The Debacle: (1870-71)

by Emile Zola

  But there the shells were falling. Henriette stood rooted to the spot, very pale in the deafening noise of a frightful explosion, and hit by the blast. A shell had exploded only a few metres away from her. She looked back at the heights on the opposite side of the river, from which puffs of smoke from the German batteries were rising, and she understood, but went on again, with eyes fixed on the horizon, looking for shells so that she could dodge them. The rash temerity of her journey was not devoid of cool-headedness, indeed it had all the brave calm that a good little housewife can muster. She simply wanted not to be killed, to find her husband and take him home so that they could live happily again. The bombardment was incessant, and she glided along by the walls, taking cover behind stone bollards or any sort of shelter. But then came an open space, a piece of street that had been demolished and was already covered with rubble, and she was pausing at the corner of a barn when, down at ground level sticking out of a sort of hole, she caught sight of a child’s inquisitive face, watching intently. It was a little boy of ten, barefoot and with torn shirt and trousers, some kid on the prowl who was thoroughly enjoying the battle. His little black eyes were sparkling and he uttered exclamations of delight at each explosion.

  ‘Oh aren’t they fun! Stay there, here comes another. Bang! That one didn’t half go! Don’t move, don’t move!’

  With each shell, he did a dive into the hole, and reappeared, popping up his head like a bird whistling, then dived down again.

  Henriette noticed that the shells were coming from Le Liry, whilst the batteries of Pont-Maugis and Noyers were now only firing at Balan. She could clearly see the smoke at each discharge, and almost at once she heard the whining, followed later by the explosion. There must have been a short break, for the clouds of thin vapour slowly cleared away.

  ‘Bet you they’re having a drink,’ shouted the kid. ‘Quick, quick, let me take your hand and we’ll run for it.’

  He took her hand and pulled her along and, bent double, they both ran side by side across the open space. At the end, as they threw themselves behind a haystack, they saw another shell coming, and it fell right on the barn where they had been just before. The din was appalling, the barn collapsed.

  The kid danced about with glee, finding it all a scream.

  ‘Hooray – there’s a nice smash-up! It was about time, too, wasn’t it?’

  But once again Henriette came up against an impassable obstacle, garden walls and no way through. Her little companion went on laughing and said you could always get by if you wanted to. He clambered up on to the coping of a wall and helped her over. They jumped down into a vegetable garden between rows of beans and peas. Walls everywhere. So to get out of it they had to go through a gardener’s cottage. The boy went first, whistling and swinging his arms, ready for anything. He pushed open a door, found himself in a room, went through to another in which there was an old woman, probably the only living soul still there. She looked dazed, and was standing by a table. She watched these two unknown people walking like this through her home, but didn’t say a word to them, nor they to her. They were out at the other side in a narrow lane that they were able to follow for a short distance. Then fresh difficulties arose, and so it went on for nearly a kilometre, walls had to be scaled or hedges got through, they took the shortest cuts they could, through coach-house doors, windows of houses, just as it chanced on the route they managed to follow. Dogs barked, and -they were nearly knocked down by a madly galloping cow. But they must be getting near now, for there was a smell of burning, and at every moment big, ruddy clouds like floating, gauzy material veiled the sun.

  Suddenly the boy stopped and planted himself in front of Henriette.

  ‘I say, Missis, where are you off to like this?’

  ‘But you can see, I’m going to Bazeilles.’

  He whistled and gave vent to a high-pitched laugh like a truant from school who is having a grand time.

  ‘Bazeilles… Oh no, I don’t want that, I’m off somewhere else. Ta-ta!’

  He turned on his heel and went off as he had come, without her knowing where he came from or where he was going. She had found him in a hole in the ground, she lost sight of him at the corner of a wall, and would never see him again.

  Left alone, Henriette felt strangely frightened. That puny child with her was hardly a protection, but his chatter had been a distraction. Now, though normally so courageous, she was trembling. The shells were no longer coming over, the Germans had stopped firing on Bazeilles, no doubt for fear of killing their own men, now masters of the village. But for some minutes she had heard bullets whistling, that buzzing of big flies she had heard about and which she recognized. In the background so many hellish noises were mingled together that she could not even pick out the sound of the rifle fire from the violence of the din. As she rounded the corner of a house, right by her ear there was a dull thud and plaster falling which pulled her up; a bullet had chipped a lump off the façade, and she went very pale. Then before she had time to wonder whether she dared go any further she felt a kind of hammer-blow on the forehead and fell to her knees, dazed. A second bullet had ricocheted and caught her just above her left eyebrow, but it had only made a nasty graze. When she put both hands to her forehead and took them away they were red with blood. But she had felt her skull solid and unharmed under her fingers, and said aloud, to give herself courage:

  ‘It isn’t anything, it isn’t anything… come on, I’m not afraid, no, I’m not afraid!’

  And it was true. She got to her feet again and walked on among the bullets with the detachment of a person outside herself, beyond reasoning, prepared to give her life. She even gave up protecting herself, walking straight in front of her, head held high, only quickening her step in the hope of getting there sooner. Bullets spattered round her, and a score of times she might have been killed, but she appeared not to notice. Her lithe step, with her quiet, unfussed efficiency, seemed to help her to slip, slender and supple, through the danger that she escaped. She was in Bazeilles at last, and cut across a field of lucerne to rejoin the main road, the village high street. As she emerged on to it she saw, two hundred metres to her right, her house on fire. In the bright sun the flames could not be seen, but half the roof had already fallen in and the windows were belching clouds of black smoke. She rushed forward, running for all she was worth.

  Weiss had been marooned there since eight in the morning, cut off from the withdrawing troops. Suddenly his return to Sedan had become impossible, for the Bavarians, who had come out through the park of Montvillers, had cut the line of retreat. He was alone with his gun and the remaining rounds of ammunition, when he saw ten soldiers in front of his door who like him had been left behind, isolated from their comrades, and they were looking round for some shelter where they could at least sell their lives as dearly as possible. He at once ran downstairs and opened the door to them, and from then on the house had a garrison, a captain, a corporal and eight men, all in a fury of desperation and determined never to surrender.

  ‘What, you one of them, Laurent!’ exclaimed Weiss, amazed to find among them a lanky fellow with a rifle picked up beside some dead body.

  Laurent, in his blue shirt and trousers, was a gardener in the village, about thirty, who had recently lost his mother and his wife in the same influenza epidemic.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be in it?’ he answered. ‘I’ve got nothing left but my own carcass, and that’s mine to give if I want to… And besides, you know, I enjoy it because I’m not a bad shot and it’s going to be fun to finish off one of those buggers with each go!’

  The captain and corporal were already looking over the house. Nothing doing on the ground floor, and they just pushed the furniture against the door and windows to barricade them as securely as they could. So it was in the three little rooms on the first floor and in the loft that they organized the defence, and they approved of the preparations already made by Weiss, the mattresses reinforcing the venetian blinds and the loopholes he had
made here and there between the slats. As the captain ventured to lean out to take stock of the surroundings he heard a child crying.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  There came back into Weiss’s mind the sight of the sick child Auguste, with his face flushed with fever against the white sheets, calling his mother who could never answer again, lying on the pavement with her head smashed. With a gesture of grief at this vision he replied:

  ‘A poor little kid whose mother has been killed by a shell, and he’s crying there next door.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ muttered Laurent, ‘we’ve got to make them pay for all this!’

  So far only a few stray bullets were hitting the front of the house. Weiss and the captain, together with the gardener and two of the men, had gone up into the attic from which it was easier to keep an eye on the road. They could see at an angle as far as the Place de l’Eglise, which was now in the hands of the Bavarians, who were still advancing only with great difficulty and with extreme caution. At the corner of a lane a few infantrymen still held them at bay for nearly a quarter of an hour with such murderous fire that the dead were piling up. And then it was a single house, even an angle between two walls that they had to take before being able to move on. Sometimes through the smoke a woman could be seen with a rifle shooting from one of the windows. It was a baker’s shop in which there were some stranded soldiers together with the inhabitants, and when the house was taken, there were screams and a fearful vision of people being hustled across to the opposite wall: a flood in which could be glimpsed a woman’s skirt, a man’s jacket, a mane of white hair, and then the rattle of a firing squad and blood splashing up to the coping of the wall. The Germans were inflexible: any person not belonging to the armed forces who was found with weapons was shot at once, having wilfully deprived himself of all legal rights. In the face of the furious resistance of the village their anger was rising, and the terrible losses they had been suffering for nearly five hours provoked them to take atrocious reprisals. The gutters were running red and the dead were blocking the roadway, some crossroads were mere charnel-houses from which came the gasps of the dying. So then they could be seen throwing lighted straw into every house they captured after a fight, and others ran along with torches or sprinkled walls with paraffin. Soon whole streets were on fire and Bazeilles went up in flames.

  Hence now in the centre of the village there only remained Weiss’s house, with its shutters closed, like a menacing fortress, determined never to give in.

  ‘Look out, here they come!’ cried the captain.

  A volley from the attic and the first floor laid low three Bavarians who were creeping along by the walls. The others fell back and took cover in all the corners along the road; the siege of the house began, such a rain of bullets lashed the front that it was like a hailstorm. For nearly ten minutes this fusillade went on, making holes in the plaster but not doing much harm. But one of the men the captain had taken up with him into the attic was imprudent enough to show himself at a dormer window, and he was killed instantly with a bullet through the forehead.

  ‘Dammit, that’s one less!’ grunted the captain. ‘Do be careful, there aren’t so many of us that we can get killed for fun!’

  He had taken a rifle himself and was firing from behind a shutter. But it was Laurent the gardener whom he admired the most. Kneeling with the barrel of his rifle supported in the narrow slit of a loophole, as though he were stalking game, he never let off a shot unless he was quite sure, and he even announced the result in advance.

  ‘Now for the little blue officer over there, I’ll get him in the heart… The other one further off, the tall skinny one, between the eyes… The fat one with the ginger beard – he’s getting me down, one in the belly for him…’

  And each time the man fell, killed instantly, hit in the place he had indicated, and he went on calmly, with no rush, having plenty to do, as he put it, for it would take some time for him to kill them all off one by one like this.

  ‘Oh, if only my eyes were any good!’ Weiss kept saying furiously.

  He had just broken his glasses and was very annoyed. He still had the folding ones, but he could not keep them firmly on his nose because of the sweat running down his face, and consequently he often fired at random, over excited and with shaky hands. A mounting passion was triumphing over his normal coolness.

  ‘Don’t be in a hurry, it’s no good at all,’ said Laurent. ‘Look, take aim carefully at that one over there without his cap, on the corner of the grocer’s… But that’s fine, you’ve smashed his foot, look at him jigging about in his own blood.’

  Weiss looked at him and went a bit pale. He murmured:

  ‘You finish him off.’

  ‘What, and waste a bullet! Oh no. More use to do in another of them.’

  The assailants must have noticed this formidable fire from the windows in the attic. Not a single man could step forward but he stayed there for good. So they brought up some fresh troops with orders to riddle the roof with bullets. That made the attic untenable, for the slates could be pierced as easily as sheets of thin paper, and the bullets came in on all sides, buzzing like bees. Each second meant risk of death.

  ‘Let’s go down,’ said the captain. ‘We can still hold out on the first floor.’

  But as he was making for the ladder a bullet got him in the groin and knocked him backwards.

  ‘Too late, dammit!’

  Weiss and Laurent, helped by the one remaining soldier, insisted on getting him down although he shouted that they were not to waste their time over him: he had got his ticket and he could peg out up there just as well as downstairs. Yet when they had laid him on a bed in a first-floor room he was still determined to direct the defence.

  ‘Fire into the middle of them and don’t bother about anything else. So long as your fire doesn’t slacken they’re much too prudent to take any risks.’

  The siege of the little house indeed looked like going on and on for ever. A score of times it had seemed on the point of being taken in the storm of iron beating upon it, and in the midst of these squalls and through the smoke it still was standing, holed and gashed, torn to bits and yet spitting forth bullets from every crack. The attackers were exasperated at being held up for so long and losing so many men over a shanty like this, and they yelled and fired from a distance without daring to charge forward and smash in the ground-floor door and windows.

  ‘Look out!’ shouted the corporal, ‘that shutter’s coming down!’

  The impact of the bullets had forced a shutter off its hinges. But Weiss rushed and pushed a cupboard against the window, and Laurent could go on firing, shielded by that. One of the soldiers lay at his feet, his jaw smashed and losing a lot of blood. Another was hit in the throat by a bullet and reeled over to the wall where he made a continual snoring noise, with his whole body jerking in convulsions. They were now down to eight, not counting the captain, who was too weak to speak but propped up on the bed was still giving orders by signs. The three first-floor rooms were beginning to be as untenable as the loft, for the tattered mattresses were no longer stopping the bullets: bits of plaster jumped from the walls and ceiling, furniture was being broken and sides of cupboards splitting as though under the axe. Worst of all, ammunition was running short.

  ‘What a pity!’ grumbled Laurent. ‘It’s going so well.’

  Weiss had a sudden idea.

  ‘Wait a moment.’

  He had thought of the dead soldier up there in the loft. He went up and searched him for the ammunition he must have. A whole section of roofing had fallen in and he could see the blue sky, a patch of gay light which astonished him. To avoid being killed he crawled along on his knees. Then, when he had the ammunition, another thirty or so rounds, he hurried down at full speed.

  Down below, as he was sharing this new supply with the gardener, a soldier uttered a scream and fell on his face. They were now only seven, and immediately after only six, the corporal getting a bullet through his le
ft eye which blew out his brains.

  From then on Weiss lost all consciousness of what was happening. He and the five others went on shooting like mad things, finishing off the ammunition and not even thinking they could surrender. The floors of the three little rooms were strewn with bits of furniture. The dead blocked the doorways and one wounded man in a corner went on and on with his pitiful moaning. Everywhere blood stuck to their feet. A red trickle had gone down the stairs. The air was scarcely breathable, thick and with a burning taste of gunpowder, an acrid, sickening smoke, almost total darkness streaked by the flames of the rifle-fire.

  ‘Good God!’ exclaimed Weiss. ‘They’re bringing up cannon!’

  It was true. Feeling they would never be able to liquidate this handful of fanatics who were holding them up like this, the Bavarians were bringing up a cannon into position at the corner of the Place de l’Eglise. Perhaps they would get through once they had demolished the house with gunfire. The honour they were being done by having artillery trained on them put the finishing touch to the wild glee of the besieged men, who sneered in utter scorn. The cowardly lot of sods with their cannon! Still on his knees, Laurent took careful aim at the gunners, picking off his man each time and preventing the gun from being served, so that it took five or six minutes before the first shot was fired. It went too high and only took off a bit of the roof.

  But the end was in sight. They searched the dead in vain, there was not a single round of ammunition left. Exhausted and haggard, the six men felt about for something to hurl out of the windows and crush the enemy. One of them showed himself, vociferating and brandishing his fists; he was immediately riddled with lead, and they were only five. What could they do next? Go downstairs and try to escape through the garden and over the fields? But just then there was a tumult down below and a furious mob surged up the stairs: it was the Bavarians who had at last surrounded the house, smashed the back door and come in. There was a free fight in the little room among the corpses and bits of broken furniture. One of the soldiers had a bayonet through his chest and the two others were taken prisoner, while the captain, who had just breathed his last, remained there with his mouth open and arm raised as if giving an order.