Complete Works of Emile Zola (1194 page)

“I am going to die, I am going to die. Oh! ‘tis horrible—”

Then suddenly he became conscious of his torn, soiled uniform and the grime upon his hands, and it made him feel uncomfortable to be in the company of women in such a state. It shamed him to show such weakness, and his desire to look and be the gentleman to the last restored to him his manhood. When he spoke again it was in a tone almost of cheerfulness.

“If I have got to die, though, I would rather it should be with clean hands. I should count it a great kindness, madame, if you would moisten a napkin and let me have it.”

Gilberte sped away and quickly returned with the napkin, with which she herself cleansed the hands of the dying man. Thenceforth, desirous of quitting the scene with dignity, he displayed much firmness. Delaherche did what he could to cheer him, and assisted his wife in the small attentions she offered for his comfort. Old Mme. Delaherche, too, in presence of the man whose hours were numbered, felt her enmity subsiding. She would be silent, she who knew all and had sworn to impart her knowledge to her son. What would it avail to excite discord in the household, since death would soon obliterate all trace of the wrong?

The end came very soon. Captain Beaudoin, whose strength was ebbing rapidly, relapsed into his comatose condition, and a cold sweat broke out and stood in beads upon his neck and forehead. He opened his eyes again, and began to feebly grope about him with his stiffening fingers, as if feeling for a covering that was not there, pulling at it with a gentle, continuous movement, as if to draw it up around his shoulders.

“It is cold — Oh! it is so cold.”

And so he passed from life, peacefully, without a struggle; and on his wasted, tranquil face rested an expression of unspeakable melancholy.

Delaherche saw to it that the remains, instead of being borne away and placed among the common dead, were deposited in one of the outbuildings of the factory. He endeavored to prevail on Gilberte, who was tearful and disconsolate, to retire to her apartment, but she declared that to be alone now would be more than her nerves could stand, and begged to be allowed to remain with her mother-in-law in the ambulance, where the noise and movement would be a distraction to her. She was seen presently running to carry a drink of water to a chasseur d’Afrique whom his fever had made delirious, and she assisted a hospital steward to dress the hand of a little recruit, a lad of twenty, who had had his thumb shot away and come in on foot from the battlefield; and as he was jolly and amusing, treating his wound with all the levity and nonchalance of the Parisian rollicker, she was soon laughing and joking as merrily as he.

While the captain lay dying the cannonade seemed, if that were possible, to have increased in violence; another shell had landed in the garden, shattering one of the old elms. Terror-stricken men came running in to say that all Sedan was in danger of destruction; a great fire had broken out in the Faubourg de la Cassine. If the bombardment should continue with such fury for any length of time there would be nothing left of the city.

“It can’t be; I am going to see about it!” Delaherche exclaimed, violently excited.

“Where are you going, pray?” asked Bouroche.

“Why, to the Sous-Prefecture, to see what the Emperor means by fooling us in this way, with his talk of hoisting the white flag.”

For some few seconds the major stood as if petrified at the idea of defeat and capitulation, which presented itself to him then for the first time in the midst of his impotent efforts to save the lives of the poor maimed creatures they were bringing in to him from the field. Rage and grief were in his voice as he shouted:

“Go to the devil, if you will! All you can do won’t keep us from being soundly whipped!”

On leaving the factory Delaherche found it no easy task to squeeze his way through the throng; at every instant the crowd of straggling soldiers that filled the streets received fresh accessions. He questioned several of the officers whom he encountered; not one of them had seen the white flag on the citadel. Finally he met a colonel, who declared that he had caught a momentary glimpse of it: that it had been run up and then immediately hauled down. That explained matters; either the Germans had not seen it, or seeing it appear and disappear so quickly, had inferred the distressed condition of the French and redoubled their fire in consequence. There was a story in circulation how a general officer, enraged beyond control at the sight of the flag, had wrested it from its bearer, broken the staff, and trampled it in the mud. And still the Prussian batteries continued to play upon the city, shells were falling upon the roofs and in the streets, houses were in flames; a woman had just been killed at the corner of the Rue Pont de Meuse and the Place Turenne.

At the Sous-Prefecture Delaherche failed to find Rose at her usual station in the janitor’s lodge. Everywhere were evidences of disorder; all the doors were standing open; the reign of terror had commenced. As there was no sentry or anyone to prevent, he went upstairs, encountering on the way only a few scared-looking men, none of whom made any offer to stop him. He had reached the first story and was hesitating what to do next when he saw the young girl approaching him.

“Oh, M. Delaherche! isn’t this dreadful! Here, quick! this way, if you would like to see the Emperor.”

On the left of the corridor a door stood ajar, and through the narrow opening a glimpse could be had of the sovereign, who had resumed his weary, anguished tramp between the fireplace and the window. Back and forth he shuffled with heavy, dragging steps, and ceased not, despite his unendurable suffering. An aide-de-camp had just entered the room — it was he who had failed to close the door behind him — and Delaherche heard the Emperor ask him in a sorrowfully reproachful voice:

“What is the reason of this continued firing, sir, after I gave orders to hoist the white flag?”

The torture to him had become greater than he could bear, that never-ceasing cannonade, that seemed to grow more furious with every minute. Every time he approached the window it pierced him to the heart. More spilling of blood, more useless squandering of human life! At every moment the piles of corpses were rising higher on the battlefield, and his was the responsibility. The compassionate instincts that entered so largely into his nature revolted at it, and more than ten times already he had asked that question of those who approached him.

“I gave orders to raise the white flag; tell me, why do they continue firing?”

The aide-de-camp made answer in a voice so low that Delaherche failed to catch its purport. The Emperor, moreover, seemed not to pause to listen, drawn by some irresistible attraction to that window at which, each time he approached it, he was greeted by that terrible salvo of artillery that rent and tore his being. His pallor was greater even than it had been before; his poor, pinched, wan face, on which were still visible traces of the rouge that had been applied that morning, bore witness to his anguish.

At that moment a short, quick-motioned man in dust-soiled uniform, whom Delaherche recognized as General Lebrun, hurriedly crossed the corridor and pushed open the door, without waiting to be announced. And scarcely was he in the room when again was heard the Emperor’s so oft repeated question.

“Why do they continue to fire, General, when I have given orders to hoist the white flag?”

The aide-de-camp left the apartment, shutting the door behind him, and Delaherche never knew what was the general’s answer. The vision had faded from his sight.

“Ah!” said Rose, “things are going badly; I can see that clearly enough by all those gentlemen’s faces. It is bad for my tablecloth, too; I am afraid I shall never see it again; somebody told me it had been torn in pieces. But it is for the Emperor that I feel most sorry in all this business, for he is in a great deal worse condition than the marshal; he would be much better off in his bed than in that room, where he is wearing himself out with his everlasting walking.”

She spoke with much feeling, and on her pretty pink and white face there was an expression of sincere pity, but Delaherche, whose Bonapartist ardor had somehow cooled considerably during the last two days, said to himself that she was a little fool. He nevertheless remained chatting with her a moment in the hall below while waiting for General Lebrun to take his departure, and when that officer appeared and left the building he followed him.

General Lebrun had explained to the Emperor that if it was thought best to apply for an armistice, etiquette demanded that a letter to that effect, signed by the commander-in-chief of the French forces, should be dispatched to the German commander-in-chief. He had also offered to write the letter, go in search of General de Wimpffen, and obtain his signature to it. He left the Sous-Prefecture with the letter in his pocket, but apprehensive he might not succeed in finding de Wimpffen, entirely ignorant as he was of the general’s whereabouts on the field of battle. Within the ramparts of Sedan, moreover, the crowd was so dense that he was compelled to walk his horse, which enabled Delaherche to keep him in sight until he reached the Minil gate.

Once outside upon the road, however, General Lebrun struck into a gallop, and when near Balan had the good fortune to fall in with the chief. Only a few minutes previous to this the latter had written to the Emperor: “Sire, come and put yourself at the head of your troops; they will force a passage through the enemy’s lines for you, or perish in the attempt;” therefore he flew into a furious passion at the mere mention of the word armistice. No, no! he would sign nothing, he would fight it out! This was about half-past three o’clock, and it was shortly afterward that occurred the gallant, but mad attempt, the last serious effort of the day, to pierce the Bavarian lines and regain possession of Bazeilles. In order to put heart into the troops a ruse was resorted to: in the streets of Sedan and in the fields outside the walls the shout was raised: “Bazaine is coming up! Bazaine is at hand!” Ever since morning many had allowed themselves to be deluded by that hope; each time that the Germans opened fire with a fresh battery it was confidently asserted to be the guns of the army of Metz. In the neighborhood of twelve hundred men were collected, soldiers of all arms, from every corps, and the little column bravely advanced into the storm of missiles that swept the road, at double time. It was a splendid spectacle of heroism and endurance while it lasted; the numerous casualties did not check the ardor of the survivors, nearly five hundred yards were traversed with a courage and nerve that seemed almost like madness; but soon there were great gaps in the ranks, the bravest began to fall back. What could they do against overwhelming numbers? It was a mad attempt, anyway; the desperate effort of a commander who could not bring himself to acknowledge that he was defeated. And it ended by General de Wimpffen finding himself and General Lebrun alone together on the Bazeilles road, which they had to make up their mind to abandon to the enemy, for good and all. All that remained for them to do was to retreat and seek security under the walls of Sedan.

Upon losing sight of the general at the Minil gate Delaherche had hurried back to the factory at the best speed he was capable of, impelled by an irresistible longing to have another look from his observatory at what was going on in the distance. Just as he reached his door, however, his progress was arrested a moment by encountering Colonel de Vineuil, who, with his blood-stained boot, was being brought in for treatment in a condition of semi-consciousness, upon a bed of straw that had been prepared for him on the floor of a market-gardener’s wagon. The colonel had persisted in his efforts to collect the scattered fragments of his regiment until he dropped from his horse. He was immediately carried upstairs and put to bed in a room on the first floor, and Bouroche, who was summoned at once, finding the injury not of a serious character, had only to apply a dressing to the wound, from which he first extracted some bits of the leather of the boot. The worthy doctor was wrought up to a high pitch of excitement; he exclaimed, as he went downstairs, that he would rather cut off one of his own legs than continue working in that unsatisfactory, slovenly way, without a tithe of either the assistants or the appliances that he ought to have. Below in the ambulance, indeed, they no longer knew where to bestow the cases that were brought them, and had been obliged to have recourse to the lawn, where they laid them on the grass. There were already two long rows of them, exposed beneath the shrieking shells, filling the air with their dismal plaints while waiting for his ministrations. The number of cases brought in since noon exceeded four hundred, and in response to Bouroche’s repeated appeals for assistance he had been sent one young doctor from the city. Good as was his will, he was unequal to the task; he probed, sliced, sawed, sewed like a man frantic, and was reduced to despair to see his work continually accumulating before him. Gilberte, satiated with sights of horror, unable longer to endure the sad spectacle of blood and tears, remained upstairs with her uncle, the colonel, leaving to Mme. Delaherche the care of moistening fevered lips and wiping the cold sweat from the brow of the dying.

Rapidly climbing the stairs to his terrace, Delaherche endeavored to form some idea for himself of how matters stood. The city had suffered less injury than was generally supposed; there was one great conflagration, however, over in the Faubourg de la Cassine, from which dense volumes of smoke were rising. Fort Palatinat had discontinued its fire, doubtless because the ammunition was all expended; the guns mounted on the Porte de Paris alone continued to make themselves heard at infrequent intervals. But something that he beheld presently had greater interest for his eyes than all beside; they had run up the white flag on the citadel again, but it must be that it was invisible from the battlefield, for there was no perceptible slackening of the fire. The Balan road was concealed from his vision by the neighboring roofs; he was unable to make out what the troops were doing in that direction. Applying his eye to the telescope, however, which remained as he had left it, directed on la Marfee, he again beheld the cluster of officers that he had seen in that same place about midday. The master of them all, that miniature toy-soldier in lead, half finger high, in whom he had thought to recognize the King of Prussia, was there still, erect in his plain, dark uniform before the other officers, who, in their showy trappings, were for the most part reclining carelessly on the grass. Among them were officers from foreign lands, aides-de-camp, generals, high officials, princes; all of them with field glasses in their hands, with which, since early morning, they had been watching every phase of the death-struggle of the army of Chalons, as if they were at the play. And the direful drama was drawing to its end.