The Debacle: (1870-71)

by Emile Zola

  ‘Is all that because of the Emperor?’ he asked the waitress by way of a joke as she was spreading a spotlessly white cloth on the table.

  ‘Yes, just that, for the Emperor all by himself,’ she answered in her jolly way, glad to be showing her white teeth.

  And no doubt informed by the stable-boys who had been coming in for drinks since the day before, she went through the inventory: a general staff of twenty-five officers, the sixty household cavalry and detachment of guides for escort duty, six military police, then the household, comprising seventy-three persons, chamberlains, menservants and waiters, cooks, kitchen hands; in addition, four saddle-horses and two carriages for the Emperor, ten horses for the equerries, eight for the outriders and grooms, to say nothing of forty-seven post horses, an open waggon for personnel, twelve baggage vans, two of which, reserved for the cooks, had won her admiration for the quantity of utensils, plates and bottles inside, all in perfect order.

  ‘Oh, sir, those saucepans, you’ve no idea! They shine like suns. And all sorts of dishes, receptacles and gadgets for I don’t know what all! And a cellar, yes, bordeaux, burgundy, champagne, enough to give a fine old beano!’

  In his joy at seeing a white cloth and delight with the white wine twinkling in his glass, Maurice ate two boiled eggs with a gusto he didn’t recognize in himself. When he turned his head to the left he could get a view through one of the entrances of the arbour of the great plain dotted with tents – a whole town buzzing with life that had sprung up in the fields of stubble between the canal and Rheims. Only an occasional clump of trees brought a touch of green into the expanse of grey. Three windmills stood there stretching out their skinny arms. But above the jumble of roofs of Rheims, largely hidden in the tops of chestnut trees, the colossal hull of the cathedral stood out against the blue sky, gigantic beside the low houses, in spite of the distance. Back into his mind came schoolboy memories, lessons learned by heart and repeated in a sing-song voice, the coronation of our kings, the phial of holy oil, Clovis, Joan of Arc, all the ancient glories of France. Then, as the thought of the Emperor in this unpretentious house, so discreetly shut away, made Maurice look back again at the high yellow wall, he had a shock as he read in enormous black letters: Long Live Napoleon! mixed up with obscene scribblings in huge letters. The rain had blurred these letters, but the inscription was obviously old. What a strange thing to see on this wall – the old enthusiastic war-cry which no doubt acclaimed the conqueror, the uncle, and not the nephew! Already he felt all his childhood coming back and singing in his memories, the days when, back in Le Chêne-Populeux, from earliest childhood he listened to tales told by his grandfather, a soldier of the Grande Armée. His mother was dead and his father had had to accept a job as a tax-collector in that twilight of glory which had overtaken the sons of heroes after the fall of the Empire, and the grandfather lived with them on a tiny pension, having come down to the mediocrity of this humble office-worker’s home, and his one consolation was to recount his campaigns to his grandchildren, fair-haired twins, a boy and a girl, to whom he was a kind of mother. He would sit Henriette on his left knee and Maurice on his right, and for hours there were Homeric narratives of battle.

  Periods ran into each other, and it all seemed to be independent of history in a terrible collision of all the nations. English, Austrians, Prussians, Russians passed by in turn and together, and it was not always possible to know why some were beaten rather than others. But in the end they were all beaten, beaten inevitably in advance, in a surge of heroism and genius that swept armies away like straw. Marengo, the battle of the plain, with its great lines skilfully deployed, its faultless retreat, like a game of chess, by battalions, silent and unruffled under fire; the legendary battle lost at three o’clock, won by six, in which the eight hundred grenadiers of the Consular Guard broke the momentum of the whole Austrian cavalry, in which Desaix came, as he thought, to die but changed an incipient rout into an immortal victory. Austerlitz, with its wonderful sun of victory in the winter mists, Austerlitz, beginning with the capture of the plateau of Pratzen and ending in the terrifying disaster of the frozen lakes, with a whole Russian army corps falling through the ice, men and animals in an appalling crack of doom, while the godlike Napoleon, who of course had foreseen it all, hastened the disaster with a rain of cannon-balls. Jena, the grave of Prussian power, first the sharpshooters firing through the

  October mists, the impatience of Ney who nearly upset the whole plan, then Augereau coming into line and relieving him, the great collision, with an impact that carried away the enemy’s centre, and finally the panic and headlong flight of their vaunted cavalry which our hussars mowed down like ripe oats, filling the picturesque valley with a harvest of men and horses. Eylau, abominable Eylau, the bloodiest of all, a slaughter piling up heaps of hideously mutilated corpses, Eylau red with blood in a blizzard of snow, with its dismal, heroic graveyard, Eylau, still re-echoing with the thunderous charge of Murat’s eighty squadrons, cutting the Russian army through and through and strewing the ground with such a thick carpet of bodies that even Napoleon wept. And Friedland, the huge, hideous trap into which once again the Russians fell like a flock of silly sparrows, the strategic masterpiece of the Emperor who knew everything and could do it all, our left wing immovable, imperturbable, while Ney, having taken the town street by street, was destroying the bridges; then our left charging the enemy’s right and hurling it into the river, crushing it into this dead-end with such slaughter that the killing was still

  going on at ten o’clock at night. Wagram, the Austrians out to cut us off from the Danube and constantly reinforcing their right wing to beat Masséna who, though wounded, went on commanding from an open carriage, while Napoleon, crafty Titan, let them get on with it and then suddenly opened a terrible bombardment with a hundred pieces of artillery on their depleted centre, throwing it back over a league whilst the right, appalled at its isolation, gave way before Masséna, the now victorious Masséna, and carried the rest of their army away in the devastation of a broken dam. And finally Borodino, when the bright sun of Austerlitz shone for the last time, a terrifying confusion of men, a turmoil of numbers and obstinate courage, hillocks taken under incessant fire, redoubts carried by storm with naked swords, ceaseless counter-offensives disputing every inch of ground, such fanatical bravery by the Russian guards that victory was only achieved by the furious charges of Murat, the thunder of three hundred cannon firing together and the valour of Ney, whose triumph made him prince of the day. Whatever the battle, the flags floated with the same swirl of glory on the evening air and the same cries of Vive Napoléon re-echoed as the camp fires were lit on conquered positions, everywhere France was at home as a conqueror and carried her invincible eagles from end to end of Europe. She had only to plant her foot on a foreign realm and the defeated peoples were swallowed up in the earth.

  Maurice was finishing his cutlet, more intoxicated by so much glory rising up and singing in his memory than by the white wine twinkling in his glass, when his eye fell on two soldiers in tatters and covered with mud, like bandits sick of roaming the roads, and he heard them asking the waitress for information about the exact whereabouts of the regiments camping along the canal.

  He called them over.

  ‘Come over here, mates… But you belong to the 7th corps!’

  ‘Yes of course, first division! Oh I can tell you I fucking well do! And if you want to know, I was at Froeschwiller, where it wasn’t cold, you can take it from me!… And my mate here is in the 1st corps and he was at Wissembourg, another hell of a place.’

  They told him their stories, how they were swept on in panic and rout, stayed in the bottom of a trench half dead with fatigue and actually both slightly wounded, and after that they had dragged along in the wake of the army and were obliged to stop in towns with exhausting attacks of fever, and were now so far behind the rest that they had only just arrived, feeling a bit recovered and now looking for their squads.

  Deeply touched
, Maurice, on the point of attacking a piece of Gruyère, noticed their eyes staring voraciously at his plate.

  ‘Mademoiselle, some more cheese, please, and bread and wine… You’ll join me, won’t you, mates? I’m having a blow-out. Here’s to your very good health.’

  They sat down, thrilled. But he felt a chill come over him as he looked at these disarmed soldiers in their pitiful state, with their red trousers and capes so tied up with string and patched with so many odds and ends that they looked like rag-pickers or gypsies wearing out the clothes picked up on some battlefield.

  ‘Oh fuck it, yes,’ the taller one began again, with his mouth full, ‘it wasn’t at all funny there… You have to have seen it – you tell him, Coutard.’

  The smaller one told him, waving his bread about by way of illustration.

  ‘I was just washing my shirt while they were doing the stew . . Just think of it, a filthy hole, a real crater with woods all round that had let those Prussian bastards creep up on all fours without anybody even suspecting… Then at seven, lo and behold, shells falling into our saucepans. Christ! We didn’t give them long, but jumped to our rifles and until eleven at night we really thought we were giving them a prize pasting… But you must know that there were less than five thousand of us and those sods just went on coming and coming and then some. I was on a little rise lying behind a bush and I saw them coming out straight ahead of me and to right and left, real anthills and streams of black ants, so that when there weren’t any more left there were still some more to come. Though I says it as shouldn’t, we did all think the officers were a lot of bloody fools to have landed us in a hornet’s nest like that, miles from our friends, and let us be flattened out without coming to our help. Well then, our general, that poor bugger General Douay, and he wasn’t a fool or a coward either, he went and caught a bullet and was laid out, all four legs in the air. Cleaned out, nobody left! All the same, we held our ground. But there were too many of them and we had to push off. We fought in a field, we defended the station in a racket enough to make you deaf for life. And after that, I don’t know, the town must have been taken because we found ourselves on a mountain, the Geissberg, they call it, I think, and there we withdrew into a sort of castle, and didn’t we half mow them down, the sods! They jumped up into the air and it was a real pleasure to see them come down again on their noses… and then, well, they still came on and on, ten to one and guns ad lib. When it’s like that all bravery does for you is to leave you dead on the field. Anyway, it was such a mess that we just had to fuck off… All the same, for a lot of chumps our officers took the biscuit, didn’t they, Picot?’

  There was a pause. Picot, the tall one, swallowed a glass of white wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘That’s a fact. Like at Froeschwiller – you must be as barmy as a donkey to fight in such conditions. My captain, who was a smart little bloke, said as much… The truth is they couldn’t have known. A whole army of those buggers fell on us when we were scarcely forty thousand, and our lot weren’t expecting to fight that day, and the battle began just afterwards without the officers wanting it, apparently… Well, I didn’t see everything, of course, but what I do know is that the dance started up all over again from one end of the day to the other, and when we thought it was over, not a bit of it, the violins were just tuning up for something better still! First at Woerth, a nice little village with a funny church tower that looks like a stove because they’ve covered it all with porcelain tiles. I don’t know why the hell they ever made us leave it in the morning, because we fought tooth and nail to reoccupy it and didn’t manage to. Oh, I’m telling you, mates, we didn’t half fight there, and the number of bellies split open, and the brains scattered about, you wouldn’t credit it! Then they fought round some other village, Elsasshausen, a name as long as your arm! We were being potted at by lots of guns firing at their ease from the top of a bloody hill we had given up that morning too. And that’s when I saw, yes, with my very own eyes, the charge of the cavalry. How they faced death, those buggers! It was a real shame to send horses and men over ground like that, a slope covered with bushes and full of potholes. Especially, for Christ’s sake, when it couldn’t do any good. Never mind, it was plucky and it warmed your heart… Then it seemed that the best thing was to go off and get our breath back further away. The village was flaming like a match, and the Badeners, the Württembergers and the Prussians, in fact all the gang, over a hundred and twenty thousand of the bleeders they reckoned it was later, had surrounded us. But was it over, not at all, the band started playing louder still around Froeschwiller! For this is the gospel truth, MacMahon may be a fathead, but he is brave. You should have seen him on his big horse with shells all round him! Anybody else would have sloped off at the outset, deciding there was no disgrace in refusing to fight when you haven’t got the wherewithal. But not him. As he had begun he wanted to slog on to the end. And he did, too! You see at Froeschwiller they weren’t men, they were wild beasts devouring each other. For nearly two hours the gutters ran with blood… And then, and then, good God, we had to decamp all the same. And to think they came and told us we had thrown back the Bavarians on our left! God Almighty, if we had been a hundred thousand as well, if we had had enough guns and some chiefs who weren’t such bloody clots!’

  Coutard and Picot were still violently resentful in their ragged uniforms, grey with dust, as they cut slices of bread and great hunks of cheese, trying to get out of their minds their nightmare memories, there under the pretty trellis with its ripe clusters of grapes pierced by golden shafts of sunlight. Now they came to the fearful rout that had followed: regiments in disorder, demóralized, famished, streaming across the fields, and main roads jammed with a dreadful confusion of men, horses, waggons, cannons, all the wreckage of a shattered army lashed along by the frantic wind of panic. Since they had not had the sense to fall back properly and defend the passes through the Vosges, where ten thousand men could have halted a hundred thousand, they should at least have blown up the bridges and blocked the tunnels. But no, the generals galloped on like mad, and everybody was in such a dazed state, losers and winners alike, that for a time the two armies had lost touch in a blind-man’s-buff pursuit in broad daylight, MacMahon scurrying for Lunéville while the Crown Prince of Prussia was hunting for him in the Vosges. On the 7th the remnants of the 1st corps were passing through Saverne like a muddy river in spate bearing away bits of wreckage. On the 8th, at Sarrebourg, the 5th corps tumbled into the 1st like one raging torrent into another; it was in flight too, without having fought, bearing along with it its commander, the pitiful General de Failly, quite unhinged because people were tracing the responsibility for the defeat back to his inaction. On the 9th and 10th the stampede went on, a mad rush that never even glanced behind. On the 11th, in driving rain, they came down towards Bayon in order to avoid Nancy because of a false rumour that that city was in enemy hands. On the 12th they camped at Haroué, the 13th at Vicherey and on the 14th they reached Neufchâteau, where at last the railway gathered up this moving mass of men and shovelled them for three whole days into trains to transport them to Châlons. Twenty-four hours after the departure of the last train the Prussians arrived.

  ‘Oh, what a bloody balls-up!’ was Picot’s conclusion. ‘How we had to use our legs!… And us left behind in hospital!’

  Coutard was emptying the rest of the bottle into his own glass and his mate’s.

  ‘Yes, we had to do a bunk and we’re running still… Oh well, we feel a bit better all the same because we can drink to the health of those who haven’t been done in.’

  Then Maurice understood. After the idiotic surprise of Wissembourg the crushing defeat of Froeschwiller was the flash of lightning whose sinister light had suddenly shown up the terrible truth. We were unprepared, with second-rate artillery, less manpower than we had been given to believe, incompetent generals, and the much despised enemy emerged strong, solid and numberless, with perfect discipline and tactics. The
thin screen of our seven army corps, stretched out all the way from Metz to Strasbourg, had been dented in by the three German armies as though by three powerful wedges. Hence we were alone, and neither Austria nor Italy would come in, and the Emperor’s plan had foundered because of the slowness of the operations and the incompetence of the officers. Even fate worked against us, accumulating tiresome accidents and awkward coincidences, facilitating the Prussians’ plan which was to cut our armies in two and roll one part back on Metz to keep it isolated from France while they would march on Paris after destroying the remainder. Now it could be seen to be mathematically worked out: we were bound to be beaten on account of causes the inevitable results of which were plain for all to see, the collision of unintelligent bravery with superior numbers and cool method. Whatever argument there might be about it in the future, the defeat was inevitable, like the physical laws governing the world.

  Then Maurice’s eyes, lost in a reverie, suddenly focused again on the slogan Long Live Napoleon chalked on the yellow wall in front of him. It gave him a sensation of unbearable distress, a twinge of pain that stabbed him to the heart. So it was true that this France, with her legendary victories, who had marched across Europe with drums rolling, had now been knocked over at the first push by a contemptible little country? Fifty years had sufficed to do it, the world had changed and ghastly defeat was swooping down on the eternal conquerors. He recalled all the things his brother-in-law Weiss had said on the dreadful night outside Mulhouse. Yes, he had been the only one to see clearly and guess at the long-standing hidden causes of our weakness, to sense the new wind of youth and strength blowing from Germany. Was it not the end of one military age and the beginning of another? Woe to whoever stands still in the ceaseless thrust of nations, victory is to those who march in the forefront, the most scientific, the healthiest, the strongest!