The Debacle: (1870-71) Page 3

  Standing there, Jean looked round the camp in which the retreat was producing a last-minute flurry of activity. A few men were running about, but others, already dropping with sleep, were getting up and stretching, looking tired and irritated. But he was patiently waiting for roll-call with that good-natured, equable reasonableness which made him such an excellent soldier. His mates said that with a bit of education he might have gone a long way. But being just able to read and write, he didn’t even covet the rank of sergeant. Once a peasant always a peasant.

  But his eye was caught by the greenstick fire which was still smoking, and he hailed the two men still slaving away at it, Loubet and Lapoulle, both in his own squad.

  ‘Oh, turn it up! You’re smothering us all.’

  Loubet, thin and wiry, who looked a bit of a joker, grinned.

  ‘It’s catching, corporal, it really is… Go on, you, blow!’

  He bullied Lapoulle, a great giant of a man who was busting himself, blowing up a hurricane, with his cheeks puffed out like a pair of bellows and purple in the face, his eyes red and streaming.

  Two other soldiers of the squad, Chouteau and Pache, the former flat on his back, being a lazy-bones fond of his comfort, the latter squatting and diligently mending a tear in his trousers, burst into laughter, tickled by the fearful face that great clot of a Lapoulle was making.

  ‘Why not turn round and blow from your backside, it’ll burn better,’ yelled Chouteau.

  Jean let them laugh. There might not be many more chances, and for all the serious look of the man, with his full face and regular features, he wasn’t in favour of melancholy and deliberately shut his eyes when the men had their bit of fun. But another group caught his attention, yet another soldier in his squad, Maurice Levasseur, who had been talking for the last hour to a civilian, a red-haired gentleman of about thirty-six, with a face like a good-natured dog, with huge blue popping eyes – the short-sighted eyes that had got him exempted from military service. They had been joined by a reserve artilleryman, a sergeant, smart and self-assured with his dark moustache and goatee beard, and all three were chatting away quite oblivious of time as though they were at home.

  Out of kindness, to save them from being told off, Jean felt he ought to intervene.

  ‘You had better be going, sir. This is retreat, and if the lieutenant should find you…’

  Maurice cut him short.

  ‘You stay, Weiss.’

  And to the corporal he snapped:

  ‘This gentleman is my brother-in-law. He had a permit from the colonel, who is a friend of his.’

  What business was it of this yokel whose hands still smelt of dung? He himself had passed his law exams the previous autumn, enlisted as a volunteer and thanks to the colonel’s influence had been drafted direct to the 106th without going through the square-bashing, though he deigned to wear the knapsack. But from the first minute he had been put off by this illiterate clodhopper in command over him and felt a sullen resentment.

  ‘All right,’ Jean quietly answered, ‘get yourself run in, it’s all the same to me.’

  Then he turned away as he saw that Maurice really wasn’t lying, for the colonel, Monsieur de Vineuil, happened to come along, with his grand manner, his long sallow face divided in two by his thick white moustache, and he had greeted Weiss and the soldier with a smile. The colonel was hurrying over to a farmhouse that could be seen two or three hundred metres to the left, surrounded by plum orchards, where headquarters had been set up for the night. Nobody knew whether the commanding officer of the 7th corps was there, in the awful grief over the death of his brother, killed at Wissembourg. But Brigadier Bourgain-Desfeuilles, who had the 106th under his command, was certainly there, yapping as usual, quite untroubled by his lack of brains, his skin florid with so much high living, and his heavy body rolling on his stumpy legs. There was increasing activity round the farm; dispatch-riders were coming and going every minute, and yet there was feverish waiting for dispatches, always too slow with news about this great battle which everybody sensed to be decisive and imminent ever since morning. Where had it been fought and what was the outcome at this stage? As night fell it seemed as though mounting anxiety was spreading a lake of darkness over the orchard and the few hayricks around the farm buildings. And it was also being said that a Prussian spy had just been arrested while prowling round the camp and taken to the farm for the general to interrogate. Perhaps Colonel de Vineuil had had some telegram that was making him run so fast.

  Meanwhile Maurice had gone on talking to his brother-in-law Weiss and his cousin Honoré Fouchard, the artillery sergeant. Retreat, at first far distant, then gradually getting louder, passed near them, with its brass and drums in the melancholy quiet of dusk, but they did not even appear to notice it. The young man, grandson of a hero of the Grande Armée, was born at Le Chêne-Populeux, where his father, fighting shy of glory, had come down to a humble job of tax-collector. His mother, of peasant stock, had died bringing him and his twin sister Henriette into the world, and Henriette had looked after him from their earliest childhood. He was now here as a volunteer after a long series of misdeeds, the typical dissipations of a weak and excitable temperament, money thrown away on gambling, women and the follies of all-devouring Paris; and all that when he had gone there to finish his law studies and his people had bled themselves white to make a grand gentleman of him. This had hastened his father’s death, and his sister, having spent her all, had had the good fortune to find a husband, this reliable fellow Weiss, an Alsatian from Mulhouse, who had been a book-keeper for years at the General Refinery at Le Chêne-Populeux, and was now an overseer for Monsieur Delaherche, one of the biggest clothmakers in Sedan. And Maurice thought he had quite turned over a new leaf, with his nervy nature as quick to hope for the best as to be discouraged by the bad, generous, enthusiastic, but without the slightest stability, blown hither and thither by every passing gust of wind. Fair, small, with a very large head, small neat nose and chin, he had a clever face, with grey, affectionate eyes, a bit wild at times.

  Weiss had hurried to Mulhouse the day before the outbreak of hostilities, suddenly anxious to settle a family affair, and the reason why he had taken advantage of Colonel de Vineuil’s kindness and come to give his brother-in-law a handshake was that the colonel was uncle of young Madame Delaherche, a pretty widow married last year to the manufacturer. Maurice and Henriette had known her as a young girl through having been neighbours. Also, apart from the colonel, Maurice had found in Captain Beaudoin, the captain of his company, an acquaintance of Gilberte, young Madame Delaherche, and an intimate one, it was said, dating from Mézières when she was Madame Maginot, wife of Monsieur Maginot, Inspector of Forests.

  ‘Give Henriette a kiss for me,’ Maurice was saying to Weiss, for he was passionately devoted to his sister. ‘Tell her she will be pleased with me and that I mean to make her proud of me at last.’

  Tears came into his eyes as he thought of his follies. His brother-in-law, deeply moved himself, changed the subject abruptly and talked to Honoré Fouchard, the artilleryman.

  ‘And as I’m going up Remilly way I’ll go and tell Uncle Fouchard I’ve seen you and you are all right.’

  Uncle Fouchard, a peasant with some land and a business as a travelling butcher, was a brother of Henriette and Maurice’s mother. He lived at Remilly, up on the hill, six kilometres from Sedan.

  ‘Yes do,’ Honoré quietly answered. ‘Dad couldn’t care less, but go all the same if you would like to.’

  At that moment there was a commotion over by the farm and they saw the prowler, the man they had accused of being a spy, coming out quite free, with only one officer. Presumably he had shown his papers and told a tale, for he was simply being turned out of the camp. At such a distance and in the dusk they could not make him out very clearly, but he was huge and square, with reddish hair.

  But Maurice uttered a cry.

  ‘Honoré, look… it’s just like that Prussian, you know, Goliath!’
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  The name made the artilleryman start. He looked with blazing eyes. Goliath Steinberg, the farm-hand, the man who had made trouble between him and his father, who had taken Silvine away from him, the whole nasty story and abominable corruption that still tortured him. He would have liked to rush over and strangle the man, but by now he was beyond the piled arms and disappearing into the night.

  ‘Goliath!’ he muttered. ‘But it can’t be! He’s over there with the others… If ever I run into him!’

  He had made a menacing gesture towards the darkening horizon – all that purplish Orient which for him was Prussia. There was a silence and then retreat was heard once more, but far away, fading out towards the end of the camp with a dying softness in keeping with the deepening haze.

  ‘Gosh!’ went on Honoré, ‘I shall get run in if I’m not there for roll-call. Good night, bye-bye all!’

  He gave a final squeeze to both Weiss’s hands and strode rapidly towards the hillock on which the reserve artillery was parked, without another word about his father or message for Silvine, whose name burned his throat.

  A few more minutes went by and over to the left, where the second brigade would be, a bugle sounded roll-call. Another answered, nearer, and then a third a long way off. Then, one after another they were all blowing together when Gaude, the company bugler, made up his mind in a volley of piercing notes. He was a tall, thin and miserable-looking fellow, clean shaven and with never a word to say, and he blew his calls with the breath of a hurricane.

  Then Sergeant Sapin, a skinny little man with big cowlike eyes, began roll-call. He snapped out the names in his high-pitched voice, and the soldiers who had gathered round answered on every note from cello to flute. But then there was a hold-up.

  ‘Lapoulle!’ repeated the sergeant, very loud.

  Still no answer. And Jean had to dash over to the heap of green sticks which Fusilier Lapoulle, egged on by his mates, was determined to get alight. Now he was flat on his belly and purple in the face, blowing the smoke from the blackening wood straight along the ground.

  ‘For Christ’s sake turn it up!’ shouted Jean. ‘Answer roll-call!’

  Lapoulle leaped up in a daze, seemed to understand and bellowed ‘Present’ in such a savage roar that it made Loubet fall on his backside, it was such a scream. Pache, who had finished his sewing, answered almost inaudibly, like muttering a prayer. Chouteau, full of scorn, didn’t even get up, but called out the word and stretched himself out a little more.

  Meanwhile Lieutenant Rochas, who was on duty, stood motionless a metre or so away. When the call was over and Sergeant Sapin went up to report that there was nobody missing, he mumbled into his moustache, pointing with a jerk of his chin to Weiss who was still talking to Maurice:

  ‘There’s even one too many. What’s that character up to over there?’

  ‘Permission from the colonel, sir,’ Jean, who had overheard, thought he ought to answer. Rochas shrugged angrily and without another word continued his tramp along the tents, waiting for lights out, while Jean, whose legs were giving way after the day’s march, sat down a few paces from Maurice, whose words reached him at first in a jumble which he didn’t listen to, for he himself was weighed down by vague reflections hardly formulated in the depths of his stolid, slow brain.

  Maurice was all for war, which he thought was inevitable and vital for the very existence of nations. That had been perfectly plain

  to him ever since he had gone in for evolutionist ideas, all this theory of evolution which at that time fascinated the younger intellectuals. Is not life a state of war every second? Is not the very condition of nature a continuous struggle, the survival of the fittest, strength maintained and renewed through action, life rising ever young out of death? He recalled the great burst of enthusiasm which had uplifted him when he had had the idea of atoning for his misdeeds by becoming a soldier and going to fight at the front. Perhaps the France of the plebiscite, by handing itself over to the Emperor, did not want war. A week earlier he himself had declared it iniquitous and stupid. People argued about this candidature of a German prince for the throne of Spain, and in the confusion that had gradually developed everybody seemed in the wrong, so that now nobody really knew which side the provocation had come from, and the one inevitable thing had remained unaltered, the inexorable law which at a given moment throws one nation against another. But a great fever of excitement had run through Paris, and he could still see that burning evening, with crowds surging along the boulevards, bands waving torches and shouting: ‘To Berlin! To Berlin!’ He could still hear the tall, beautiful woman with the

  regal profile, standing on a coachman’s box in front of the Hôtel de Ville, wrapped in the folds of the flag and singing the ‘Marseillaise’. Was it all a lie, then? Had the heart of Paris not beaten? And later, as always with him, the nervous elation had been followed by hours of dreadful doubt and revulsion: his arrival in the barracks, the sergeant major who had signed him on, the sergeant who had issued him his uniform, the stinking barrack-room and the revolting filth, the coarse familiarity with his new companions, the routine drill which exhausted his limbs and stupefied his brain. And yet in less than a week he had got used to it and lost his disgust. Then his enthusiasm had taken over again when the regiment had at last set off for Belfort.

  From the outset Maurice had been absolutely certain of victory. For him the Emperor’s plan was clear: hurl four hundred thousand men at the Rhine, cross the river before the Prussians were ready, separate North Germany from South by a vigorous thrust, and thanks to some striking victory, immediately force Austria and Italy to side with France. Hadn’t there been a rumour, at one moment, that the 7th army corps, to which his regiment belonged,

  was to embark at Brest and land in Denmark to stage a diversion and oblige Prussia to immobilize one of her armies? She would be surprised, overwhelmed on all fronts and crushed in a few weeks. A sheer walk-over, from Strasbourg to Berlin. But since the delay at Belfort he had been tormented by misgivings. The 7th army corps, whose role was to command the Black Forest gap, had reached there in a state of indescribable confusion, incomplete and short of everything. The third division had still not arrived from Italy, the second cavalry brigade was still in Lyons for fear of popular unrest, and three batteries had got lost somewhere or other. Then there was an extraordinary famine, the shops in Belfort which were supposed to supply everything were empty: no tents, no cooking utensils, no body belts, no medical equipment, no smithies, no hobbles for the horses. Not a single medical orderly or clerk. At the last moment they had realized that thirty thousand spare parts, indispensable for rifles, were missing, and an officer had had to be dispatched to Paris and he had brought back five thousand, which he had had a lot of trouble to get out of them. Besides, what upset Maurice was the inaction. They had been there for two weeks and why weren’t they advancing? He felt that each day’s

  delay was an irreparable miscalculation, one more chance of victory lost. Confronting the dream-plan there rose up the reality of its execution, that he was to know later but then only felt in an anguished, obscure way: the seven army corps strung out thinly along the frontier from Metz to Bitche and from Bitche to Belfort, everywhere the fighting force below strength, and the four hundred thousand men amounted to two hundred and thirty thousand at the most; generals were jealous of each other, each determined to get the field-marshal’s baton for himself and not to help his neighbour; the most appalling lack of foresight, the mobilization and concentration of troops done simultaneously in order to gain time and leading to an inextricable muddle; in fact a slow paralysis, starting at the top from the Emperor, a sick man incapable of any quick decision, which was beginning to creep through the entire army and disorganize it, reduce it to nothing and hurl it into the worst disasters, unable to defend itself. Nevertheless, over and above the vague unease of the waiting, and in the instinctive shrinking from what was to come, the certainty of victory remained.

  Suddenly on 3 August th
e news of the previous day’s victory at Saarbrücken had burst upon them. A great victory – well perhaps. But the papers were bursting with enthusiasm – it was the invasion of Germany, the first step on the march to glory, and the Prince Imperial, who had coolly picked up a bullet on the battlefield, began to be a legend. Then two days later, when the surprise and crushing defeat of Wissembourg was known, a howl of rage had burst from people’s throats. Five thousand men caught in a trap, men who had stood up to thirty-five thousand Prussians for ten hours, such a cowardly massacre cried out for vengeance! It must be that the leaders were guilty of faulty protective measures and lack of foresight. But it was all going to be put right, MacMahon had called in the first division of the 7th corps, the 1st would be supported by the 5th, and by now the Prussians must have re-crossed the Rhine with our infantrymen’s bayonets prodding their backsides. And the thought that there must have been desperate fighting that day, the increasingly feverish wait for news, the general anxiety spread further every minute under the wide, fading sky.

  That was what Maurice kept on telling Weiss.

  ‘Oh yes, they’ve taken a fine old beating today!’

  Weiss made no answer, but shook his head with a worried look. He was looking towards the Rhine, too, towards the east where night had already closed down, a black wall, impenetrable, mysterious. After the last notes of roll-call a great silence had fallen over the sleepy camp, hardly broken at all by the footsteps and voices of a few belated soldiers. A light had come on, like a twinkling star, in the living-room of the farmhouse where headquarters staff were sitting up waiting for the dispatches coming in hour by hour, without making things any clearer. The fire of green twigs, at last abandoned, was still smoking with a dense, dismal smoke which a gentle wind was blowing over the restless farmhouse, dirtying the first stars.