The Debacle: (1870-71)

by Emile Zola

  Meanwhile an officer, a heavy, fair man with a revolver and bloodshot eyes popping out of their sockets, had caught sight of Weiss and Laurent, one in his overcoat and the other in his blue cotton shirt, and he addressed them furiously in French:

  ‘Who are you? What are you two doing here?’

  Then seeing them blackened with powder he understood and heaped curses on them in German, his voice choking with rage. He was by way of raising his pistol to blow their brains out when the soldiers under his command rushed and seized Weiss and Laurent and bundled them down the stairs. The two men were carried along on this human tide, out into the road and across to the wall opposite with such vociferations that the officers’ voices could no longer be heard. So that for another two or three minutes, while the big fair officer was trying to detach them in order to proceed with their execution, they could stand up and see everything.

  Other houses were on fire and Bazeilles would soon be nothing but a furnace. Tongues of flame were beginning to come from the lofty windows of the church. Soldiers chasing an old lady out of her house had forced her to give them some matches so as to set fire to her bed and curtains. By degrees the fires were spreading as straw firebrands were thrown and quantities of oil poured about, It was now nothing but a war of savages frenzied by the length of the struggle, avenging their dead, the heaps of their dead on which they had to tread. Bands of men were bawling amid the smoke and sparks, in a frightful din made up of all kinds of noises, the moans of the dying, shots, crashed buildings. People could scarcely see each other for great livid clouds of swirling dust, which stank intolerably of soot and blood as though filled with the abominations of massacre, and which hid the light of the sun. The killing was still going on, with destruction in every corner: the wild beast let loose, the raving madness of men in the act of destroying their fellow men.

  And then Weiss saw his own house burning there in front of him. Soldiers had run up with torches, others were feeding the flames by throwing in bits of furniture. In no time the ground floor was ablaze and the smoke was issuing from all the holes in the walls and roof. Already the dyeworks next door was catching fire as well and, most horrible thing, you could still hear the voice of the child Auguste lying in bed calling for his mother in his feverish delirium, while the poor creature’s skirt, as she lay there across the doorstep with her head bashed in, was beginning to burn.

  ‘Mummy, I’m thirsty… Mummy, give me a drink of water…’

  The flames roared up, the voice stopped, and all that could be heard was the deafening cheering of the victors.

  Above the noises and shouting rose a terrible shriek. Henriette appeared at that moment and saw her husband against the wall facing a firing squad that was getting ready.

  She rushed to embrace him.

  ‘Oh God, what is it? They aren’t going to kill you?’

  Weiss looked at her, dazed. What, his wife, this woman he had yearned for so long and whom he worshipped with such loving devotion! He woke up with a shudder. What had he been doing? What had he stayed there for, firing a rifle instead of going back to her as he had sworn he would? In a flash he saw his happiness lost in a brutal separation, for ever. Then he caught sight of the blood on her forehead and said in a faltering, almost off-hand way:

  ‘Are you wounded, dear?… You were mad to come.’

  She roughly cut him short:

  ‘Oh there’s nothing the matter with me, just a scratch. But you, you, why are they holding you? I won’t let them kill you!’

  The officer was busying himself in the middle of the cluttered road to give his squad a little more distance, when he saw this woman hanging on to the neck of one of the prisoners and he said angrily, in French again:

  ‘Oh no, none of that nonsense! Where have you come from? What do you want?’

  ‘I want my husband!’

  ‘Your husband, what, that man there? He has been sentenced, and justice has got to be done.’

  ‘I want my husband.’

  ‘Look here, be sensible… Get out of the way, we don’t want to do any harm to you.’

  ‘I want my husband.’

  So, abandoning the effort to convince her, the officer was going to give orders for her to be torn away from the prisoner’s arms, when Laurent, who so far had said nothing, but had been standing there quite unmoved, ventured to intervene:

  ‘I say, captain, I was the one who bumped off so many of your lot, so let me be shot, that’s all right. And what’s more I’ve got nobody, neither mother, wife nor child… But this gentleman is married… So let him go and then you can settle my account.’

  Beside himself now, the captain bellowed:

  ‘That’s enough talk! Are you trying to pull my leg? Come on, I want a volunteer to take this woman away.’

  He had to repeat the order in German. A soldier stepped forward, a thickset Bavarian with a huge head bristling with red beard and hair, in the midst of which all that could be seen was a wide potato nose and big blue eyes. He had blood on him and looked horrible, like one of those cave-dwelling bears, hairy wild beasts red with the prey whose bones they have been cracking.

  In heart-rending tones Henriette went on crying:

  ‘I want my husband, kill me with my husband.’

  The officer energetically beat his breast, declaring that he was not a murderer, and if there were some who killed innocent people, it wasn’t him. She had not been sentenced and he would cut his own hand off rather than touch a hair of her head.

  Then as the Bavarian was coming she clung to her husband’s body with all the strength of her limbs, frantically.

  ‘Oh my darling, please keep me, let me die with you!’

  Weiss was weeping bitterly, but without answering her he struggled to wrench the desperate woman’s convulsive fingers from his shoulders and waist.

  ‘So you don’t love me any more, and want to die without me! Hold on to me and they’ll get tired of it and kill us both together!’

  He had pulled away one of her little hands and he pressed it to his mouth and kissed it while working at the other to make it let go.

  ‘No, no, keep me, I want to die.’

  At last, with a great effort, he held both her hands. So far he had avoided speaking and remained mute. Now all he said was:

  ‘Good-bye, dearest wife.’

  And immediately he deliberately threw her into the arms of the Bavarian, who carried her away, struggling and screaming, while, perhaps to calm her, keeping up a stream of guttural talk. With a violent effort she got her head free and saw everything.

  It lasted less than three seconds. Weiss’s folding glasses had slipped down during the parting, and he quickly replaced them on his nose as though he wanted to look death squarely in the face. He backed against the wall and folded his arms, and the face of this big, good-natured fellow in his tattered jacket shone with radiance, admirable in beauty and courage. Next to him Laurent had simply thrust his hands into his pockets. He looked outraged at this cruel scene, the abomination of these savages killing men before the eyes of their wives. He drew himself up, looked at them insolently and spat out in contempt:

  ‘Filthy swine!’

  But the officer had raised his sword, and the two men fell like logs, the gardener face to the ground and the other, the accounts clerk, on his side along the wall. Before expiring he had a final convulsion, his eyelids flickered and his mouth twitched. The officer came up and turned him over with his foot to make sure he was not still alive.

  Henriette had seen it all, the dying eyes looking for her, the dreadful spasm of his end, the heavy boot kicking his corpse. She even stopped screaming, but silently, furiously, bit whatever she could, a hand her teeth came up against. The Bavarian uttered a cry of intense pain, flung her down and nearly knocked her out. Their faces touched, and she was never to forget that red beard and hair flecked with blood, those blue eyes staring and mad with rage.

  Later Henriette could not clearly remember what had happened next.
She had had only one desire, to go back to her husband’s body, take it away and watch over it. But as in a nightmare one obstacle after another sprang up and stopped her every move. A fresh and violent fusillade had broken out and a great deal of manoeuvring took place among the German troops occupying Bazeilles: it was the arrival at long last of the Marines, and the fight began again so fiercely that she was thrown back down an alley to the left with a mob of panic-stricken inhabitants. In any case the outcome of the struggle could not be in doubt, for it was too late to recapture the abandoned positions. For nearly another half-hour the Marines fought doggedly on and gave their lives with superb dash, but the enemy was continually being reinforced from every side, the meadows, the roads, the park of Montvillers. Nothing could now dislodge them from the village they had bought at such a price, where thousands of their men lay in blood and flames. Destruction was now completing its work, and nothing was left but a charnel-house of scattered limbs and smoking ruins. Bazeilles, murdered, demolished, was disappearing into ashes.

  Henriette caught one last glimpse of her little home where the floors were falling into a whirlpool of fire. Opposite, she could still see her husband’s body lying by the wall. Then a fresh wave caught her again, the bugles were sounding the retreat and she was carried along somehow in the midst of the fleeing troops. She just became an object, a piece of flotsam washed along in a swirling stream of people flowing along the road. She lost any idea of what was happening until she found herself in Balan, in somebody’s kitchen, where she was sobbing with her head on a table.

  5

  AT ten o’clock up on the plateau of Algérie Beaudoin’s company was still lying among the cabbages, not having moved from that field since first thing. The cross-fire from the batteries of Le Hattoy and the Iges peninsula was increasing in intensity and had just killed two more of their men, and still no order to advance. Were they going to spend all day there, to be shot down without a fight?

  And now the men had not even the relief of letting off their own rifles. Captain Beaudoin had managed to stop the firing, a furious and pointless fusillade against the little wood opposite, in which not a single Prussian seemed to have stayed. The sun was scorching and they were baked alive, lying like this on the ground under a blazing sky.

  Jean turned round and saw with alarm that Maurice had let his head fall on the ground, his cheek was against the earth and his eyes shut. His face was white and still.

  ‘Hallo, what’s up?’

  It simply was that Maurice had gone to sleep. The waiting and his exhaustion had knocked him out even though death was hovering all round. He woke up with a start, opened wide, serene eyes which at once took on again the frightened, haunted expression of battle. He never knew how long he had been asleep. He felt he was emerging from a timeless, delicious nothingness.

  ‘Fancy, isn’t that funny, I’ve been asleep! Oh, it’s done me good.’

  It was true that he was less conscious of the painful tightness in his head and ribs, the strait-jacket of fear that makes your bones crack. He teased Lapoulle, who was worrying about the disappearance of Chouteau and Loubet and talking of going to look for them – lovely idea that was, to go and take cover behind a tree and smoke a pipe! Pache would have it that they had been kept by the ambulance people who were short of stretcher-bearers. That’s not a pleasant occupation either, going round picking up the wounded under fire. Then, tormented as ever by his rustic superstitions, he added that it was bad luck to touch the dead, you might die yourself.

  ‘Oh shut up, for God’s sake!’ shouted Lieutenant Rochas. ‘As though you would!’

  Colonel de Vineuil, riding by on his tall horse, turned his head, and he smiled for the only time since the early morning. Then he relapsed into his immobility, always unmoved under fire, waiting for orders.

  Maurice’s interest was being caught by the stretcher-bearers, and he watched them as they searched among the ups and downs of the terrain. There must be a first-aid post behind the hedge at the end of the sunken lane and it was the men from there who had set about exploring the plateau. A tent was being quickly set up while the essential material was unloaded from a van, the few instruments and pieces of apparatus, bandages, the wherewithal for quick dressings before the wounded were dispatched for Sedan as and when transport could be made available; and soon it would not be. There were only orderlies at that point. But it was the stretcher-bearers whose heroism was steadfast and inconspicuous. They could be seen in their grey uniforms with the red cross on their caps and armbands, slowly, quietly risking their lives under fire to get to places where men had fallen. They crawled on all fours, trying to utilize ditches and hedges and any mound or dip without showing off by needlessly exposing themselves. Then as soon as they found men lying on the ground their hard task began, for many of these men had lost consciousness, and they had to distinguish the wounded from the dead. Some had stayed lying on their faces with their mouths in a pool of blood and were choking to death, others had their gullets full of mud as though they had bitten off lumps of earth, others lay in heaps higgledy-piggledy, arms and legs contorted and ribs nearly crushed. With great care the bearers freed and lifted the ones still breathing, straightened out their limbs, raised their heads and cleaned them as best they could. Each man had a can of fresh water, but was exceedingly sparing with it. Often they could be seen kneeling for minutes at a time trying to revive a wounded man and waiting for him to open his eyes.

  Some fifty metres away to the left Maurice watched one trying to locate the wound of a young soldier from whose sleeve blood was trickling drop by drop. There was a haemorrhage that the red-cross man found eventually and stopped by compressing an artery. In urgent cases they simply took immediate precautions, avoiding harmful movements in fracture cases, binding up limbs and immobilizing them so as to make it safe to move the men. And transport then became the main problem: they supported the walking cases, carried others in their arms like children or pickaback, or again they worked in pairs of three or four together according to the degree of difficulty, making a chair with joined hands, or supporting their legs and shoulders. Beside the regulation stretchers there were also all kinds of ingenious devices, stretchers improvised from rifles tied together with straps from packs. And from all directions all over the plain being raked by gunfire, they could be seen singly or in groups, moving along with their burdens, keeping their heads down, testing the ground with their feet with cautious, admirable heroism.

  As Maurice was watching one of them on his right, a puny, delicate-looking young man who was carrying a heavily-built sergeant on his back and struggling along on his tired legs like a worker ant transporting a grain of wheat too heavy for it, he saw them pitch over and vanish in a shell-burst. When the smoke had blown away the sergeant reappeared, lying on his back but with no fresh wound, while the bearer lay with his belly ripped open. And another busy ant ran up, and after turning over and examining his dead comrade he picked up the wounded man again and carried him away on his back.

  So Maurice chipped Lapoulle:

  ‘I say, chum, if you prefer that job go and give them a hand!’

  For some little time the batteries on Saint-Menges had been at it like fury, and the hail of shells had got thicker. Captain Beaudoin, still nervously going up and down in front of his company, decided to approach the colonel. It was a pity to wear down the men’s morale for hours and hours without giving them anything to do.

  ‘I have no orders,’ was the colonel’s stoical answer.

  Once again General Douay was seen galloping past, followed by his staff. He had just had a meeting with General de Wimpffen, who had hurried there to beg him to hold on, which he thought he could promise to do, but on the strict understanding that the Calvary of Illy, on his right, would be defended. If the Illy position was lost he could answer for nothing and retreat would be inevitable. General de Wimpffen declared that troops from the 1st corps were going to occupy the Calvary, and indeed almost at once a regiment of Zou
aves could be seen taking it over. Hence General Douay, now reassured, agreed to send the Dumont division to support the 12th corps which was very hard pressed. But a quarter of an hour later, as he was on his way back from seeing that his left was in good shape, he uttered an oath on looking up and seeing that the Calvary was deserted, the Zouaves had gone, the plateau had been abandoned and the hellish fire from the Fleigneux batteries was in any case making it untenable. In desperation, foreseeing disaster, he was hastening towards the right when he ran into a stampede of the Dumont division falling back in disorder and panic, mixed up with the remains of the 1st corps. The latter, after its withdrawal, had not succeeded in regaining its morning positions, abandoning Daigny to the XIIth Saxon corps and Givonne to the Prussian Guard, forced northwards through the Garenne woods and bombarded by batteries the enemy was placing on every hilltop from one end of the valley to the other. The terrible ring of iron and fire was tightening, a part of the Guard was continuing its advance on Illy from east to west, rounding the hills, while from west to east, behind the XIth corps, now in possession of Saint-Menges, the Vth was steadily moving on past Fleigneux, bringing its guns further forward with insolent unconcern, so convinced of the ignorance and impotence of the French troops that it did not even wait for the infantry to support it. It was midday, and the whole skyline was ablaze, thundering and cross-firing at the 7th and 1st corps.