Complete Works of Emile Zola (1151 page)

It was during one of those short halts that Maurice witnessed a scene that was destined to remain indelibly impressed upon his memory.

Standing by the road-side was a lonely house, the abode of some poor peasant, whose lean acres extended up the mountainside in the rear. The man had been unwilling to leave the little field that was his all and had remained, for to go away would have been to him like parting with life. He could be seen within the low-ceiled room, sitting stupidly on a bench, watching with dull, lack-luster eyes the passing of the troops whose retreat would give his ripe grain over to be the spoil of the enemy. Standing beside him was his wife, still a young woman, holding in her arms a child, while another was hanging by her skirts; all three were weeping bitterly. Suddenly the door was thrown open with violence and in its enframement appeared the grandmother, a very old woman, tall and lean of form, with bare, sinewy arms like knotted cords that she raised above her head and shook with frantic gestures. Her gray, scanty locks had escaped from her cap and were floating about her skinny face, and such was her fury that the words she shouted choked her utterance and came from her lips almost unintelligible.

At first the soldiers had laughed. Wasn’t she a beauty, the old crazy hag! Then words reached their ears; the old woman was screaming:

“Scum! Robbers! Cowards! Cowards!”

With a voice that rose shriller and more piercing still she kept lashing them with her tongue, expectorating insult on them, and taunting them for dastards with the full force of her lungs. And the laughter ceased, it seemed as if a cold wind had blown over the ranks. The men hung their heads, looked any way save that.

“Cowards! Cowards! Cowards!”

Then all at once her stature seemed to dilate; she drew herself up, tragic in her leanness, in her poor old apology for a gown, and sweeping the heavens with her long arm from west to east, with a gesture so broad that it seemed to fill the dome:

“Cowards, the Rhine is not there! The Rhine lies yonder! Cowards, cowards!”

They got under way again at last, and Maurice, whose look just then encountered Jean’s, saw that the latter’s eyes were filled with tears, and it did not alleviate his distress to think that those rough soldiers, compelled to swallow an insult that they had done nothing to deserve, were shamed by it. He was conscious of nothing save the intolerable aching in his poor head, and in after days could never remember how the march of that day ended, prostrated as he was by his terrible suffering, mental and physical.

The 7th corps had spent the entire day in getting over the fourteen or fifteen miles between Dannemarie and Belfort, and it was night again before the troops got settled in their bivouacs under the walls of the town, in the very same place whence they had started four days before to march against the enemy. Notwithstanding the lateness of the hour and their spent condition, the men insisted on lighting fires and making soup; it was the first time since their departure that they had had an opportunity to put warm food into their stomachs, and seated about the cheerful blaze in the cool air of evening they were dipping their noses in the porringers and grunting inarticulately in token of satisfaction when news came in that burst upon the camp like a thunderbolt, dumfoundering everyone. Two telegrams had just been received: the Prussians had not crossed the Rhine at Markolsheim, and there was not a single Prussian at Huningue. The passage of the Rhine at Markolsheim and the bridge of boats constructed under the electric light had existed merely in imagination, were an unexplained, inexplicable nightmare of the prefet at Schelestadt; and as for the army corps that had menaced Huningue, that famous corps of the Black Forest, that had made so much talk, it was but an insignificant detachment of Wurtemburgers, a couple of battalions of infantry and a squadron of cavalry, which had maneuvered with such address, marching and countermarching, appearing in one place and then suddenly popping up in another at a distance, as to gain for themselves the reputation of being thirty or forty thousand strong. And to think that that morning they had been near blowing up the viaduct at Dannemarie! Twenty leagues of fertile country had been depopulated by the most idiotic of panics, and at the recollection of what they had seen during their lamentable day’s march, the inhabitants flying in consternation to the mountains, driving their cattle before them; the press of vehicles, laden with household effects, streaming cityward and surrounded by bands of weeping women and children, the soldiers waxed wroth and gave way to bitter, sneering denunciation of their leaders.

“Ah! it is too ridiculous too talk about!” sputtered Loubet, not stopping to empty his mouth, brandishing his spoon. “They take us out to fight the enemy, and there’s not a soul to fight with! Twelve leagues there and twelve leagues back, and not so much as a mouse in front of us! All that for nothing, just for the fun of being scared to death!”

Chouteau, who was noisily absorbing the last drops in his porringer, bellowed his opinion of the generals, without mentioning names:

“The pigs! what miserable boobies they are,
hein
! A pretty pack of dunghill-cocks the government has given us as commanders! Wonder what they would do if they had an army actually before them, if they show the white feather this way when there’s not a Prussian in sight,
hein
! — Ah no, not any of it in mine, thank you; soldiers don’t obey such pigeon-livered gentlemen.”

Someone had thrown another armful of wood on the fire for the pleasurable sensation of comfort there was in the bright, dancing flame, and Lapoulle, who was engaged in the luxurious occupation of toasting his shins, suddenly went off into an imbecile fit of laughter without in the least understanding what it was about, whereon Jean, who had thus far turned a deaf ear to their talk, thought it time to interfere, which he did by saying in a fatherly way:

“You had better hold your tongue, you fellows! It might be the worse for you if anyone should hear you.”

He himself, in his untutored, common-sense way of viewing things, was exasperated by the stupid incompetency of their commanders, but then discipline must be maintained, and as Chouteau still kept up a low muttering he cut him short:

“Be silent, I say! Here is the lieutenant: address yourself to him if you have anything to say.”

Maurice had listened in silence to the conversation from his place a little to one side. Ah, truly, the end was near! Scarcely had they made a beginning, and all was over. That lack of discipline, that seditious spirit among the men at the very first reverse, had already made the army a demoralized, disintegrated rabble that would melt away at the first indication of catastrophe. There they were, under the walls of Belfort, without having sighted a Prussian, and they were whipped.

The succeeding days were a period of monotony, full of uncertainty and anxious forebodings. To keep his troops occupied General Douay set them to work on the defenses of the place, which were in a state of incompleteness; there was great throwing up of earth and cutting through rock. And not the first item of news! Where was MacMahon’s army? What was going on at Metz? The wildest rumors were current, and the Parisian journals, by their system of printing news only to contradict it the next day, kept the country in an agony of suspense. Twice, it was said, the general had written and asked for instructions, and had not even received an answer. On the 12th of August, however, the 7th corps was augmented by the 3d division, which landed from Italy, but there were still only two divisions for duty, for the 1st had participated in the defeat at Froeschwiller, had been swept away in the general rout, and as yet no one had learned where it had been stranded by the current. After a week of this abandonment, of this entire separation from the rest of France, a telegram came bringing them the order to march. The news was well received, for anything was preferable to the prison life they were leading in Belfort. And while they were getting themselves in readiness conjecture and surmise were the order of the day, for no one as yet knew what their destination was to be, some saying that they were to be sent to the defense of Strasbourg, while others spoke with confidence of a bold dash into the Black Forest that was to sever the Prussian line of communication.

Early the next morning the 106th was bundled into cattle-cars and started off among the first. The car that contained Jean’s squad was particularly crowded, so much so that Loubet declared there was not even room in it to sneeze. It was a load of humanity, sent off to the war just as a load of sacks would have been dispatched to the mill, crowded in so as to get the greatest number into the smallest space, and as rations had been given out in the usual hurried, slovenly manner and the men had received in brandy what they should have received in food, the consequence was that they were all roaring drunk, with a drunkenness that vented itself in obscene songs, varied by shrieks and yells. The heavy train rolled slowly onward; pipes were alight and men could no longer see one another through the dense clouds of smoke; the heat and odor that emanated from that mass of perspiring human flesh were unendurable, while from the jolting, dingy van came volleys of shouts and laughter that drowned the monotonous rattle of the wheels and were lost amid the silence of the deserted fields. And it was not until they reached Langres that the troops learned that they were being carried back to Paris.

“Ah,
nom de Dieu!
” exclaimed Chouteau, who already, by virtue of his oratorical ability, was the acknowledged sovereign of his corner, “they will station us at Charentonneau, sure, to keep old Bismarck out of the Tuileries.”

The others laughed loud and long, considering the joke a very good one, though no one could say why. The most trivial incidents of the journey, however, served to elicit a storm of yells, cat-calls, and laughter: a group of peasants standing beside the roadway, or the anxious faces of the people who hung about the way-stations in the hope of picking up some bits of news from the passing trains, epitomizing on a small scale the breathless, shuddering alarm that pervaded all France in the presence of invasion. And so it happened that as the train thundered by, a fleeting vision of pandemonium, all that the good burghers obtained in the way of intelligence was the salutations of that cargo of food for powder as it hurried onward to its destination, fast as steam could carry it. At a station where they stopped, however, three well-dressed ladies, wealthy bourgeoises of the town, who distributed cups of bouillon among the men, were received with great respect. Some of the soldiers shed tears, and kissed their hands as they thanked them.

But as soon as they were under way again the filthy songs and the wild shouts began afresh, and so it went on until, a little while after leaving Chaumont, they met another train that was conveying some batteries of artillery to Metz. The locomotives slowed down and the soldiers in the two trains fraternized with a frightful uproar. The artillerymen were also apparently very drunk; they stood up in their seats, and thrusting hands and arms out of the car-windows, gave this cry with a vehemence that silenced every other sound:

“To the slaughter! to the slaughter! to the slaughter!”

It was as if a cold wind, a blast from the charnel-house, had swept through the car. Amid the sudden silence that descended on them Loubet’s irreverent voice was heard, shouting:

“Not very cheerful companions, those fellows!”

“But they are right,” rejoined Chouteau, as if addressing some pot-house assemblage; “it is a beastly thing to send a lot of brave boys to have their brains blown out for a dirty little quarrel about which they don’t know the first word.”

And much more in the same strain. He was the type of the Belleville agitator, a lazy, dissipated mechanic, perverting his fellow workmen, constantly spouting the ill-digested odds and ends of political harangues that he had heard, belching forth in the same breath the loftiest sentiments and the most asinine revolutionary clap-trap. He knew it all, and tried to inoculate his comrades with his ideas, especially Lapoulle, of whom he had promised to make a lad of spirit.

“Don’t you see, old man, it’s all perfectly simple. If Badinguet and Bismarck have a quarrel, let ‘em go to work with their fists and fight it out and not involve in their row some hundreds of thousands of men who don’t even know one another by sight and have not the slightest desire to fight.”

The whole car laughed and applauded, and Lapoulle, who did not know who Badinguet[*] was, and could not have told whether it was a king or an emperor in whose cause he was fighting, repeated like the gigantic baby that he was:

[*] Napoleon III.

“Of course, let ‘em fight it out, and take a drink together afterward.”

But Chouteau had turned to Pache, whom he now proceeded to take in hand.

“You are in the same boat, you, who pretend to believe in the good God. He has forbidden men to fight, your good God has. Why, then, are you here, you great simpleton?”

“
Dame
!” Pache doubtfully replied, “it is not for any pleasure of mine that I am here — but the gendarmes—”

“Oh, indeed, the gendarmes! let the gendarmes go milk the ducks! — say, do you know what we would do, all of us, if we had the least bit of spirit? I’ll tell you; just the minute that they land us from the cars we’d skip; yes, we’d go straight home, and leave that pig of a Badinguet and his gang of two-for-a-penny generals to settle accounts with their beastly Prussians as best they may!”

There was a storm of bravos; the leaven of perversion was doing its work and it was Chouteau’s hour of triumph, airing his muddled theories and ringing the changes on the Republic, the Rights of Man, the rottenness of the Empire, which must be destroyed, and the treason of their commanders, who, as it had been proved, had sold themselves to the enemy at the rate of a million a piece.
He
was a revolutionist, he boldly declared; the others could not even say that they were republicans, did not know what their opinions were, in fact, except Loubet, the concocter of stews and hashes, and
he
had an opinion, for he had been for soup, first, last, and always; but they all, carried away by his eloquence, shouted none the less lustily against the Emperor, their officers, the whole d —— d shop, which they would leave the first chance they got, see if they wouldn’t! And Chouteau, while fanning the flame of their discontent, kept an eye on Maurice, the fine gentleman, who appeared interested and whom he was proud to have for a companion; so that, by way of inflaming
his
passions also, it occurred to him to make an attack on Jean, who had thus far been tranquilly watching the proceedings out of his half-closed eyes, unmoved among the general uproar. If there was any remnant of resentment in the bosom of the volunteer since the time when the corporal had inflicted such a bitter humiliation on him by forcing him to resume his abandoned musket, now was a fine chance to set the two men by the ears.