The Debacle - Emile Zola [107]
‘Where’s that firing?’
‘As far as I can tell,’ Maurice answered, ‘it seems to me to be over towards the Meuse, but the devil take me if I have the faintest idea where I am!’
‘Look here chum,’ the corporal said, ‘you and I aren’t going to get separated because, you see, you’ve got to have the know-how if you don’t want to land in trouble. I’ve already been through all this, and I’ll keep my eyes open for you as well as myself.’
By now the squad were beginning to grouse and get angry at having nothing hot to put in their stomachs. Can’t light a fire with no dry wood in bloody awful weather like this! At the very moment when the battle was opening the question of the belly came back imperiously, decisively. Heroes perhaps, but bellies first and foremost. To eat, that was the sole concern, and with what rapture they skimmed the pot on good stew days, and what childish, savage tempers when bread was short!
‘When you don’t eat you don’t fight,’ declared Chouteau. ‘I’ll be buggered if I risk my skin today!’
The revolutionary was raising his head again in this great oaf of a house-painter, the Montmartre orator, the public-bar theorist who spoiled the few good ideas he picked up here and there in the most appalling mess-up of rubbish and lies.
‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘what did they fucking well take us for, telling us the Prussians were dying of starvation and diseases, that they hadn’t even got no shirts left and that you could meet them on the roads all dirty and ragged like a lot of tramps?’
Loubet began to laugh. He was a real Parisian smart aleck, who had dabbled in all the dubious jobs at the Markets.
‘Don’t you believe it, we’re the ones pegging out in poverty, the ones people’d give a penny to when we go by with our cracked boots and scarecrow’s clothes. And what about those famous victories? And that was a nice joke too, when they told us how Bismarck had been taken prisoner and that they had kicked a whole army of them into a quarry… Balls! They were fucking well having us on!’
Pache and Lapoulle listened and clenched their fists, nodding furiously. And others were getting worked up too, for the final effect of these continuous lies in the papers was disastrous. The men had lost all confidence and no longer believed anything. The imaginings of these overgrown children, at first so fertile in wild hopes, were now collapsing into wild nightmares.
‘Of course it’s easy enough to see,’ went on Chouteau, ‘it’s got a simple explanation, we’ve been sold down the river… You all know that.’
Lapoulle’s simple peasant mind was outraged each time this phrase cropped up.
‘Sold down the river! Oh aren’t they shits!’
‘Sold, like Judas sold his Master,’ murmured Pache, always haunted by biblical memories.
Chouteau was triumphant.
‘It’s quite simple, good Lord, we know the figures… MacMahon has had three million and the other generals a million each for bringing us to this place… It was all fixed up in Paris in the spring, and last night they fired a rocket just to tell them it was all ready and they could come and get us!’
Maurice was disgusted by the stupidity of this invention. Formerly Chouteau had amused him and almost won him over with his back-street smartness. But at the moment he could not stand this trouble-maker, the bad workman who spat on all the jobs so as to put off the others.
‘Why do you say such absurdities?’ he shouted. ‘You know it isn’t true!’
‘What do you mean it isn’t true?… So it isn’t true that we’ve been sold?… Oh I say, your lordship, are you one of them too, one of that lot of fucking bastards?’
He advanced menacingly.
‘Look here, it’s about time it was said, Mister