The Debacle - Emile Zola [128]
Off he galloped and disappeared along a road going up to La Moncelle. It was rumoured that he had had a violent altercation with General Ducrot, each of them defending his own plan and attacking the opposite one, one declaring that their retreat via Mézières had not been feasible since first thing in the morning, the other prophesying that before nightfall the army would be surrounded unless they withdrew on to the plateau of Illy. Each accused the other of not knowing the terrain nor the true situation of the troops. The worst of it was that they were both right.
But for a moment Henriette had had her mind taken off her hurry to get on. She had recognized a Bazeilles family stranded there at the roadside, a family of poor weavers, the man and wife and three girls, the eldest of whom was only nine. They were so shattered and dazed with exhaustion and despair that they could go no further and had collapsed by a wall.
‘Oh, dear lady,’ the woman said to Henriette, ‘we’ve got nothing left… You know our home was on the Place de l’Eglise. Well, a shell set fire to it. I don’t know how the children and ourselves got out alive.’
The three little girls began crying and screaming again at the thought of it, while the mother went into details about their disaster, with wild gestures.
‘I saw the loom burning like dry firewood. The bed and the furniture blazed up quicker than handfuls of straw… And even the clock, I didn’t have time to bring that away.’
‘God Almighty!’ swore the man, with big tears in his eyes. ‘What’s going to become of us?’
In order to calm them Henriette just said, in a slightly unsteady voice:
‘You are together, both safe and sound, you have your little girls, what are you complaining about?’
Then she questioned them about what was happening in Bazeilles, whether they had seen her husband, what her house looked like when they left. But in their trembling, frightened state their answers were contradictory. No, they hadn’t seen Weiss. Yet one of the little girls said she had seen him on the pavement, with a big hole in the middle of his head, and her father boxed her ears to make her shut up because, he said, she was lying for certain. As for the house, it must have been all right when they left, and they even remembered noticing that the door and windows were carefully shut as though there wasn’t a soul there. At that time, in any case, the Bavarians were still only occupying the Place de l’Eglise, and had to take the village street by street, house by house. But of course they had had quite a way to come and perhaps by now the whole of Bazeilles was on fire. And the poor wretches went on talking about these things with vague, panic-stricken gestures as they called to mind the awful sight of the blazing roofs, blood flowing and the dead covering the ground.
‘And what about my husband, then?’ she asked.
They made no further answer, but sobbed into their clasped hands. She stood there in atrocious anguish, firm, but her lips were quivering slightly. What was she to believe? However much she told herself that the child was mistaken, she could see her husband lying there in the street with a bullet-hole in his head. And then she was worried about this hermetically sealed house. Why? Wasn’t he still there, then? Suddenly the certainty that he had been killed struck a cold fear into her heart. But perhaps he was only wounded; and her need to go there and be there returned so inexorably that she would have tried once again to force a way through, there and then, if the bugles had not sounded the advance.
Many of these young soldiers had just come from Toulon, Rochefort or Brest, they were almost completely untrained and had never been under fire, yet since first thing they had been fighting as bravely and reliably as veterans. These men who had marched so badly from Rheims to Mouzon, worn out by the unaccustomed strain, were now revealing themselves in the face of the enemy to be the best disciplined