The Debacle - Emile Zola [102]
Weiss rushed back. Almost incoherent, he could only stammer out swear words:
‘Bloody hell! Bloody hell!’
No doubt about her being dead. He stooped and felt her hands. and as he straightened up he saw the flushed face of the child Auguste who had raised his head to look at his mother. He did not speak, he did not cry, but only stared at this horrible, unrecognizable body with his eyes monstrously magnified by fever.
‘Oh God,’ Weiss at last managed to say, ‘they’re killing women now!’
He was now standing up again and shaking his fist at the Bavarians whose helmets were beginning to reappear by the church. The sight of the roof of his house half stove-in by the falling chimney put the finishing touch to his mad fury.
‘Filthy sods! You kill women and destroy my home! No, no, it’s not possible, I can’t go away like this. I’m staying here!’
He dashed off and came back in a single bound with the rifle and cartridges of the dead soldier. For special occasions, when he wanted to see clearly, he always had on him a pair of spectacles which he did not usually wear, out of a touching sense of embarrassment and vanity in front of his young wife. Now he quickly took off his folding glasses and replaced them with the spectacles, and this heavily-built bourgeois in his overcoat, with his round, jolly face transfigured by rage, looking almost comically and sublimely heroic, began firing into the mass of Bavarians at the end of the street. It was in his blood, as he always used to say, this urge to pick a few of them off, ever since the tales of 1814 he had been told in his childhood away in Alsace.
‘Oh, the filthy sods! The filthy sods!’
He fired non-stop and so fast that the barrel of his gun began to burn his fingers.
Clearly the attack was going to be terrible. The fusillade from the meadows had died down. The Bavarians were masters of the little stream fringed with poplars and willows, and were now preparing for an assault on the houses defending the church square, and so their snipers had prudently drawn back. The sun shone in golden splendour on the great stretch of grassland, dotted with a few black patches, the bodies of killed soldiers. So the lieutenant had moved out of the yard of the dyeworks, leaving a sentry there, realizing that the danger was now going to be on the street side. He quickly disposed his men along the pavement, with orders that in the event of the enemy’s capturing the square they should barricade themselves in the first floor of the building and resist there to the last bullet. Lying on the ground, sheltering behind stones or taking advantage of the slightest projections, the men were firing all out, and along this wide, sunlit and empty street there was a hurricane of lead with streaks of smoke, like a hailstorm blown by a high wind. A young girl was seen running across the road in terror, but she was not hit. But then an old man, a yokel in a smock, was insisting on getting his horse into a stable, and he was struck in the forehead by a bullet with such force that it knocked him into the middle of the road. The roof of the church was blown in by a shell. Two other shells had set fire to houses, which blazed up in the bright light with cracklings of timber. And poor Françoise’s body, smashed beside her sick child, the old peasant with a bullet through his skull, the destruction and the fires goaded to exasperation inhabitants who had preferred to die there rather than run away into Belgium. Bourgeois, workmen, people in overcoats or overalls, all of them were firing frenziedly through the windows.
‘Oh, the swine!’ shouted Weiss. ‘They’ve gone right round… I saw them quite clearly going along the railway line… Listen, can’t you hear them over there to the left?’
And indeed rifle fire had broken out behind the park of Montvillers, the trees of which bordered the road. If the