The Downfall. Emile Zola
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her will respected by the nations, mistress of a world that in vain conspired to crush her and upon which she set her foot.
Maurice was contentedly finishing his cutlet, cheered not so much by the wine that sparkled in his glass as by the glorious memories that were teeming in his brain, when his glance encountered two ragged, dust-stained soldiers, less like soldiers than weary tramps just off the road; they were asking the attendant for information as to the position of the regiments that were encamped along the canal. He hailed them.
“Hallo there, comrades, this way! You are 7th corps men, aren’t you?”
“Right you are, sir; 1st division – at least I am, more by token that I was at Froeschwiller, where it was warm enough, I can tell you. The comrade, here, belongs in the 1st corps; he was at Wissembourg, another beastly hole.”
They told their story, how they had been swept away in the general panic, had crawled into a ditch half-dead with fatigue and hunger, each of them slightly wounded, and since then had been dragging themselves along in the rear of the army, compelled to lie over in towns when the fever-fits came on, until at last they had reached the camp and were on the lookout to find their regiments.
Maurice, who had a piece of Gruyere before him, noticed the hungry eyes fixed on his plate.
“Hi there, mademoiselle! bring some more cheese, will you – and bread and wine. You will join me, won’t you, comrades? It is my treat. Here’s to your good health!”
They drew their chairs up to the table, only too delighted with the invitation. Their entertainer watched them as they attacked the food, and a thrill of pity ran through him as he beheld their sorry plight, dirty, ragged, arms gone, their sole attire a pair of red trousers and the capote, kept in place by bits of twine and so patched and pieced with shreds of vari-colored cloth that one would have taken them for men who had been looting some battle-field and were wearing the spoil they had gathered there.
“Ah! foutre, yes!” continued the taller of the two as he plied his jaws, “it was no laughing matter there! You ought to have seen it, – tell him how it was, Coutard.”
And the little man told his story with many gestures, describing figures on the air with his bread.
“I was washing my shirt, you see, while the rest of them were making soup. Just try and picture to yourself a miserable hole, a regular trap, all surrounded by dense woods that gave those Prussian pigs a chance to crawl up to us before we ever suspected they were there. So, then, about seven o’clock the shells begin to come tumbling about our ears. Nom de Dieu! but it was lively work! we jumped for our shooting-irons, and up to eleven o’clock it looked as if we were going to polish ‘em off in fine style. But you must know that there were only five thousand of us, and the beggars kept coming, coming as if there was no end to them. I was posted on a little hill, behind a bush, and I could see them debouching in front, to right, to left, like rows of black ants swarming from their hill, and when you thought there were none left there were always plenty more. There’s no use mincing matters, we all thought that our leaders must be first-class nincompoops to thrust us into such a hornet’s nest, with no support at hand, and leave us to be crushed there without coming to our assistance. And then our General, Douay,[*] poor devil! neither a fool nor a coward, that man, – a bullet comes along and lays him on his back. That ended it; no one left to command us! No matter, though, we kept on fighting all the same; but they were too many for us, we had to fall back at last. We held the railway station for a long time, and then we fought behind a wall, and the uproar was enough to wake the dead. And then, when the city was taken, I don’t exactly remember how it came about, but we were upon a mountain, the Geissberg, I think they call it, and there we intrenched ourselves in a sort of castle, and how we did give it to the pigs! they jumped about the rocks like kids, and it was fun to pick ‘em off and see ‘em tumble on their nose. But what would you have? they kept coming, coming, all the time, ten men to our one, and all the artillery they could wish for. Courage is a very good thing in its place, but sometimes it gets a man into difficulties, and so, at last, when it got too hot to stand it any longer, we cut and run. But regarded as nincompoops, our officers were a decided success; don’t you think so, Picot?”
[*] This was Abel Douay – not to be confounded with his brother, Felix, who commanded the 7th corps. – TR.
There was a brief interval of silence. Picot tossed off a glass of the white wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Of course,” said he. “It was just the same at Froeschwiller; the general who would give battle under such circumstances is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum. That’s what my captain said, and he’s a little man who knows what he is talking about. The truth of the matter is that no one knew anything; we were only forty thousand strong, and we were surprised by a whole army of those pigs. And no one was expecting to fight that day; battle was joined by degrees, one portion after another of our troops became engaged, against the wishes of our commanders, as it seems. Of course, I didn’t see the whole of the affair, but what I do know is that the dance lasted by fits and starts all day long; a body would think it was ended; not a bit of it! away would go the music more furiously than ever. The commencement was at Woerth, a pretty little village with a funny clock-tower that looks like a big stove, owing to the earthenware tiles they have stuck all over it. I’ll be hanged if I know why we let go our hold of it that morning, for we broke all our teeth and nails trying to get it back again in the afternoon, without succeeding. Oh, my children, if I were to tell you of the slaughter there, the throats that were cut and the brains knocked out, you would refuse to believe me! The next place where we had trouble was around a village with the jaw-breaking name of Elsasshausen. We got a peppering from a lot of guns that banged away at us at their ease from the top of a blasted hill that we had also abandoned that morning, why, no one has ever been able to tell. And there it was that with these very eyes of mine I saw the famous charge of the cuirassiers. Ah, how gallantly they rode to their death, poor fellows! A shame it was, I say, to let men and horses charge over ground like that, covered with brush and furze, cut up by ditches. And on top of it all, nom de Dieu! what good could they accomplish? But it was very chic all the same; it was a beautiful sight to see. The next thing for us to do, shouldn’t you suppose so? was to go and sit down somewhere and try to get our wind again. They had set fire to the village and it was burning like tinder, and the whole gang of Bavarian, Wurtemburgian and Prussian pigs, more than a hundred and twenty thousand of them there were, as we found out afterward, had got around into our rear and on our flanks. But there was to be no rest for us then, for just at that time the fiddles began to play again a livelier tune than ever around Froeschwiller. For there’s no use talking, fellows, MacMahon may be a blockhead but he is a brave man; you ought to have seen him on his big horse, with the shells bursting all about him! The best thing to do would have been to give leg-bail at the beginning, for it is no disgrace to a general to refuse to fight an army of superior numbers, but he, once we had gone in, was bound to see the thing through to the end. And see it through he did! why, I tell you that the men down in Froeschwiller were no longer human beings; they were ravening wolves devouring one another. For near two hours the gutters ran red with blood. All the same, however, we had to knuckle under in the end. And to think that after it was all over they should come and tell us that we had whipped the Bavarians over on our left! By the piper that played before Moses, if we had only had a hundred and twenty thousand men, if we had had guns, and leaders with a little pluck!”
Loud and angry were the denunciations of Coutard and Picot in their ragged, dusty uniforms as they cut themselves huge slices of bread and bolted bits of cheese, evoking their bitter memories there in the shade of the pretty trellis, where the sun played hide and seek among the purple and gold of the clusters of ripening grapes. They had come now to the horrible flight that succeeded the defeat; the broken, demoralized, famishing regiments flying through the fields, the highroads blocked with men, horses, wagons, guns, in inextricable confusion; all the wreck and ruin of a beaten army that pressed on, on, on, with the chill breath of panic on their backs. As they had not had wit enough to fall back while there was time and take post among the passes of the Vosges, where ten thousand men would have sufficed to hold in check a hundred thousand, they should at least have blown up the bridges and destroyed the tunnels; but the generals had lost their heads, and both sides were so dazed, each was