The Debacle - Emile Zola [10]
Out of kindness, to save them from being told off, Jean felt he ought to intervene.
‘You had better be going, sir. This is retreat, and if the lieutenant should find you…’
Maurice cut him short.
‘You stay, Weiss.’
And to the corporal he snapped:
‘This gentleman is my brother-in-law. He had a permit from the colonel, who is a friend of his.’
What business was it of this yokel whose hands still smelt of dung? He himself had passed his law exams the previous autumn, enlisted as a volunteer and thanks to the colonel’s influence had been drafted direct to the 106th without going through the square-bashing, though he deigned to wear the knapsack. But from the first minute he had been put off by this illiterate clodhopper in command over him and felt a sullen resentment.
‘All right,’ Jean quietly answered, ‘get yourself run in, it’s all the same to me.’
Then he turned away as he saw that Maurice really wasn’t lying, for the colonel, Monsieur de Vineuil, happened to come along, with his grand manner, his long sallow face divided in two by his thick white moustache, and he had greeted Weiss and the soldier with a smile. The colonel was hurrying over to a farmhouse that could be seen two or three hundred metres to the left, surrounded by plum orchards, where headquarters had been set up for the night. Nobody knew whether the commanding officer of the 7th corps was there, in the awful grief over the death of his brother, killed at Wissembourg. But Brigadier Bourgain-Desfeuilles, who had the 106th under his command, was certainly there, yapping as usual, quite untroubled by his lack of brains, his skin florid with so much high living, and his heavy body rolling on his stumpy legs. There was increasing activity round the farm; dispatch-riders were coming and going every minute, and yet there was feverish waiting for dispatches, always too slow with news about this great battle which everybody sensed to be decisive and imminent ever since morning. Where had it been fought and what was the outcome at this stage? As night fell it seemed as though mounting anxiety was spreading a lake of darkness over the orchard and the few hayricks around the farm buildings. And it was also being said that a Prussian spy had just been arrested while prowling round the camp and taken to the farm for the general to interrogate. Perhaps Colonel de Vineuil had had some telegram that was making him run so fast.
Meanwhile Maurice had gone on talking to his brother-in-law Weiss and his cousin Honoré Fouchard, the artillery sergeant. Retreat, at first far distant, then gradually getting louder, passed near them, with its brass and drums in the melancholy quiet of dusk, but they did not even appear to notice it. The young man, grandson of a hero of the Grande Armée, was born at Le Chêne-Populeux, where his father, fighting shy of glory, had come down to a humble job of tax-collector. His mother, of peasant stock, had died bringing him and his twin sister Henriette into the world, and Henriette had looked after him from their earliest childhood. He was now here as a volunteer after a long series of misdeeds, the typical dissipations of a weak and excitable temperament, money thrown away on gambling, women and the follies of all-devouring Paris; and all that when he had gone there to finish his law studies and his people had bled themselves white to make a grand gentleman of him. This had hastened his father’s death, and his sister, having spent her all, had had the good fortune to find a husband, this reliable fellow Weiss, an Alsatian from Mulhouse, who had been a book-keeper for years at the General Refinery at Le Chêne-Populeux, and was now an overseer for Monsieur Delaherche, one of the biggest clothmakers in Sedan. And Maurice thought he had quite turned over a new leaf, with his nervy nature as quick to hope for the best as to be discouraged by the bad, generous, enthusiastic, but without the slightest