The Debacle - Emile Zola [108]
The others were beginning to mutter, and so Jean thought he had better intervene.
‘Now you shut up! I’ll report the first one to move.’
But Chouteau sneered and booed at him. He didn’t give a hoot for his report! He would fight or he wouldn’t, just as he felt inclined, and they’d better not get across him any more, because he hadn’t got bullets for Prussians only! Now that the battle was under way what little discipline had been maintained by fear was collapsing: what could anyone do to him? He’d just piss off when he had had enough. He began a slanging match, working the others up against the corporal who let them die of hunger. Yes, it was his fault that the squad hadn’t had anything to eat for three days while the other blokes had had soup and meat. But of course the gentleman went out guzzling with his lordship and the tarts. Oh yes, they’d been seen in Sedan all right!
‘You’ve blued the squad’s money, and don’t you dare to deny it, you bleeding swindler!’
Then things turned nasty. Lapoulle began clenching his fists, and Pache, for all his meekness, was crazed with hunger and demanding an explanation. The most sensible was Loubet once again, who began laughing his knowing laugh, saying it was daft for Frenchmen to be going for each other when the Prussians were just over there. He didn’t hold with quarrels, whether with fists or guns, and referring to the few hundred francs he had received as a conscript’s replacement, he added:
‘’Struth, if they think my carcass isn’t worth more than that I’ll give them something for their money.’
Maurice and Jean, annoyed by this mindless aggressiveness, were shouting back in self-defence when a loud voice came out of the fog:
‘What’s up? What’s all this about? Which bloody fools are having a row now?’
Lieutenant Rochas appeared, in his rain-soiled képi and cape with buttons off, his whole lean and gawky person in a pitiful state of neglect and shabbiness. But that didn’t affect his victorious cockiness, and his eyes were shining and his moustache bristling.
‘Sir,’ Jean said, beside himself with rage, ‘what’s up is these men shouting about the place that we have been betrayed… Yes, they say our generals have sold us…’
In Rochas’s limited mind this idea of treason was not far from seeming the obvious thing, for it explained defeats he could not admit to.
‘Well, what the fuck does it matter to them if we are sold? What business is it of theirs? It doesn’t alter the fact that the Prussians are here and that we’ve got to give them one of those thrashings you don’t forget in a hurry.’
Away behind the thick curtain of fog the gunfire at Bazeilles was continuous. He waved his arms with a sweeping gesture.
‘Well, this time here it is! We’re going to chase them back home with the butts of our rifles!’
For him, since he had heard the gunfire, everything else was wiped out: the delays, lack of direction on the march, demoralization of the troops, the disaster at Beaumont, the final agony of the forced retreat on Sedan. But since they were actually fighting, wasn’t victory certain? He had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, and he kept his swaggering contempt for the enemy, his total ignorance of modern conditions of warfare, his obstinate certainty that a veteran of Africa, the Crimea and Italy was unbeatable. It really would be too silly to start again at his age!
A sudden laugh opened his jaws wide. He had one of those bursts of maty affection that made the soldiers worship him in spite of the ticking-off he sometimes handed out.
‘Listen, boys, instead of squabbling it would be better to have a drink. Yes, I’m going to stand you all a drink and you can drink my health!’
And from a pocket deep in his cape he produced a bottle of brandy, adding with his triumphant air that it was a present from a lady. And indeed he had been seen the evening before at a table in a pub at Floing getting very fresh with the barmaid whom he had on his knee. By now the soldiers were laughing like