought her poor hands capable, she broke it with a sharp snap upon her knee. The colonel had got into bed again, and lay there weeping, and looking at his old friend with an expression of infinite tenderness.
Meantime, in the dining-room, the cook had served bowls of café-au-lait for everybody. Both Henriette and Gilberte were now awake, the latter well rested by her good sleep, and with a clear face and gay eyes. And tenderly did she kiss her friend, whom she pitied, so she said, from the very depths of her heart. Maurice placed himself near his sister, whilst Jean, who had been pressed to stay, and who felt somewhat embarrassed, found himself facing Delaherche. Old Madame Delaherche could not be prevailed upon to come and sit down at table, and merely drank a bowl of coffee which was taken to her. The breakfast of the five others, however, though begun in silence, soon became animated. They were empty and very hungry, and how could they not feel glad at finding themselves there, virtually unharmed and in good health, when thousands of poor devils were strewing the surrounding country? And in the large, cool dining-room, too, the spotless white table-cloth was a joy for the eyes, whilst the café-au-lait, which was very hot, seemed exquisite.
They talked. Delaherche, who had already recovered all the assurance of the rich manufacturer, the bonhomie of the master fond of popularity, severe only towards those who failed, reverted to Napoleon III., whose face had been haunting him for a couple of days past. And he addressed himself to Jean, having only that artless fellow there. ‘Ah! monsieur,’ he began, ‘yes, I can indeed say that the Emperor has greatly deceived me. For however much his incense-bearers may plead extenuating circumstances, he is evidently the first cause, the only cause of our disasters.’
He was already forgetting that he had formerly shown himself an ardent Bonapartist, and but a few months previously had done all he could to insure the triumph of the Plebiscitum. And he no longer even pitied the fallen Sovereign who was about to become the Man of Sedan, but taxed him with every iniquity.
‘Absolutely incapable, as one is forced to recognise at the present moment; still that by itself would be nothing—but his mind has always been addicted to chimeras; he’s a man with an ill-proportioned brain, with whom things seemed to succeed just so long as he had luck on his side. No; people mustn’t try to make us pity his fate, by telling us that he was deceived by others, and that the Opposition refused him the necessary men and credits. It is he who has deceived us, whose vices and blunders have plunged us into the frightful mess in which we find ourselves.’
Maurice, who did not wish to take any part in the conversation, could not restrain a smile, whilst Jean, whom this talk about politics rendered uncomfortable, and who feared that he might say something foolish, contented himself with replying: ‘Folks say, all the same, that he’s a good fellow.’
However, these few words, modestly spoken though they were, almost made Delaherche leap from his seat. All the fright he had experienced, all the anguish he had undergone, burst forth in a cry of exasperated passion that had turned to hatred. ‘A good fellow, indeed; that’s easily said! Do you know, monsieur, that three shells fell here in my factory, and that it wasn’t the Emperor’s fault if the buildings were not burnt down? Do you know that I who speak to you, I shall lose a hundred thousand francs in this idiotic affair? Ah! no, no, it is altogether too much—France invaded, burnt, exterminated, industry at a standstill, trade destroyed! We’ve had quite enough of such a good fellow as that, Heaven preserve us from him! He’s down in the mud and the blood, and I say let him stay there!’
Thereupon he made an energetic gesture with his fist as though he were pushing down some struggling wretch and keeping him under water. Then, with a greedy lip, he finished drinking his coffee. Gilberte had given vent to a slight involuntary laugh at sight of the painful abstractedness of Henriette, whom she served like a child. The meal continued till at last the bowls were emptied; still they did not stir, preferring to linger awhile amid the gladsome peacefulness of that large, cool room.
And at that same hour Napoleon III. was in the weaver’s poor house on the Donchery road. Already at five in the morning he had insisted upon leaving the Sub-Prefecture, ill at ease at feeling Sedan encompassing him, like a reproach and a threat; still worried, moreover, by a desire to soothe his sensitive heart by obtaining more favourable terms for his unfortunate army. He wished to see the King of Prussia. So, getting into a hired calash, he had set out along the broad highway, bordered with lofty poplars, that first portion of his journey into exile, accomplished in the freshness of the dawn, with a consciousness of all the fallen grandeur that he was leaving behind him in his flight; and it was upon that road that he met Bismarck hastening to him, in an old flat cap and long greased boots, for the sole purpose of trifling with him and preventing him from seeing the King until the capitulation was signed. The King was still at Vendresse, eight and a half miles away. Where should he go? Where could he wait? Afar off, the palace of the Tuileries had disappeared, enveloped in a thundercloud. Sedan, too, already seemed to have receded a distance of many leagues, shut off, as it were, by a river of blood. There were no more imperial châteaux in France, no more official residences; there was not even a corner in the abode of the smallest functionary where he dared to go and seat himself. And it was in the weaver’s house that he was minded to strand—the wretched house espied beside the road, with its narrow kitchen-garden skirted by a hedge, and comprising merely a ground-floor and one upper storey with mournful little windows. The room upstairs had whitewashed walls and a tiled floor, and its only furniture was a deal table and two straw-bottomed chairs. There he waited for hours, at first in the company of Bismarck, who smiled on hearing him talk of generosity, and then all alone, dragging his misery up and down the room, pressing his ashy face to the window-panes, and gazing once more upon that soil of France, that Meuse which looked so beautiful as it flowed along athwart vast, fertile fields.[35]
Then that day, the next day, and the following days, there came the other abominable marches and their halting places: the château of Bellevue, that smiling bourgeois country-seat overlooking the river, where he slept, and where he wept after his interview with King William; then the cruel departure, Sedan avoided for fear of the vanquished and the famished, the pontoon bridge, which the Prussians had thrown across the river at Iges, the long circuit on the northern side of the town, the by-ways, the remote roads of Floing, Fleigneux, and Illy—all that lamentable flight in the open calash; and there, on that tragic, corpse-strewn plateau of Illy, occurred the legendary meeting—the wretched Emperor, no longer able to endure the motion of the vehicle, sinking down under the violence of some spasm, maybe mechanically smoking his everlasting cigarette, whilst a flock of haggard, blood-and-dust-covered prisoners, whom their captors were escorting from Fleigneux to Sedan, ranged themselves at the edge of the road to allow the carriage to pass; the first ones silent, the next ones growling, and the others, beyond, growing more and more exasperated until they burst into jeers and brandished their fists with gestures of insult and malediction. And after that there was yet the interminable journey across other portions of the battlefield, a league of broken-up roads, past ruins, and corpses with widely opened, threatening eyes; and then came a bare stretch of country with vast, silent woods, and the frontier atop of an incline; and beyond it the end of everything—a dip into a narrow valley where the road was edged with pines.
And what a first night of exile that was at Bouillon, in an inn, the Hôtel de la Poste, where he found himself amid such a throng of mere sightseers and French refugees that he deemed it proper to show himself, whereat there was loud murmuring and hissing! The room, with its three windows overlooking the Place and the Semoy, was the commonplace hotel-room, with the usual chairs upholstered in red damask, the usual mahogany wardrobe with a plate-glass door, the mantelshelf decked with the usual zinc clock, flanked by shells and vases of artificial flowers under glass cases. Right and left of the door were two little fellow beds. In one of them slept an aide-de-camp, so overcome by fatigue that at nine o’clock he was already sound asleep. In the other one the Emperor must have turned and turned for hours, unable to close his eyes; and if he got up to assuage his sufferings by walking, his only diversion can have been to look at two engravings, hanging on the wall there, on either side of the chimney-piece—one representing Rouget de l’Isle singing the Marseillaise; the other, the Day of Judgment, the mighty call sounded by the trumps of the Archangels, drawing all the dead from the bosom of the earth, the resurrection of the ossuaries of the battlefields, ascending to testify before God.[36]
All the train of the Imperial household, the cumbersome, accursed baggage vans, had remained at Sedan, in distress behind the sub-prefect’s lilac bushes. Those in charge were at a loss how to spirit them away, how to remove them safely from the sight of the poor folks dying of misery, so intolerable indeed became the aggressive insolence which they had assumed, the frightful irony with which the defeat had imbued them. A very dark night had to be waited for, and then the horses, the carriages, and the vans, with their silver saucepans, their spits, and their baskets of fine wines, went forth from Sedan with great mystery, and in their turn betook themselves to Belgium, journeying with muffled tread and roll along the dark roads amid an uneasy shivering, such as attends a theft.
END OF PART II
< < < Chapter VII
PART III Chapter I > > >
French Literature – Children Books – Émile Zola – The Downfall (La Débâcle) – Contents
Copyright holders – Public Domain Book
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