The Debacle - Emile Zola [124]
Just then Henriette looked up and was amazed to see, standing in a group of people a few steps away, Delaherche, holding forth about the terrible dangers he had just come through between Bazeilles and Sedan. How had he got here? She hadn’t seen him come in.
‘Isn’t my husband with you?’
But Delaherche, whose mother and wife were enjoying questioning him, was in no hurry.
‘Just a minute.’
He took up his story again:
‘Between Bazeilles and Balan I was nearly killed twenty times. A hail of bullets and shells – no, a hurricane!… And I ran into the Emperor, oh, very brave! Then from Balan here I dashed…’
Henriette pulled his arm.
‘My husband?’
‘Weiss? Oh, he stayed there, Weiss did!’
‘There? What do you mean?’
‘Yes, he picked up a dead soldier’s rifle, he’s fighting.’
‘Fighting – but why?’
‘Oh, he’s quite off his head. He simply wouldn’t come with me, so I left him, naturally.’
Henriette looked at him with staring eyes. There was a silence. Then she calmly made up her mind.
‘All right, I’m going there.’
She was going there, but how? But it was impossible, crazy. Delaherche began again about the bullets and shells sweeping the road. Gilberte had seized her hand again to stop her, and Madame Delaherche also tried in vain to point out the absurd rashness of her idea. She said again in her quiet, calm way:
‘No, there’s nothing you can say, I’m going.’
She insisted, and all she would agree to take was Gilberte’s black lace head-scarf. Still hoping to convince her, Delaherche finally declared he would go with her, at any rate as far as the Balan gate. But at that moment he caught sight of the sentry who throughout the commotion of the installation of the casualty station had gone on pacing up and down in front of the coach-house in which the cash of the 7th corps was being kept under lock and key. He remembered and was afraid, and went to see if the millions were still there. Meanwhile Henriette was already on her way under the archway.
‘Wait for me! My word, you’re as crazy as your husband!’
But as another ambulance vehicle was coming in they had to let it pass. This was smaller, with only two wheels, containing two badly wounded lying on stretchers. The first one they brought out, with infinite care, was nothing but a mass of bleeding flesh with one hand smashed and the whole of one side torn through by a shell splinter. The second one had his right leg crushed. At once Bouroche had this one placed on the mattress and began the first operation, with orderlies and his assistants ceaselessly running to and fro. Madame Delaherche and Gilberte were sitting near the lawn, rolling bandages.
Outside, Delaherche caught up with Henriette.
‘Look here, my dear Madame Weiss, you’re not going to do such a silly thing… How do you think you can get to Weiss out there? He can’t even still be there by now, and must have taken to the fields to get back… I assure you that Bazeilles is unreachable.’
But she was not listening, and walked on faster, entering the rue du Ménil to get to the Balan gate. It was nearly nine, and Sedan had emerged from the dark, shivery morning and desolate, blind awakening in the thick fog. A sultry sun cast hard shadows of the houses, the roadway was filled with an anxious crowd, through which dispatch-riders were continually galloping. Groups formed round the few unarmed soldiers who had already come back into the town, some slightly wounded, others in a state of extraordinary emotional tension, gesticulating and shouting. And yet the town would still have had its everyday look were it not for the shops with shutters closed and dead-looking façades in which not a single blind was open. Moreover there was this continual gunfire making everything tremble, stones, ground, walls and even the slates on the roofs.
Delaherche was a prey to the