8
IN the crush in the Place de Torcy at the end of the Wadelincourt road, Jean became separated from Maurice, and he ran madly about in the milling throng but could not find him. This was a real blow because he had accepted the young man’s offer to take him to his sister’s, where they could have a rest and even sleep in a proper bed. There was such confusion, with all the regiments mixed up and no route orders or officers left, that the men were more or less free to do what they liked. There would still be time to sort yourself out and find your own lot again when you had had a few hours’ sleep.
Really alarmed, Jean found himself on the Torcy viaduct above the broad meadows that the governor had had flooded with water from the river. Then, having gone through another gate, he crossed the Meuse bridge and it seemed to him, in spite of the growing daylight, that it was getting dark again in this constricted town, hemmed in between its ramparts, with dank streets between tall buildings. He couldn’t even remember the name of Maurice’s brother-in-law. Where should he go? Whom could he ask? His feet were only carrying him on now because of the automatic movement of walking, and he felt he would fall down if he stopped. Like a drowning man, all he could hear was a dull roaring in his ears, and all he could see was the continual flow of the tide of men and animals carrying him forward. As he had had something to eat at Remilly his main trouble was lack of sleep, and all round him fatigue was more powerful than hunger, and the herd of shadows was staggering along the unknown streets. At every step a man collapsed on the pavement, fell into a doorway and stayed there as if dead, fast asleep.
Looking up, Jean read a name-plate: Avenue de la Sous-Préfecture. At the far end there was a monument in a garden. And at the corner of the avenue he saw a cavalryman, a Chasseur d’Afrique, whom he thought he knew. Wasn’t it Prosper, the chap from Remilly he had seen at Vouziers with Maurice? The man had dismounted, and the horse, sick-looking and unsteady on his legs, was suffering so much from hunger as to be on the point of stretching his neck to eat the planks of the baggage-wagon drawn up at the kerb. The horses had had no rations for two days and were dying of exhaustion. His big teeth were grating like a file on the wood and the man was in tears.
Jean went on, but turned back thinking this man might know the address of Maurice’s relatives, but he had gone. Then he was in despair, and wandered from street to street, found himself at the Sub-Prefecture, pushed on as far as the Place Turenne. There he thought for one moment he was saved when he saw Lieutenant Rochas and a few men of the company in front of the Hôtel de Ville at the foot of the statue of Turenne. If he couldn’t rejoin his friend he would link up with the regiment again and at any rate sleep in a tent. Captain Beaudoin not having reappeared – he had been carried along and landed somewhere else – the lieutenant was trying to collect his men together, asking for information and trying in vain to find out where their camp was. But as they advanced into the town the company, far from growing, was fading away. One soldier gesturing wildly, went into a pub and never reappeared. Three others stopped at the door of a grocer’s, their interest held by some Zouaves who had banged a hole in a little cask of spirits. Quite a few were already stretched out across the gutter, others set off to go somewhere, but fell down again, overcome with fatigue and quite dazed. Chouteau and Loubet, nudging each other, disappeared down a dark alley behind a fat woman carrying a loaf of bread. By then only Pache and Lapoulle, with a handful of others, were left with the lieutenant.
At the foot of the bronze statue of Turenne Rochas was making a great effort to stay on his feet with his eyes open. When he saw Jean he muttered:
‘Oh, it’s you, corporal. What about your men?’
Jean waved a vague arm to indicate that he didn’t know. But Pache, pointing at Lapoulle, answered, melting into tears:
‘Here we are, only two of us left… Oh God have mercy on us, it’s too awful!’
The other one, the big eater, looked voraciously at Jean’s hands, outraged to see them empty at this juncture. Perhaps in his sleepwalking state he had dreamed that the corporal had gone for the issue of rations.
‘Bloody hell!’ he growled. ‘Got to squeeze me belly in again!’
Gaude the bugler, leaning against the railings while waiting for the order to blow fall-in, had slipped straight down and gone to sleep flat on his back. One by one they all gave in to sleep and were snoring away dead to the world. Only Sergeant Sapin was still standing, with his eyes wide open and his nose screwed up in his little pale face as though he were reading his own doom on the horizon of this unknown town.
By now Lieutenant Rochas had given in to the irresistible urge to sit down on the ground. He tried to give an order.
‘Corporal, we must… we must…’
He couldn’t find his words, for his mouth was clogged by fatigue, and suddenly he went over as well, knocked out by sleep.
Afraid of falling on the pavement too, Jean moved off. He was determined to find a bed. From the other side of the square, through a window of the Hôtel de la Croix d’Or, he had perceived General Bourgain-Desfeuilles already in his shirtsleeves and preparing to slip between some fine white sheets. What was the point of being conscientious and putting up with any more? He had a sudden burst of joy when a name sprang up in his memory, the name of the cloth manufacturer who was the employer of Maurice’s brother-in-law: Monsieur Delaherche. Yes, that was it! He stopped an old man who was passing.
‘Monsieur Delaherche’s?’
‘Rue Maqua, almost at the corner of the rue au Beurre, a nice big house with carvings on it.’
Then the old man ran after him.
‘I say, you belong to the 106th, don’t you? If you are looking for your regiment, it went off again down by the castle. I’ve just run into the colonel, Monsieur de Vineuil, whom I knew when he was at Mézières.’
But Jean was off with a gesture of wild impatience. Oh no, now he was sure of finding Maurice he wasn’t going to sleep on the hard ground. But there was a slight feeling of guilt nagging inside him as he conjured up a vision of the colonel with his tall figure, a man so resistant to fatigue in spite of his age, sleeping like his men under canvas. But then he entered the Grande-Rue and finally asked a little boy who took him to the rue Maqua.
It was there that a great-uncle of the present Delaherche had built in the last century the huge factory which had not gone out of the family for a hundred and sixty years. There are textile mills like this in Sedan dating from the early years of Louis XV, mills as big as the Louvre, with regal, majestic façades. The one in the rue Maqua had three floors with lofty windows framed with classical carvings, and inside there was a palatial courtyard still planted with the original elms dating from the founding of the business, gigantic trees. Three generations of Delaherches had made sizeable fortunes there. The father of Jules, the present proprietor, had inherited the mill from a cousin who had died childless, and so it was a younger branch of the family that was now in charge. Jules’s father had increased the prosperity of the firm, but he was a gay fellow and had made his wife unhappy. So she, when she was widowed, trembling lest her boy should start on the same fun and games, had tried to keep him completely dependent, like a grown-up good boy, until he was past fifty, having married him off to a simple and pious woman. The terrible thing is that life takes its revenges. His wife died, and Delaherche, never having been allowed any youth, fell head over heels in love with a young widow of Charleville, the pretty Madame Maginot, about whom various tales were whispered, and in spite of his mother’s remonstrances he had married her the previous autumn. Sedan, a very puritanical town, has always been severe on Charleville, a city of gaiety and fun. Not that the marriage would ever have been concluded had not one of Gilberte’s uncles been Colonel de Vineuil, who was by way of being promoted to general. This connexion and the thought that he had become a member of a military family, were very gratifying to the cloth manufacturer.
The day before, in the morning, Delaherche, learning that the army was to pass through Mouzon, had been out with Weiss, his book-keeper, for the drive that old Fouchard had mentioned to Maurice. Tall and heavily built, with a high colour, strong nose and thick lips, he was an outgoing kind of man with the middle-class Frenchman’s enjoyment and interest in watching fine parades of troops. Having been told by the chemist at Mouzon that the Emperor was at Baybel farmhouse, he had gone up as far as there, had seen him, and even almost spoken to him – quite a thrilling adventure that he had never stopped narrating since his return. But what a terrible return it was, through the panic at Beaumont and on the roads blocked with fugitives! A score of times the carriage had nearly capsized in ditches, and it was dark before the two men had made their way back through ever recurring obstacles. This pleasure jaunt, the army that Delaherche had travelled two leagues to see go by and which carried him brutally back in the stampede of its retreat, this whole unforeseen and tragic tale had made him say ten times over on the way back:
‘And to think that I thought it was marching to Verdun and didn’t want to miss the chance of seeing it! Well, I’ve seen it now, and I think we’re going to see it at Sedan, and more of it than we want!’
That morning he was awakened at five by the 7th corps going through the town with the loud noise of open sluice-gates. He had dressed with all speed, and the first person he saw in the Place Turenne proved to be Captain Beaudoin. The year before, in Charleville, the captain had been one of pretty Madame Maginot’s group of intimates, and Gilberte had introduced him before their marriage. A story had formerly gone the whispered rounds that the captain, having no favour left to desire, had withdrawn with tactful delicacy in favour of the cloth manufacturer, not wanting to stand between his mistress and the very great fortune which was coming her way.
‘What, you!’ exclaimed Delaherche. ‘Good Lord, what a state you’re in!’
Beaudoin, normally so correct and well groomed, was in fact in a lamentable condition, with dirty uniform and black hands and face. He was exasperated at having fallen in with some Turcos and couldn’t understand how he had lost his own company. Like everybody else, he was dropping with hunger and fatigue, but that was not what caused his most acute misery; what put him out most of all was not having changed his shirt since Rheims.
‘Just think of it!’ he at once began moaning. ‘They lost my luggage at Vouziers. Fools and rogues, I’d break their necks if I got hold of them!… Nothing left, not even a handkerchief or a pair of socks! It’s enough to drive you mad, it really is!’
Delaherche at once insisted on taking him to his own home, but he demurred: oh no, he didn’t even look human, he didn’t want to give everybody a fright. Delaherche had to swear that neither his wife nor his mother would be up yet. And besides, he would give him soap and water, clean underclothes, in fact anything he needed.
It was striking seven when Captain Beaudoin, all washed and brushed up, wearing one of the husband’s shirts under his uniform, appeared in the grey-panelled dining-room with its lofty ceiling. Madame Delaherche senior was there already, for she always rose at dawn in spite of her seventy-eight years. She was quite white, and her nose had got even more pointed and her mouth never laughed now in her long, thin face. She rose to her feet and was exceedingly polite, inviting the captain to sit down in front of one of the cups of coffee and milk already poured out.
‘But perhaps, sir, you would rather have some meat and wine after such a tiring time?’
He protested.
‘No, thank you very much indeed, Madame, just some milk and bread and butter, that would suit me best.’
At that moment a door was gaily thrown open and Gilberte came in with outstretched hand. Delaherche must have warned her, for as a rule she never got up before ten. She was tall, looked lithe but well built, with beautiful black hair and lovely dark eyes, and yet a very fair skin, a laughing face, a bit harum-scarum and without a trace of malice. Her beige dressing-gown with red silk embroidery had come from Paris.
‘Oh, captain,’ she gushed, as she shook the young man’s hand, ‘how kind of you to have come to see us in our dead-and-alive part of the world!’
But she was the first to laugh at her own scatterbrained talk.
‘Oh aren’t I silly? You could certainly do without being in Sedan in these circumstances. But I’m so glad to see you again!’
Her fine eyes shone with delight. Madame Delaherche, who must have been aware of the tittle-tattle of the Charleville gossips, sat bolt upright, watching them both closely. The captain, on his side, was being very discreet, behaving like a man who had simply kept happy memories of a hospitable home where he had been made welcome.
They had breakfast, and at once Delaherche came back to his excursion of the day before, unable to resist the itch to tell the story once again.
‘Do you know, I saw the Emperor at Baybel.’
He was off, and nothing could stop him after that. First there was a description of the farmhouse, a large, square building with an inner courtyard, shut off by railings, and standing on a little hill overlooking Mouzon to the left of the Carignan road. Then he came back to the 12th corps that he had gone right through as they were camping among the vines on the slopes – superb troops, gleaming in the sunshine, the sight of whom had filled him with great patriotic joy.
‘And there I was, sir, when the Emperor suddenly came out of the farmhouse where he had gone for a break to rest and eat. He was wearing a cloak thrown over his general’s uniform, although the sun was very hot. Behind him a manservant was carrying a folding seat. I didn’t think he looked at all well, oh no! stooping and walking with difficulty, his face yellow, in fact a sick man… And that didn’t surprise me because the chemist at Mouzon who had advised me to go on as far as Baybel had just told me that an aide-de-camp had been to him for medicine… yes, you know, remedies for…’
The presence of his mother and his wife prevented him from describing more clearly the diarrhoea from which the Emperor had been suffering since Le Chêne, and which had compelled him to stop like this at farmhouses along the route.
‘So, in a word, the servant set up the folding seat on the edge of a cornfield, at the point of a wood, and the Emperor sat down… He stayed there motionless, all huddled up, looking like some old pensioner warming his aches and pains in the sun. He scanned with his dull eyes the vast horizon, the Meuse below him flowing along the valley and opposite him the wooded slopes with summits going away into the distance, the peaks of the Dieulet woods on the left, the green hilltops of Sommauthe on the right… He was surrounded by aides-de-camp and high ranking officers, and a colonel of dragoons who had already asked me for directions had just signed to me not to go away, when suddenly…’
Delaherche rose to his feet for he was approaching the gripping climax of the narrative, and he wanted to add action to the words.
‘Suddenly there are shattering explosions, and lo and behold, right opposite, this side of Dieulet woods, shells describe parabolas in the sky… Upon my soul, it looked to me like a firework display let off in broad daylight… Naturally in the Emperor’s entourage there are exclamations, expressions of anxiety. My colonel of dragoons rushes back and asks me if I can say exactly where the fighting is. Without any hesitation I say: ‘At Beaumont, no doubt whatever.’ He returns to the Emperor, across whose knees an aide-de-camp was unfolding a map. The Emperor refused to believe they could be fighting at Beaumont. Well, I couldn’t insist, could I? Especially as the shells were careering through the sky and falling nearer, following the Mouzon road… It was then, just as I am looking at you now, sir, that I saw the Emperor turn his ashen face in my direction. Yes, he, looked at me for a moment with his lack-lustre eyes, full of mistrust and sadness. Then his head was bowed again over the map and he did not move again.’
Delaherche had been an ardent Bonapartist at the time of the plebiscite, but since the first reverses he admitted that the Empire had made some mistakes. However, he still defended the dynasty and pitied Napoleon III, who was being deceived by everybody. So according to him the people really responsible for our disasters were none other than the republican deputies in the opposition who had prevented the voting of the necessary numbers of men and financial credits.
‘And did the Emperor go back to the farmhouse?’ asked Captain Beaudoin.
‘Well, sir, I really don’t know, I left him on his campstool. It was midday, the battle was getting closer and I was beginning to be concerned about getting home… All I can add is that a general, to whom I pointed out Carignan in the distance on the plain behind us, seemed amazed to learn that the Belgian frontier was there, a few kilometres away. Oh poor Emperor, he has some wonderful servants!’
Gilberte, smiling and quite at her ease, as of old in her widowhood when she entertained in her drawing-room, concerned herself with the captain, passing him toast and butter. She tried to insist on his accepting a room or a bed, but he declined, and it was settled that he would only lie down for a couple of hours on a settee in Delaherche’s study before rejoining his regiment. As he was taking the sugar-basin from the young woman, old Madame Delaherche, who kept her eyes glued on them, clearly saw them link fingers; so now she knew.
A maid had just come in.
‘Sir, there’s a soldier downstairs asking for Monsieur Weiss’s address.’
Delaherche was not proud, as they say, and enjoyed talking to the lowly of this world, out of a love of chattering and popularity.
‘Weiss’s address, well, that’s funny!… Bring the soldier in.’
Jean came in, so exhausted that he was reeling. Seeing his captain sitting at table with some ladies, he started slightly in surprise and drew back the hand he was automatically putting out to support himself against a chair. Then he briefly answered the questions of the manufacturer, who was playing up the common touch, the soldier’s friend. In a few words he explained his friendship with Maurice and why he was looking for him.
‘He is a corporal in my company,’ the captain said at last, to cut things short.
He interrogated Jean in his turn, for he was anxious to know what had happened to the regiment. And as Jean said that the colonel had recently been seen going through the town at the head of his remaining men, on the way to camp to the north, Gilberte once again spoke too quickly with the usual impulsiveness of a pretty young woman not given to much thought.
‘Oh why didn’t my uncle come and have breakfast here?… We could have had a room ready for him… Suppose we send somebody to look for him?’
But old Madame Delaherche made a gesture of sovereign authority. In her veins flowed the ancient bourgeois blood of the frontier towns, with all the manly virtues of unbending patriotism. She only broke her severe silence to say:
‘Never mind Monsieur de Vineuil, he is doing his duty.’
That caused some embarrassment. Delaherche took the captain off to his study and wanted to see for himself that he rested on the settee, and Gilberte, in spite of the reprimand, fluttered off like a bird flapping its wings, blithe and gay just the same in the storm, while the maid who had been put in charge of Jean took him through the yards of the factory and into a maze of passages and stairs.
The Weisses lived in the rue des Voyards, but the house, which belonged to Delaherche, communicated with the huge main building in the rue Maqua. This rue des Voyards was at that time one of the strangest in Sedan, a narrow lane, damp and darkened by the rampart with which it ran parallel. The roofs of the lofty house-fronts almost touched each other and the dark entries were like mouths of caves, especially at the end where the high wall of the school towered. But Weiss, who occupied the whole of the third floor rent free, including heating, was well off, living right by his office to which he could go down in his slippers all under cover. He was a contented man since he had married Henriette, whom he had waited for so long, ever since he had first known her at Le Chêne in the house of her father the tax-collector. She had been a housewife from the age of six, taking her dead mother’s place, while he, having got a job in the General Refinery as a practically unskilled labourer, had educated himself and worked his way up to the position of ledger clerk by hard study. And even then, before he made his dream come true, he had had to wait for the death of the father, and then there had been the terrible follies of the brother in Paris, this Maurice, whose twin sister was a sort of servant to him, and had sacrificed her whole life to make him a gentleman. Brought up as a Cinderella at home, having learned little more than how to read and write, she had sold the house and furniture and still not filled the hole made by the young man’s extravagances when the kindly Weiss had hastened to offer all he possessed, with his strong arms and his heart. Touched to tears by his affection, and being very sensible, after careful thought she had agreed to marry him, for she was full of tender esteem if not of passionate love. Now fortune was smiling on them, Delaherche had talked of making Weiss a partner in the business. It would be perfect happiness when children came.
‘Mind how you go!’ said the maid, ‘the stairs are very steep.’
And indeed he was stumbling about in pitch darkness when a door was quickly opened and the stairs were flooded with light. He heard a gentle voice saying:
‘Here he is.’
‘Madame Weiss,’ said the maid, ‘here’s a soldier who is asking for you.’
There was a happy little laugh and the gentle voice answered:
‘Good, good, I know who he is.’
As the corporal, tongue-tied and awkward, was hesitating at the door:
‘Come in, Monsieur Jean… Maurice has been here for two hours and we’ve been expecting you so impatiently!’
Then in the subdued light of the room he saw her, strikingly like Maurice, with that extraordinary likeness of twins which is a sort of duplication of faces. But she was shorter and even slighter, more frail-looking, with a largish mouth, small features and a lovely head of fair hair, the light gold of ripe oats. The main thing that made her different from him was her grey eyes, calm, brave eyes in which there lived on all the heroic soul of their grandfather, the hero of the Grande Armée. She was not a great talker and moved noiselessly, and her movements were so neat, and her gentleness so radiant that as she passed by you felt her like a caress in the air.
‘Come this way, Monsieur Jean,’ she said again. ‘Everything will be ready in a moment.’
He made vague sounds and could not even find words to thank her in his emotion at being welcomed just like a brother. In any case his eyes were closing of their own accord and he could only see her through the invincible sleepiness which was overtaking, him like a sort of mist through which she floated like a wraith not touching the ground. Was she only a beguiling vision, this woman who was offering help and smiling at him with such simplicity? He thought she was taking his hand and that he felt hers, small, strong and as reliable as an old friend’s.
From that moment onwards Jean lost any clear consciousness of events. They were in the dining-room, there was bread and meat on the table, but he couldn’t even have found the strength to carry the pieces to his mouth. There was a man sitting on a chair. Then he realized it was Weiss, whom he had seen at Mulhouse. But he could not take in what the man was saying in such a worried voice and with slow, weary gestures. On a camp-bed set up in front of the stove Maurice was already fast asleep, his face motionless, looking like a corpse. Henriette was busying herself round a divan, on which she had put a mattress, and was now bringing a bolster, pillow and blankets, and then with quick skilful hands white sheets, lovely white sheets, white as snow.
Oh, those white sheets, sheets so desperately longed for! They were all Jean could see. He had not taken off his clothes properly or slept in a bed for six weeks. It felt like the impatient greed of a child, an irresistible passion to slip into this cool whiteness and lose himself. As soon as they left him alone he stripped down to his shirt and had his feet bare, and went to bed and satisfied this hunger with the grunt of a contented animal. The pale morning light came in through the high window, and as he was sinking into sleep he half opened his eyes and had one more vision of Henriette, an even more vague and disembodied Henriette tiptoeing back to put on a table at his side a carafe and glass she had forgotten. She seemed to pause there a few seconds looking at them both, her brother and him, with her gentle smile, infinitely kind. Then she faded away. And he slept between the white sheets dead to everything.
Hours, years went by. Jean and Maurice no longer existed, dreamless, not even conscious of the faint pulse in their veins. Ten years or ten minutes, time no longer counted; it was like the revenge of their overwrought bodies, satisfying themselves in the death of their whole being. Suddenly, jerked back by the same shock, they both woke up. What was the matter? What was going on? How long had they been asleep? The same pale light was falling from the high window. They felt knocked out, with stiff joints, and their limbs felt more tired and their mouths more dry than when they had gone to bed. Fortunately they couldn’t have slept for more than an hour. So they were not surprised to see Weiss on the same chair, apparently waiting for them to wake up, and still in the same attitude of dejection.
‘Oh Lord,’ muttered Jean, ‘we must get up and get back to the regiment by noon.’
He jumped to the floor with a little exclamation of pain and pulled on his clothes.
‘By noon!’ Weiss repeated. ‘Do you realize it’s seven in the evening, and you’ve been sleeping for about twelve hours?’
Seven o’clock, good God! This was terrifying. Jean, already fully dressed, was for running. But Maurice, still in bed, was moaning that he had lost the use of his legs. How were they to get back to their mates? Hadn’t the army moved on? They both began to get angry, they shouldn’t have been allowed to sleep on so long. But Weiss made a gesture of despair.
‘Good Lord, considering all they’ve done you’ve been wise to stay in bed.’
He had been wandering round Sedan and its outskirts all day. He had only just come in, disgusted at the inaction of the troops this whole day, the 31st, so valuable and lost in some inexplicable delay. There was only one possible excuse, the extreme fatigue of the men, and even then he didn’t see why the retreat had not continued after the few essential hours of rest.
‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘I don’t presume to understand, but I have the feeling, yes, I feel that the army is very badly placed in Sedan… The 12th corps is at Bazeilles, where there was a little fighting this morning; the 1st is strung out all along the Givonne from the village of La Moncelle to the Garenne woods; while the 7th is camping on the plateau of Floing and the 5th, already half destroyed, is huddled right under the ramparts of the castle… And that’s what frightens me, knowing that they are all standing round the town like that, just waiting for the Prussians. If it had been me, I’d have got away at once towards Mézières. I know the country, and there’s no other line of retreat, or else we shall be pitched back into Belgium… And then besides, come and see something…’
He took Jean’s hand and led him to the window.
‘Look over there, on the crest of those hills.’
The window looked out over the ramparts and the near-by buildings to the valley of the Meuse south of Sedan. The river was winding across the broad meadows, with Remilly on the left, Pont-Maugis and Wadelincourt opposite, Frénois on the right; and the hills spread out their green slopes – first Le Liry, then La Marfée and La Croix-Piau, with their extensive woods. In the evening light the immense horizon looked profoundly peaceful, limpid as crystal.
‘Don’t you see over there along the tops those black lines moving like a procession of black ants?’
Jean opened his eyes wide and Maurice, kneeling on his bed, craned his neck.
‘Oh yes,’ they exclaimed together. ‘There’s one line, and there’s another, and another and another! It’s crawling with them.’
‘Well,’ said Weiss, ‘those are the Prussians… I’ve been watching them ever since this morning, and they keep going on and on! Oh, I can tell you, if our soldiers are waiting for them they are in a hurry to get here! And all the inhabitants of this town have seen them, same as me, and really the generals are the only ones with their eyes blindfolded. I was talking just now to a general and he shrugged his shoulders and told me that Marshal MacMahon was absolutely convinced he had scarcely seventy thousand men opposing him. God grant he is well informed… But just look at them, the ground is covered with them, and still they come and come, like black ants!’
At that moment Maurice threw himself back on the bed and burst into violent sobbing. Henriette was coming in with the smiling face she had had that morning, but she ran over in alarm.
‘What is it?’
But he pushed her away.
‘No, no, leave me alone, I’ve never given you anything but trouble. When I think that you went without clothes and I was at college! Oh yes, an education I’ve made fine use of! And then I pretty nearly dishonoured our name, and I don’t know where I’d be now if you hadn’t bled yourself white to pay the price of my idiocy.’
She began to smile again.
‘Really, my poor darling, you’re not waking up in a very happy mood… But you know all that is over and forgotten. Aren’t you doing your duty as a Frenchman now? Since you enlisted I’ve been very proud of you, I really have.’
She turned to Jean as though to call in his help. He looked at her and was a little taken aback to find her not so pretty as before, but thinner and paler now he was no longer seeing her through the near-hallucination of his fatigue. What was still striking was the likeness to her brother, and yet all the profound difference between their natures showed clearly at that moment. He was as highly-strung as a woman, shattered by the disease of the age they were living in, going through the historical and social crisis of his race, capable of passing from one minute to the next from the most noble enthusiasms to the most craven discouragements, but she, so weak-looking, a self-effacing Cinderella with the resigned look of a little housewife, had the firm brow and brave eyes of the blessed stock that martyrs are made of.
‘Proud of me!’ exclaimed Maurice. ‘There’s no reason at all for that, really there isn’t. For a whole month now we’ve been running away like the cowards we are.’
‘Well, after all,’ said Jean with his usual good sense, ‘we aren’t the only ones, we do what we are told to do.’
But at that the young man’s attack burst out more violently than ever.
‘That’s just what I mean, and I’ve had enough!… Doesn’t it make you weep tears of blood, these continual defeats, these fools of commanders, these soldiers just being led by stupid people to the slaughterhouse like a lot of cattle?… Now look at us here in a blind alley. It is perfectly clear that the Prussians are closing in from every direction and we are going to be crushed, the army is doomed… No, no, I’m staying here, I prefer to be shot as a deserter. Jean, you can go without me. No, I’m staying here.’
He fell back on to the pillow in another flood of tears. It was an irresistible nervous reaction, an all-destroying collapse, one of those sudden plunges into despair and contempt for the world and for himself to which he was so often subject. Knowing him well, his sister remained calm.
‘It would be very wrong, Maurice dear, to desert your post at the moment of danger.’
He sat up with a jerk.
‘All right, give me my gun and I’ll blow my brains out, it will be quicker.’
He pointed to Weiss, standing still and silent.
‘You see, he’s the only sensible one, yes, he’s the only one who has seen clearly… Do you remember, Jean, what he was saying to me outside Mulhouse a month ago?’
‘That’s quite true, he said we should be beaten.’
They recalled the scene, that night of anxiety, that nerve-racking wait during which all the disaster of Froeschwiller could already be sensed in the dismal sky, while Weiss was voicing his misgivings – Germany well prepared, better led, aroused in a great burst of patriotism, France in disarray, a prey to disruption, unprepared and distraught, with neither the commanders, nor the men nor the weapons needed. Now the dreadful prophecy was coming true.
Weiss’s hands trembled as he raised them. His amiable face expressed the deepest grief.
‘Oh, I don’t feel at all triumphant about being right! I’m not very bright, but it was so obvious when you knew how things were… But all the same, if we are beaten we can kill some of those accursed Prussians. That is the one consolation, I still don’t think we shall get out of this, and I want some Prussians not to get out of it either, heaps of Prussians, enough to cover all that land over there!’
He stood up and waved his arm over the whole valley of the Meuse. There was a flame in those bulging, short-sighted eyes that had disqualified him for military service.
‘God, yes, I’d fight if I was free! I don’t know whether it’s because they are now masters in my own part of the country, in Alsace where already the Cossacks had done so much harm before, but I can’t think of them and visualize them here without at once being seized with a furious desire to make a dozen of them bleed to death… Oh, if I hadn’t been turned down on medical grounds, if I were a soldier!’
Then, after a pause:
‘But then, who knows?’
It was the rebirth of hope, the need to believe victory was always possible, held even by the most disillusioned. Maurice, already ashamed of his tears, listened and clung anew to this dream. And indeed, only yesterday hadn’t a rumour run round that Bazaine was at Verdun? Fortune owed a miracle to this France she had made glorious for so long. Henriette had slipped away in silence and when she returned she was not surprised to see her brother up and dressed and ready to go. She insisted on seeing them both eat something. They had to sit down at the table, but each mouthful stuck in their throats and made them feel sick, heavy as they still were with sleep. Being a man of foresight, Jean cut a loaf in two, and put half in Maurice’s pack and half in his own. It was getting dark, they must go. Henriette, standing by the window looking out at the Prussian troops in the distance on La Marfée, the black ants ceaselessly on the move and now gradually disappearing in the growing darkness, let an involuntary moan escape her:
‘Oh war, how atrocious war is!’
Thereupon Maurice teased her, taking his revenge:
‘What, little sister, you urge us to fight and then curse war?’
She turned round and flung at him, valiant as ever:
‘It’s true, I loathe it and think it’s unjust and horrible… Perhaps it’s simply because I am a woman. These killings make me sick. Why can’t they talk it out and come to an understanding?’
Jean, good fellow that he was, nodded in agreement. Nothing seemed easier to him, as a plain, uneducated man, than for everybody to come to terms so long as they produced good reasons. But Maurice, back in his scientific world, was thinking of war as a necessity, war like life itself, the law of the universe. Wasn’t it man, a soft-hearted creature, who introduced the conception of justice and peace, whereas impassive nature is nothing but a continual fight to the death?
‘Come to an understanding!’ he exclaimed. ‘Yes, centuries from now! If all the peoples formed only one nation you might just conceive the coming of that golden age, but even then wouldn’t the end of war mean the end of humanity?… I was silly just now, we must fight since it is the universal law.’
But then he too smiled and took up Weiss’s phrase.
‘But then, who knows?’
Once again the morbid exaggeration of his highly strung nature made him give in to unquenchable illusion and a need for deliberate blindness.
‘By the way,’ he went on gaily, ‘what about cousin Gunther?’
‘Cousin Gunther?’ said Henriette. ‘But he belongs to the Prussian Guard… Are they in these parts?’
Weiss made a gesture of ignorance, and so did the two soldiers, who couldn’t say, since even the generals themselves had no idea what enemy forces they had opposite them.
‘Let’s be off, I’ll show you the way,’ he said. ‘I found out just now where the 106th is camping.’
Then he told his wife that he would not come back, but go and sleep at Bazeilles. He had recently bought a cottage there that he had just made ready for them to use until the cold weather began. It was next door to a dyeworks belonging to Monsieur Delaherche. He was worried about the provisions he had already stored in the cellar, a cask of wine, two sacks of potatoes, and was sure, he said, that marauders would loot the place if it stayed empty, but he would probably keep it safe if he slept in it that night. While he was talking his wife looked him straight in the eyes.
‘Don’t you worry,’ he went on with a smile, ‘all I want to do is to keep an eye on our few sticks of furniture. I promise you that if the village is attacked or there is the slightest danger I shall come back at once.’
‘You go,’ she said. ‘But come back or else I shall come and fetch you!’
As they were leaving Henriette kissed Maurice tenderly. Then she put out her hand to Jean and held his in her own for a few seconds, in a friendly grip.
‘I am putting my brother in your charge again. Yes, he has told me how good you have been to him and I love you for it!’
He was so embarrassed that all he could do was squeeze her strong little hand in return. Once again he felt the impression he had had when they first came, of Henriette with hair like ripe corn and so blithe and gay in her unobtrusive way that she filled the air round her with a kind of caress.
Down below they were back in the dark Sedan of the morning. Already the narrow streets were melting into the dusk, and the roadways were cluttered up with mysterious activity. Most of the shops were shut, and houses seemed dead, whereas out in the open there was an appalling crush. But still they had managed without too much difficulty to get to the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville when they ran into Delaherche, who was wandering about to see what he could see. He at once exclaimed how delighted he was to see Maurice, told them how he had just taken Captain Beaudoin back to Floing where his regiment was, and his usual self-satisfaction increased when he heard that Weiss was going to sleep out at Bazeilles, for as he had just told the captain, he had made up his mind to spend the night there at his dyeworks, just to keep an eye on things.
‘Weiss, we’ll go there together, but first let us go down to the Sub-Prefecture where we might catch a glimpse of the Emperor.’
Ever since he had nearly spoken to him at the Baybel farmhouse, he could think of nothing but Napoleon III, and eventually he roped in the two soldiers as well. Only a few groups of people were standing about on the Place de la Sous-Préfecture and talking softly to each other, but scared-looking officers dashed through every few minutes. The colour of the trees was already fading into a dreary shadow, and to the right the sound of the Meuse could be heard as it flowed noisily past the buildings. In the crowd it was being said that the Emperor, who had decided to leave Carignan much against his will at eleven o’clock on the night before, had absolutely refused to push on as far as Mézières, because he wanted to stay in the danger zone and not demoralize the troops. Others said that he was no longer there but had fled, leaving by way of a substitute one of his lieutenants wearing his uniform, whose striking personal resemblance took the army in. Others swore on their word of honour that they had seen vehicles loaded with the imperial treasure going into the garden of the Sub-Prefecture – a hundred million in gold, in brand-new twenty-franc pieces. The truth was that it was merely the paraphernalia of the Emperor’s household, the passenger coach, the two carriages, the dozen vans which had caused such a stir as they went through the villages of Courcelles, Le Chêne, Raucourt, and had grown in popular imagination until they had become an immense train of vehicles which had brought the army to a standstill and had at last landed up here, accursed and ashamed, concealed from all eyes behind the lilac bushes of the Sub-Prefecture.
Near Delaherche, who was on tiptoe watching the ground-floor rooms, an old woman, some poor charwoman from near-by, with bent body and knotted, work-stained hands, was mumbling between her teeth:
‘An Emperor… I’d like to see one… yes, just for the sake of seeing…’
Suddenly Delaherche seized Maurice’s arm, exclaiming:
‘Look, there he is!… See, there in the left-hand window… Oh no, I’m making no mistake, I saw him yesterday quite near… He lifted the curtain, yes, that pale face pressed against the window-pane.’
The old woman had overheard and stood open-mouthed. It was indeed, pressed against the window-pane, a wraith with a cadaverous face, lack-lustre eyes, drawn features and a colourless moustache, in this final torture. And the old girl, quite taken aback, turned away at once and walked off with a gesture of sovereign contempt.
‘That an Emperor? Well, of all the sillies!’
A Zouave was there too, one of the soldiers on the loose and in no hurry to get back to the corps. He waved his rifle, swearing and spitting out threats, and said to a mate:
‘Just wait a minute while I put a bullet through his fucking head!’
Delaherche intervened in great indignation. But the Emperor had already disappeared. The loud swash of the Meuse went on and an unspeakably doleful moan seemed to have passed by in the deepening shadows. Other vague sounds could be heard far away. Was it the terrible order: March on! March on! shouted from Paris, which had hounded this man on from stage to stage, dragging the irony of his imperial escort along the roads of defeat until he was now cornered in the frightful disaster he had foreseen and come deliberately to meet? How many decent, ordinary people were about to die through his fault, and what an utter breakdown of this sick man’s whole being, this sentimental dreamer, silent while dully awaiting his doom!
Weiss and Delaherche took the two soldiers as far as the plateau of Floing.
‘Good-bye,’ said Maurice, embracing his brother-in-law.
‘No, no! Au revoir, good gracious me!’ cried Delaherche in his jolliest manner.
Jean, with his instinctive sense of direction, at once found the 106th, whose tents were aligned up the slope to the plateau behind the cemetery. It was now almost dark, but you could still make out the roofs of the town in great dark masses, and beyond them Balan and Bazeilles in the fields opening out as far as the line of hills from Remilly to Frénois; to the left stretched the black patch of the Garenne woods and down on the right gleamed the pale ribbon of the Meuse. For a moment Maurice watched the huge panorama vanish into the darkness.
‘Ah, here comes the corporal!’ said Chouteau. ‘Has he come back with the rations?’
A buzz of conversation arose. All through the day the men had been coming back singly or in dribs and drabs and in such confusion that the officers had given up even asking for explanations. They kept their eyes shut and were glad to welcome those who consented to return.
As a matter of fact Captain Beaudoin had only just got back, and Lieutenant Rochas had only returned at about two o’clock with the straggling company reduced by two thirds. Now it was more or less up to strength. Some of the soldiers were drunk, others were still famished, not having been able to scrounge a bit of bread. And once again rations had not turned up. Loubet, however, had contrived to cook some cabbages pinched from a garden somewhere, but he had neither salt nor fat and their stomachs were still crying out for something to eat.
‘Come on, corporal, you’re a sly one, you are!’ Chouteau repeated with a leer. ‘Oh, it’s not for myself, I’ve had a very good meal with Loubet at a lady’s house.’
Anxious faces looked towards Jean, the squad had been waiting, especially Lapoulle and Pache, the unlucky ones, who hadn’t picked anything up, counting on him, for he could have got flour out of a stone, as they put it. So Jean, moved with pity and conscience-stricken at having abandoned his men, divided between them the half loaf he had in his pack.
‘Oh Christ, oh Christ!’ Lapoulle kept on saying as he chewed, finding no other word in his growl of satisfaction, while Pache said under his breath a Paternoster and an Ave to make sure that God would send him his daily bread again tomorrow.
The bugler Gaude had blown roll-call at full blast, but not retreat, and the camp fell at once into deep silence. And it was then, when he had checked that his half-section was complete, that Sergeant Sapin, with his sickly-looking face and screwed-up nose, said quietly:
‘There will be a lot missing this time tomorrow.’
As Jean looked at him he added with quiet certainty, gazing far away into the darkness:
‘Oh, as for me, I shall be killed tomorrow.’
By now it was nine, and the night looked like being bitterly cold, for the mists had risen off the Meuse, hiding the stars. Maurice, lying beside Jean under a hedge, shivered and said they would do well to go and lie down in the tent. But neither of them could get to sleep, for since the rest they had had they were more tired and aching than ever. They envied Lieutenant Rochas near them who, scorning any cover, and simply wrapped in a blanket, was snoring like an old campaigner on the wet ground. Then for a long time they watched with interest the little candle flame burning in a large tent where the colonel and some officers were sitting up late. All the evening Monsieur de Vineuil had looked very worried because he had had no orders for the following morning. He felt his regiment was exposed too far forward, although he had already drawn back and abandoned the forward outpost occupied that morning. General Bourgain-Desfeuilles had not been seen – he was said to be ill in bed at the Hôtel de la Croix d’Or, and the colonel had to decide to send an officer to warn him that the new position looked dangerous, the 7th corps being so spread out because it was obliged to defend too long a line from the loop of the Meuse to the Garenne woods. It was certain that the battle would begin with the daylight, so there were not more than seven or eight hours of this great black calm left. Maurice was very surprised to see, as the little glimmer of light in the colonel’s tent went out, Captain Beaudoin pass quite close to him, skirting the hedge with furtive steps, and disappear in the direction of Sedan.
The night steadily thickened as the vapours rising from the river obscured everything in a dismal fog.
‘Are you asleep, Jean?’
He was, and so Maurice was alone. The thought of joining Lapoulle and the others in the tent made him feel sick and tired. He listened to their snores answering those of Rochas, and felt envious. It may well be that if great captains sleep soundly on the eve of a battle it is simply because they are tired out. Nothing could now be heard coming from the great camp, lost in the darkness, but the heavy breath of sleep, a gigantic but gentle breathing. Nothing really existed clearly, he only knew that the 5th corps must be camping down there beneath the ramparts, that the 1st stretched from the Garenne woods to the village of La Moncelle, while the 12th, over on the other side of the town, was occupying Bazeilles; and everything was asleep, and the slow pulse of sleep was coming from the first tents to the last from the intangible depths of shadow over more than a league. Then beyond all that there was another unknown, and its sound also sometimes reached his ears, so distant, so soft that he might have thought it was just a noise in his own ears – a far away galloping of cavalry, a muffled roar of cannon, but above all a heavy tramp of marching men, the procession up there of the black human ant-hill, the invasion, the enveloping that even night itself could not halt. Were there not somewhere over there fires going out, occasional voices calling, a great and ever growing anguish pervading this last night as they all waited in terror for the day?
Maurice’s groping hand had found Jean’s, and only then did he fall asleep, reassured. Nothing was left but one distant bell in Sedan, tolling the hours one by one.