The Debacle: (1870-71) Read online

  ‘A beating,’ Weiss said eventually. ‘May God hear your prayer!’

  Jean, who was still sitting a few yards away, pricked up his ears, and Lieutenant Rochas, who had overheard this wish with its tremulous doubt, stopped short to listen.

  ‘What!’ said Maurice. ‘Aren’t you completely confident? Do you think a defeat is possible?’

  His brother-in-law raised a shaking hand to stop him, and his kindly face suddenly looked tired and pale.

  ‘Defeat, God preserve us from that! You know I belong to this province, and my grandfather and grandmother were murdered by the Cossacks in 1814, and whenever I think of invasion my fists clench of their own accord, and I would fight in my ordinary clothes like a trooper!… Defeat, no, no! I refuse to consider the possibility.’

  His emotion subsided, and he slumped his shoulders in utter weariness.

  ‘But all the same, look here, I’m uneasy… I know my Alsace well, and I’ve just come through it again on business, and we Alsatians have seen what was staring the generals in the face but they have refused to see. Oh, we wanted war against Prussia, and had been waiting a long time to settle that old score. But that didn’t prevent our having good neighbourly relations with Baden and Bavaria, for we’ve all got family or friends across the Rhine. We thought they were longing like us to take down the insufferable pride of the Prussians. And calm and resolute though we may be, we’ve been giving way to impatience and worry for the past fortnight as we’ve seen how everything is going from bad to worse. From the moment war was declared they have let the enemy cavalry terrify villages, reconnoitre the terrain, cut telegraph wires. Baden and Bavaria are mobilizing and enormous troop movements are going on in the Palatinate, and information from all sides, markets, fairs and suchlike, proves that the frontier is threatened. And when the inhabitants, the mayors of communes, now thoroughly scared, rush to report all that to officers passing through, the latter merely shrug their shoulders: cowardly hallucinations, the enemy is miles away… When not an hour should have been lost, days and days go by! What can they be waiting for? The whole of Germany to fall on top of us?’

  His voice was soft and heartbroken, as though he were repeating these things aloud to himself after having thought them over for a long time.

  ‘Oh, and I know Germany well, too, and the terrible thing is that all you people seem to know as little about it as you do about China… Maurice, you remember my cousin Gunther, who came last spring and looked me up in Sedan. He is a cousin on my mother’s side, his mother was my mother’s sister and she married a man in Berlin. And he is typical of them in his hatred of France. Now he is serving as an officer in the Prussian Guard. I can still hear his voice as he said to me that evening when I saw him off at the station: “If France declares war on us she will be beaten.” ’

  This made Lieutenant Rochas, who had contained himself up to then, come forward in a rage. A man of nearly fifty, he was a tall, thin fellow with a long, lantern-jawed face, tanned and leathern. His huge hook nose came down over a wide, strong but good-natured mouth with an untidy bristling grey moustache. Now he went right off the deep end and bellowed in a thundering voice:

  ‘Here, what are you fucking well doing, discouraging the men!’

  Without taking part himself in the quarrel Jean thought that really the lieutenant was right, for although he was beginning to be surprised at the long delays and the muddle they were in, he had never had any doubt either about the bloody good hiding they were going to give the Prussians. That was a fact, and that was all they had come here to do.

  Weiss was quite taken aback. ‘But, lieutenant,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to discourage anybody. On the contrary, I wish everyone knew what I know, because it’s best to know so as to be forewarned and forearmed… Now just look at Germany…’

  He proceeded in his reasonable way to explain his fears: the growth of Prussia after Sadowa, the nationalist movement which put her at the head of the other German states, a great empire in formation, rejuvenated with the enthusiasm and irresistible impetus to achieve its unity; the system of compulsory military service which set up a whole nation in arms, trained, disciplined and with powerful weapons, ready for a long war and still intoxicated with her shattering triumph over Austria; the intelligence and moral strength of this ‘army, under the command of officers almost all young and obeying a commander-in-chief who seemed about to modernize the whole art of war, a man of incomparable prudence and foresight and miraculous clarity of vision. And with that Germany he had the courage to contrast France: the Empire grown old, still acclaimed in a plebiscite but basically rotten because it had weakened the idea of patriotism by destroying liberty, and then turning back to liberalism too late and thereby hastening its own undoing because it was ready to collapse as soon as it stopped satisfying the lust for pleasure it had let loose; the army certainly admirable as a brave lot of men, and still wearing the laurels of the Crimea and Italy, but adulterated by the system of paid substitutes, still in the old routine of the Africa school, too cocksure of victory to face the great effort of modern techniques; and then the generals, most of them nonentities and eaten up with rivalries and some of them quite stupefyingly ignorant, and at their head the Emperor, a sick man and vacillating, deceived and self-deceiving, and all facing this terrible adventure into which they were blindly hurling themselves, with no serious preparation, like a stampede of scared sheep being led to the slaughter.

  Rochas listened to all this, gaping and goggling. His terrible nose was screwed up. Then he suddenly made up his mind to laugh – a huge ear-to-ear laugh.

  ‘What do you think you’re waffling about? What does all that cock-and-bull story add up to? It doesn’t make sense, it’s too silly for me to rack my brains to understand. Go and tell all that to the recruits, but not to me, with my twenty-seven years’ service!’

  He banged his chest with his fist. The son of a working stonemason from Limousin, himself born in Paris and hating his father’s trade, he had enlisted at eighteen. As a soldier of fortune he had been in the ranks, become a corporal in Africa, sergeant at Sebastopol and lieutenant after Solferino, having put in fifteen years of hard existence and heroic gallantry to achieve this rank, but so lacking in education that he would never make the grade of captain.

  ‘But this is something you don’t know about, Mr Knowall… Yes, at Mazagran I was hardly nineteen and we were a hundred and twenty-three men, not one more, and we held out for four days against twelve thousand Arabs… Oh yes, for years and years in Africa, at Mascara, Biskra, Dellys and later on the Grande Kabylie and later still Laghouat, if you had been with us, Mister, you would have seen all those bloody wogs bunking off like hares as soon as we came on the scene… And at Sebastopol, sir, blimey, you couldn’t say that was a picnic either. Gales fit to blow your hair off, perishing cold, constant alerts, and then those savages ended by making everything hop! But never mind, we made them hop too, oh yes, with music and in a big frying-pan, what’s more!… And Solferino, you weren’t there yourself, sir, so why do you talk about it? Yes, at Solferino, where it was so hot although more rain had come down that day than you have seen in your life, perhaps – at Solferino the thrashing we gave those Austrians – you should have seen them galloping away from our bayonets, going arse over tip to run faster, as if they had fire in their backsides.’

  He was bursting with joy, and all the traditional gaiety of the French soldier rang in his triumphant laugh. It was the legendary French trooper going through the world between his girl on one side and a bottle of good wine on the other, conquering the world singing ribald choruses. One corporal and four men, and great armies licked the dust.

  Suddenly his voice roared out:

  ‘Beaten! What, France beaten! Those Prussian swine beat us! Us?’

  He came up and took Weiss roughly by the lapel of his coat, and his tall, lean body, the body of a knight-errant, expressed utter contempt for the enemy, whoever he was, and he couldn’t care less about time and pl
ace.

  ‘Just you listen, Mister… If the Prussians dare to come here we’ll send them back home with kicks up the arse. You understand, kicks up the arse all the way to Berlin!’

  He made a superb gesture, with the serenity of a child, the candid conviction of the innocent who knows nothing and fears nothing.

  ‘Good God, that’s how it is because that’s how it is!’

  Dazed and almost convinced, Weiss hastened to declare that nothing could suit him better. And Maurice, who was keeping quiet, not daring to rush in with his superior officer present, finally joined in the burst of laughter, for this great oaf of a man, who was a fool in his opinion, warmed his heart. Jean too had been nodding his agreement with the lieutenant’s every word. He also had been at Solferino, where it had rained so hard. Now that was what you called talking! If all the officers had talked like that nobody would have cared a damn whether there weren’t any stewpans or flannel body-belts!

  For a long time now it had been quite dark, and still Rochas was waving his great limbs about in the night. He had only ever managed to read through one book, the victories of Napoleon, which had found its way from a pedlar’s box into his knapsack. He was thoroughly wound up now, and all his learning gushed forth in one impetuous cry:

  ‘Austria whacked at Castiglione, Marengo, Austerlitz, Wagram! Prussia whacked at Eylau, Jena, Lützen! Russia whacked at Friedland, Smolensk, Borodino! Spain and England whacked everywhere! The whole world whacked from top to bottom, one side to the other! And are we to be whacked now? Why? How? Has the world been changed?’

  He drew himself higher still, raising his arm like a flagstaff.

  ‘Look! There has been fighting over yonder today and we are expecting news. Well, I’ll tell you what the news is… They have whacked the Prussians, whacked them so as to leave them neither wings nor feet, so that we’ll have to sweep up the crumbs!’

  Just then a great moan of grief swept across the sombre sky. Was it some night bird’s plaint? Was it some mysterious voice from afar, full of woe? The whole camp shuddered in the darkness, and the anxiety which had spread because of the slow arrival of dispatches was thereby heightened to fever pitch. In the distant farmhouse the light by which the headquarters staff were anxiously waiting through the night burned up higher, with the straight, still flame of an altar candle.

  It was now ten o’clock, and Gaude rose up from the black ground into which he had disappeared and was the first to blow lights out. Other bugles answered and tailed off one by one in a dying fanfare, as though they were already stupefied with sleep. Weiss, who had not realized it was so late, put his arms tenderly round Maurice: good luck and keep smiling! He would give Henriette a kiss for her brother and go and give his love to Uncle Fouchard. And as he was really going a rumour ran round, a sort of feverish excitement. It was a great victory won by MacMahon: the Crown Prince of Prussia taken prisoner with twenty-five thousand men, the enemy pushed back, destroyed, leaving its guns and baggage in our hands.

  ‘There you are!’ was all Rochas exclaimed, in his booming voice.

  Then, overjoyed, he ran after Weiss who was hurrying back to Mulhouse:

  ‘With kicks up the arse, sir, kicks up the arse all the way to Berlin!’

  A quarter of an hour later another dispatch reported that the army had had to evacuate Woerth and was in full retreat. Oh, what a night! Rochas, knocked out with fatigue, had wrapped his greatcoat round him and was asleep on the ground, not bothering about a shelter, as often happened with him. Maurice and Jean had crawled into the tent where Loubet, Chouteau, Pache and Lapoulle were already huddled together with their heads on their knapsacks. There was room for six so long as you kept your knees bent. At first Loubet had made them all laugh away their hunger by giving Lapoulle to believe that there would be chicken at tomorrow’s issue of rations, but they were too tired and were soon snoring – let the Prussians come. Jean lay still for a moment close against Maurice; although he was dead tired he couldn’t get off to sleep, for what this gent had said was going round and round in his head – the Germans under arms, innumerable and insatiable – and he felt that his companion was not asleep either, but was thinking about the same things. Then Maurice made an impatient movement away from him and Jean realized that he was annoying him. Between the peasant and the intellectual the instinctive hostility, the dislike born of class and education, were like a physical discomfort; yet the former felt a sort of shame at this, an inner unhappiness, and shrank away, trying to escape from the hostile contempt he sensed was there. Although the night was now getting chilly outside, it was so stifling in the tent with all these bodies piled on each other that Maurice, feeling unbearably hot, suddenly jumped up, went out and lay down a few steps away. Jean, feeling wretched, tossed about in a nightmarish half-sleep in which sadness at not being liked mingled with fear of some immense disaster which he thought he could hear galloping out yonder in the unknown.

  Hours must have passed, and the whole black, motionless camp seemed crushed beneath the pressure of this limitless, evil darkness laden with something horrible but as yet nameless. Little stirrings could be felt in a lake of blackness, a sudden snore would come from some invisible tent. Or again sounds you didn’t recognize – a snorting horse, a sabre rattling, the movement of some late prowler – all quite ordinary noises which took on menacing overtones. Then all of a sudden, near the cookhouse, a great light flared up. It threw the battle front into strong relief in which you caught a glimpse of rows of stacked arms, polished rifle-barrels over which red reflections passed like trickles of fresh blood, and the dark, stiff figures of sentries loomed up in this sudden fire. Was this the enemy whom the officers had been promising for two days and they had been searching for all the way from Belfort to Mulhouse? Then the flame went out in a great fountain of sparks. It was only the heap of green sticks that Lapoulle had worried at for so long, and which after hours of smouldering had flared up like straw.

  Frightened by this bright light Jean also rushed out of the tent and nearly tripped over Maurice who was propped on one elbow, watching. The darkness had already returned blacker than ever, and the two men stayed there stretched out on the bare earth, a few metres apart. The only thing visible in the thick darkness was the farmhouse window over yonder in which the light was still burning, the solitary candle that seemed to mark a vigil over the dead. What could the time be? Perhaps two or three. But the headquarters over there was certainly not asleep. The yapping voice of General Bourgain-Desfeuilles could be heard cursing this sleepless night in which he had only been able to keep going with the help of drinks and cigars. New telegrams kept coming in, things must be going wrong, shadowy dispatch-riders could just be discerned galloping madly about. Running feet could be heard, oaths, a sound like a stifled death-cry, then a terrible silence. Was this the end, then? An icy breath blew over the exhausted and anguished camp.

  It was then that Jean and Maurice realized that a tall, thin shadow rushing by was Colonel de Vineuil. He must be with Major Bouroche, a big, leonine man. They were exchanging disconnected phrases, unfinished, whispered sentences like you hear in bad dreams.

  ‘It comes from Bâle… Our first division destroyed… Twelve hours of fighting, the whole army in retreat…’

  The shadowy figure of the colonel stopped and hailed another shade hurrying along, athletic, slim and dapper.

  ‘That you, Beaudoin?’

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  ‘Oh my dear man, MacMahon beaten at Froeschwiller, Frossard beaten at Spickeren, de Failly immobilized and powerless between the two… At Froeschwiller a single corps against a whole army -did miracles. But everything swept away, rout, panic, France wide open…’

  His voice was choking with tears, the words died away and the three shades melted and vanished.

  Maurice had leapt to his feet, his whole being shuddering.

  ‘Oh my God!’ he muttered.

  That was all he could find to say, while Jean, with death in his heart, whispered
:

  ‘Oh bloody hell! So that gentleman, your relation, was right when he said they are stronger than us!’

  Maurice could have strangled him, for he was beside himself. The Prussians stronger than the French! It made his heart bleed. But the peasant, in his calm and deliberate way, went straight on:

  ‘But it doesn’t make any difference, don’t you see? You don’t give up just because you’ve had one knock… We’ve got to bash ’em just the same.’

  At that moment a lanky figure rose up in front of them. It was Rochas, still draped in his greatcoat, who had been awakened out of his heavy sleep by the vague noises, and possibly by the wind of defeat. He questioned them, wanted to know.

  When after a great struggle he had grasped it, his childlike eyes showed an immense bewilderment.

  More than ten times he repeated:

  ‘Beaten! Beaten how? Why?’

  Now the eastern sky was lightening; it was a weird and infinitely mournful light on the sleeping tents, in one of which you could begin to pick out the grey faces of Loubet and Lapoulle, Chouteau and Pache, still snoring open-mouthed. A funereal dawn was coming up out of the sooty mists rising from the distant river.

  2

  BY about eight the sun dispersed the heavy clouds and a clear, blazing August Sunday shone out over Mulhouse in the middle of the great, fertile plain. From the camp, now awake and buzzing with activity, the bells of all the parishes could be heard hurling their chimes through the limpid air. That lovely Sunday, day of appalling disaster, had its own gaiety, its brilliant holiday sky.