The Debacle - Emile Zola [114]
‘Shut up, you fool!’ cried Rochas. ‘What’s the sense in bawling like that for a silly little trouble in your foot!’
The man was suddenly calmed, he stopped and relapsed into a motionless lethargy, nursing his foot.
The formidable artillery duel went on, getting steadily fiercer over the heads of the prostrate regiments in the baking and depressing country where there was not a soul to be seen in the blazing sun. Nothing but this thunder and hurricane of destruction rolling through the solitude. The hours were to pass one after another and it would never stop. Yet already the superiority of the German artillery was becoming clear, their percussion shells almost all went off at enormous distances, whereas the French ones with fuses had a much shorter range and most often exploded in the air before reaching the target. And no other resource was left but to make oneself as small as possible in the furrow where one was cowering! Not even the relief, the thrill of going off the deep-end and firing a rifle, for who was there to fire at since you still couldn’t see anybody on the empty horizon!
‘Are we ever going to fire?’ Maurice kept on saying in a flaming temper. ‘I’d give five francs to see one of them. It’s maddening to be machine-gunned like this and never be able to answer back!’
‘Just wait, it’ll come, I expect,’ said Jean mildly.
A galloping on their left made them look up. They recognized General Douay, followed by his staff, who had hurried over to gauge the morale of his troops under the murderous fire from Le Hattoy. He seemed satisfied, and was giving some orders when General Bourgain-Desfeuilles also appeared, emerging from a sunken road. The latter, although a court soldier, was trotting quite unruffled amid the shells, hidebound in his African colonial routine and having learned nothing. He was shouting and gesticulating like Rochas.
‘I’m expecting them. I’m expecting them now for a showdown at close quarters.’
Seeing General Douay he came over.
‘General, is it true about the marshal’s wound?’
‘Yes, unfortunately… I’ve just had a note from General Ducrot in which he said that the marshal had named him commander-in-chief of the army.’
‘Oh, so it’s General Ducrot! Well, what are the orders?’
The general made a gesture of despair. Since the previous day he had felt that the army was doomed, and had insisted in vain that the positions at Saint-Menges and Illy must be occupied in order to cover a retreat on Mézières.
‘Ducrot is going back to our plan, all troops are to concentrate on the plateau of Illy.’
He made the same gesture again, as though to say it was too late.
The noise of gunfire drowned his words, but the meaning had reached Maurice’s ears and he was appalled. What! Marshal MacMahon wounded and General Ducrot in command instead, the whole army in retreat north of Sedan? And these terrible facts unknown to the soldiers, the poor devils getting killed, and this dreadful gamble dependent on a mere accident, the whim of a new command! He felt the confusion and final chaos into which the army was falling, with no chief, no plan and pushed about in all directions, while the Germans were making straight for their goal with their clear judgement and machine-like precision.
General Bourgain-Desfeuilles was already moving off when General Douay, who had just received a new message delivered by a dust-stained hussar, recalled him in stentorian tones.
‘General! General!’
His voice was so loud and so thunderous with surprise and emotion that it could be heard above the noise of the artillery.
‘General! It’s no longer Ducrot in command, it’s Wimpffen!… Yes, he turned up yesterday