The Debacle - Emile Zola [13]
was to embark at Brest and land in Denmark to stage a diversion and oblige Prussia to immobilize one of her armies? She would be surprised, overwhelmed on all fronts and crushed in a few weeks. A sheer walk-over, from Strasbourg to Berlin. But since the delay at Belfort he had been tormented by misgivings. The 7th army corps, whose role was to command the Black Forest gap, had reached there in a state of indescribable confusion, incomplete and short of everything. The third division had still not arrived from Italy, the second cavalry brigade was still in Lyons for fear of popular unrest, and three batteries had got lost somewhere or other. Then there was an extraordinary famine, the shops in Belfort which were supposed to supply everything were empty: no tents, no cooking utensils, no body belts, no medical equipment, no smithies, no hobbles for the horses. Not a single medical orderly or clerk. At the last moment they had realized that thirty thousand spare parts, indispensable for rifles, were missing, and an officer had had to be dispatched to Paris and he had brought back five thousand, which he had had a lot of trouble to get out of them. Besides, what upset Maurice was the inaction. They had been there for two weeks and why weren’t they advancing? He felt that each day’s
delay was an irreparable miscalculation, one more chance of victory lost. Confronting the dream-plan there rose up the reality of its execution, that he was to know later but then only felt in an anguished, obscure way: the seven army corps strung out thinly along the frontier from Metz to Bitche and from Bitche to Belfort, everywhere the fighting force below strength, and the four hundred thousand men amounted to two hundred and thirty thousand at the most; generals were jealous of each other, each determined to get the field-marshal’s baton for himself and not to help his neighbour; the most appalling lack of foresight, the mobilization and concentration of troops done simultaneously in order to gain time and leading to an inextricable muddle; in fact a slow paralysis, starting at the top from the Emperor, a sick man incapable of any quick decision, which was beginning to creep through the entire army and disorganize it, reduce it to nothing and hurl it into the worst disasters, unable to defend itself. Nevertheless, over and above the vague unease of the waiting, and in the instinctive shrinking from what was to come, the certainty of victory remained.
Suddenly on 3 August the news of the previous day’s victory at Saarbrücken had burst upon them. A great victory – well perhaps. But the papers were bursting with enthusiasm – it was the invasion of Germany, the first step on the march to glory, and the Prince Imperial, who had coolly picked up a bullet on the battlefield, began to be a legend. Then two days later, when the surprise and crushing defeat of Wissembourg was known, a howl of rage had burst from people’s throats. Five thousand men caught in a trap, men who had stood up to thirty-five thousand Prussians for ten hours, such a cowardly massacre cried out for vengeance! It must be that the leaders were guilty of faulty protective measures and lack of foresight. But it was all going to be put right, MacMahon had called in the first division of the 7th corps, the 1st would be supported by the 5th, and by now the Prussians must have re-crossed the Rhine with our infantrymen’s bayonets prodding their backsides. And the thought that there must have been desperate fighting that day, the increasingly feverish wait for news, the general anxiety spread further every minute under the wide, fading sky.
That was what Maurice kept on telling Weiss.
‘Oh yes, they’ve taken a fine old beating today!’
Weiss made no answer, but shook his head with a worried look. He was looking towards the Rhine, too, towards the east where night had already closed down, a black wall, impenetrable, mysterious. After the last notes of roll-call a great silence had fallen over the sleepy camp, hardly broken at all by the footsteps and voices