The Debacle: (1870-71) Read online

  But then there was a diversion. Loubet noticed that during the row Pache, too, had quietly got rid of his rifle, putting it down at the foot of a bank. Why? He didn’t attempt to find an explanation, laughing sheepishly, half pleased with himself and half ashamed like a good little boy being scolded for his first naughtiness. He walked along with arms hanging free, very jolly and cock-a-hoop. Along the interminable sun-baked roads, between the fields of ripe corn or hops, one after another and all looking the same, the stampede went on, and the stragglers, with neither packs nor rifles, were nothing but a wandering rabble tramping along, a hotchpotch of rascals and beggars at whose approach village doors shut in panic.

  Just then they met something which put the finishing touch to Maurice’s exasperation. A distant heavy rumbling could be heard coming nearer; it was the reserve artillery which had set off last, and suddenly its head appeared round a bend in the road. The demoralized stragglers just had time to throw themselves into the nearby fields. The artillery was moving in column, coming along at a proud canter in fine correct order, a whole regiment of six batteries, the colonel on the outside and near the middle, and the officers in their places. The guns clanked by, keeping strict spacing, each with its ammunition waggon, horses and men. In the fifth battery Maurice recognized his cousin Honoré’s cannon. There was the sergeant, proudly mounted on his horse, to the left of the leader, a handsome, fair chap called Adolphe on a sturdy chestnut beautifully matched with the off-horse trotting alongside. In his correct position among the six gunners, sitting in pairs on the cases of the gun itself and its ammunition waggon, was Louis, the gun-layer, a dark little man and Adolphe’s mate, his other half, as they said, following the established custom of marrying a mounted man and a foot-slogger. They seemed much taller to Maurice, who had met them in camp, and the gun, with its four horses, followed by the waggon drawn by six more, looked as dazzling as a sun, polished and cherished by all its little world, men and beasts, closely surrounding it with the discipline and tenderness of a well-ordered family. And what hurt him most was the haughty glance his cousin Honoré cast on the stragglers and his sudden amazement when he caught sight of him in the midst of this rabble of unarmed men. The procession was nearly past, with the material for the batteries – waggons, forage-carts, smithies. Then in a final cloud of dust went the reserves, the spare men and horses, who trotted out of sight round another bend in the road with a gradually diminishing din of hoofs and wheels.

  ‘Blimey!’ declared Loubet. ‘Easy enough to be cocky when you’re going by coach!’

  The headquarters staff had found Altkirch unoccupied. No Prussians yet. Nevetheless, afraid of being dogged and of seeing them appear at any moment General Douay had decided that the march should go on as far as Dannemarie, which the leading detachments had not reached until five in the afternoon. It was eight and getting dark, and yet the regiments, in a terrible state of confusion and reduced to half strength, had hardly finished bivouacking. The men were worn out and collapsing with hunger and fatigue. Until ten o’clock they could still be seen coming in – hunting for their companies and not finding them – isolated soldiers, little groups, the whole miserable, interminable line of footsore and resentful men strung out along the roads.

  As soon as he did manage to rejoin his regiment Jean set about finding Lieutenant Rochas to make his report. He found him and Captain Beaudoin confering with the colonel. All three were in front of a little inn and very concerned about the roll-call and anxious to know the whereabouts of their men. The first words of the corporal to the lieutenant were overheard by Colonel de Vineuil, and he called him over and forced him to tell him the whole story. His long sallow face, in which the eyes looked very black against his snow-white hair and drooping moustache, expressed silent misery.

  ‘Sir,’ said Captain Beaudoin, without waiting for his commanding officer’s opinion, ‘we must shoot half a dozen of these thugs.’

  Lieutenant Rochas nodded his agreement, but the colonel made a gesture of helplessness.

  ‘Too many of them… what can you do? Nearly seven hundred of them! Who can you pick on out of that lot?… And besides, if you please, the general won’t hear of it. He goes all fatherly and says he never punished a single man in Africa… No, no, there’s nothing I can do. It’s terrible.’

  The captain made so bold as to repeat after him:

  ‘Yes it is terrible… It’s the end of everything.’

  Jean was taking himself off when he heard Major Bouroche, whom he had not noticed standing on the steps of the inn, mutter softly: no more discipline, no more punishment, army done for! Before a week was out the officers would get a few kicks up the backside, whereas if they had coshed one or two of those blighters straight away the rest might have had second thoughts.

  Nobody was punished. Officers bringing up the rear, escorting the vehicles of the baggage-train, had had the happy foresight to get the packs and rifles picked up from the roadside. There were only a few missing, and the men were rearmed at dawn on the quiet to hush the matter up. Orders were to strike camp at five, but by four the soldiers were awakened and the retreat on Belfort was pushed forward on the assumption that the Prussians were only a league or two away. Once again the troops had had to put up with biscuits, and they were still dead beat after the short and restless night, with nothing warm in their bellies. That morning, once again, the orderly conduct of the march was jeopardized by this sudden departure. That day was worse still, utterly miserable. The character of the country had changed, and they had entered a mountainous region with roads up hill and down dale through fir plantations and narrow valleys all tangled with gorse and a mass of golden blossom. But through this gaily-coloured countryside beneath a brilliant August sun, a wind of panic had blown ever more fiercely since the day before. A dispatch advising mayors to warn the inhabitants that they would do well to put away their valuables had just increased the terror to fever-pitch. So the enemy was here? Would there even be time to escape? Everybody thought he could hear the mounting roar of invasion, like the dull thunder of a river in spate, gathering strength at every village from some fresh scare, amid general clamour and lamentation.

  Maurice moved on like a sleepwalker, his feet bleeding and his shoulders weighed down with his pack and rifle. His mind had ceased to function and he trudged on through the nightmare that he could see around him. He had lost all consciousness of the tramping of his mates and only felt Jean on his left, worn out by the same fatigue and grief. It was heartbreaking, these villages they went through, the pity of it gripped your heart with anguish. As soon as they saw the troops in retreat, this rabble of exhausted soldiers dragging their feet, the inhabitants got busy and hastened their own flight. And they were so quietly confident a fortnight ago, the whole of Alsace awaiting war with a smile, convinced that the fighting would be in Germany! And now France was invaded and the storm was breaking here, round their homes, in their fields, like one of those terrible hurricanes of hail and thunder that lay waste a whole province in a couple of hours! In front of doors, amid furious confusion, men were loading carts, piling on furniture at the risk of breaking the lot. From upstairs windows women were throwing a last mattress or passing down the cradle they had

  nearly forgotten. The baby was tied into it and was secured on top amongst legs of upturned chairs and tables. Round at the back they were roping poor old sick grand-dad to a cupboard and carting him off like a piece of furniture. Then there were those who did not possess a cart, but piled their belongings on a wheelbarrow, and yet others were moving off with a load of clothing in their arms, others had only thought of saving the clock, which they clasped to their bosom like a child. They could not take everything, and abandoned furniture or bundles of clothing that had proved to be too heavy were left in the gutters. Some people shut everything up before leaving and the houses looked dead, with doors and windows fastened, but the majority, in their haste and certainty that everything was bound to be destroyed, left their old homes wide ope
n, with doors and windows gaping showing rooms stripped bare, and these were the saddest ones, with the dreadful sadness of a sacked town depopulated by fear – miserable homes open to the four winds, from which the very cats had fled in terror of what was coming. With every village the harrowing sight was more depressing, the numbers of fugitives and people moving out got larger in a growing confusion accompanied by clenched fists, curses and tears.

  But it was above all along the main road in the open country that Maurice was choked with grief, for as they approached Belfort the straggle of refugees grew thicker and became an uninterrupted procession. Poor devils who thought they could find safety behind the walls of the fortress! The man belaboured his horse, the wife followed behind, dragging the children. Families pushed ahead, weighed down under their burdens, losing each other, tiny tots unable to keep up with the rest, and all in the blinding whiteness of the road on which the sun poured down like molten lead. Many had taken off their boots and were going barefoot so as to get along faster, and without slackening their pace half dressed mothers were giving the breast to whimpering babies. Scared faces glanced behind and hands gestured wildly as if to shut out the horizon as the wind of panic tousled heads and whipped up hastily put-on clothes. Others, farmers with all their labourers, marched straight across the fields, driving their flocks ahead – sheep, cows, oxen, horses that they had driven out of sheds and stables with their sticks. These were making for the deep valleys, the high plateaux and lonely forests, throwing up the dust-clouds of the great migrations of ancient times, when peoples abandoned their lands to the advancing, all-conquering barbarians. They were all going to live under canvas in some deserted rock fastness, so far from any road that not a single enemy soldier would dare risk his life there. The moving clouds enveloping them disappeared behind clumps of fir trees with the diminishing noise of lowing and trampling herds, whilst the stream of carts and people on foot still flowed along the road, upsetting the march of the troops, and on the outskirts of Belfort it became so concentrated, with its current as irresistible as a river in spate, that several times a halt had to be called.

  It was during one of these short halts that Maurice witnessed a scene which stayed in his memory like a slap in the face.

  By the roadside there was an isolated house, the dwelling of some poor peasant, the whole of whose little property lay stretched out behind it. He had refused to leave his field, where his roots were too deeply sunk in the soil, and there he was, unable to go unless he left some of his very flesh there. He could be seen in a low-ceilinged room, slumped on a seat, staring with unseeing eyes at these passing soldiers, whose retreat would hand his ripe corn over to the enemy. Standing by him his wife, still quite young, was holding a child while another was clinging to her skirt, and all three were wailing. Then suddenly the front door was flung open and the grandmother appeared, a very old woman, tall and skinny, with bare arms like knotted ropes, furiously waving. Wisps of grey hair came out from under her bonnet and blew round her wizened face, and she was in such a rage that the words she was yelling stuck in her throat and could hardly be heard.

  At first the soldiers began to laugh. What a face, silly old geezer! But then the words came through as the old woman shouted:

  ‘Swine! Blackguards! Cowards! Cowards!’

  Her voice screamed higher and higher as she spat the insult of cowardice right in their faces. And the laughter died, and a chill ran through the ranks. The men lowered their heads and looked away.

  ‘Cowards! Cowards! Cowards!’

  Suddenly she seemed to grow taller still. She drew herself up, gaunt and tragic in her shabby old dress, moving her skinny arm from west to east with such an immense gesture that it seemed to fill the heavens.

  ‘Cowards, the Rhine isn’t that way… The Rhine is over there, cowards, cowards!’

  At last the march was resumed, and at that moment Maurice caught sight of Jean’s face and saw that his eyes were filled with tears. A shudder came over him and his own suffering became still more acute when he realized that even those oafs had felt the insult which they didn’t deserve but had to swallow. Everything was falling to pieces in his poor aching head, and he never knew how he got to the end of that day’s march.

  The 7th corps had taken the whole day to cover the twenty-three kilometres between Dannemarie and Belfort, and once again night was falling and it was very late when the troops finally bivouacked under the walls of the fortress at the very place from which they had set off to march against the foe four days before. In spite of the late hour and their extreme fatigue the soldiers insisted on lighting their cookhouse fires and making some stew. At last, for the first time since their departure, they were having something hot to eat. Round the fires, in the cool of the evening, noses were buried in messtins and grunts of satisfaction were beginning to be heard when a rumour ran round that astounded the camp. Two new dispatches had come in one after the other: the Prussians had not crossed the Rhine at Markolsheim and there wasn’t a single Prussian left in Huningue. The crossing of the Rhine at Markolsheim, the bridge of boats thrown across by the light of huge electric lamps, in fact all these alarming tales were nothing but a nightmare, an unexplained hallucination on the part of the sub-prefect of Schlestadt. And as for the army corps threatening Huningue, the famous army corps of the Black Forest before which Alsace trembled, it was merely composed of a tiny detachment from Württemberg – two battalions and one squadron – which by means of skilful tactics, repeated marches and counter-marches, sudden unexpected appearances, had given the impression that thirty or forty thousand men were involved. To think that that very evening they had almost blown up the Dannemarie viaduct! Twenty leagues of rich country had been laid waste for no reason whatever, in the most idiotic of panics, and at the thought of what they had seen during that deplorable day – populations fleeing in terror, driving their flocks up into the mountains, the stream of carts loaded with chattels flowing towards the town and mingled with multitudes of women and children – the soldiers lost their tempers and exclaimed with ugly sneers.

  ‘No, really, it’s beyond a joke!’ spluttered Loubet with his mouth full, waving his spoon. ‘What! Is that the enemy we were marched against? Nobody there!… Twelve leagues forwards, twelve leagues backwards, and not even a cat to be seen! All that for nothing, just for the fun of getting the wind up!’

  Chouteau, noisily scraping his messtin, held forth against the generals without mentioning them by name.

  ‘What, those swine? What a lot of bloody fools! Proper runaways they’ve given us! If they hopped it like that when there was nobody there, wouldn’t they half have skedaddled if they had found themselves faced by a real enemy!’

  They had flung a fresh armful of wood on the fire so as to enjoy the brightness of the leaping flames, and Lapoulle, luxuriously warming his legs, was exploding with silly, mindless laughter, when Jean, who had at first turned a deaf ear, chipped in in a fatherly way:

  ‘That’ll do! If somebody heard you there might be trouble.’

  His own simple common sense was just as disgusted by the stupidity of their leaders. But still, you had to see that they were respected, and as Chouteau was still carrying on he cut him short:

  ‘Shut up! Here’s the lieutenant, you’d better complain to him if you’ve any remarks to make.’

  Maurice was sitting away on his own, staring at the ground. This was really the end! Hardly had they started before it was all over. This lack of discipline and revolt of the men at the first setback was already turning the army into a rabble with no bond of union, demoralized and ripe for any disaster. Here under the walls of Belfort, these men had not set eyes on a single Prussian and they were defeated.

  The following days were full of trepidation and anxiety in their very monotony. So as to find the troops something to do General Douay set them to work on the defences of the fortress, still far from complete. They turned over the ground in a rage and cut into the rock. And no news! Where was MacMahon’
s army? What was going on in front of Metz? The most extravagant rumours were in circulation and a few Paris newspapers hardly made the enveloping mists of anxiety all that much worse by their contradictions. Twice the general had written and asked for orders, and had not even had an answer. But by 12 August the 7th corps was at last brought up to full strength by the arrival of the third division direct from Italy, yet in spite of that there were only two divisions, because the first, beaten at Froeschwiller, had been carried away in the rout and nobody now knew where the current had cast it up. After they had been left for a week, cut off from the rest of France, the order to depart came by wire. There was great rejoicing, for anything was better than this prison life. During the preparations the guessing began again, nobody knew where they were making for: some said to defend Strasbourg and others even talked of a bold thrust into the Black Forest to cut the Prussians’ line of retreat.

  The next morning the 106th was among the first to leave, piled up in cattle trucks. It was particularly crowded in the truck where Jean’s unit was, so much so that Loubet made out he hadn’t room to sneeze. As once again the issue of rations had been a complete muddle, and the soldiers had received in spirits what they should have had in food, they were nearly all drunk with a violent and bawling drunkenness that worked itself off in obscene singing. The train went on and on and you couldn’t see the others in the truck, so thick was the haze of pipe smoke; the heat was unbearable, with the stink of all these bodies in a heap, and as the truck sped along there issued out of the blackness shoutings that drowned the noise of the wheels and died away across the dreary countryside. It was only at Langres that the troops realized they were being taken back to Paris.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ exclaimed Chouteau, already reigning in his corner as undisputed king because of his all-powerful gift of the gab, ‘they’re going for certain to park us at Charentonneau to prevent Bismarck from going to doss in the Tuileries.’