The Debacle - Emile Zola [130]
‘Bet you they’re having a drink,’ shouted the kid. ‘Quick, quick, let me take your hand and we’ll run for it.’
He took her hand and pulled her along and, bent double, they both ran side by side across the open space. At the end, as they threw themselves behind a haystack, they saw another shell coming, and it fell right on the barn where they had been just before. The din was appalling, the barn collapsed.
The kid danced about with glee, finding it all a scream.
‘Hooray – there’s a nice smash-up! It was about time, too, wasn’t it?’
But once again Henriette came up against an impassable obstacle, garden walls and no way through. Her little companion went on laughing and said you could always get by if you wanted to. He clambered up on to the coping of a wall and helped her over. They jumped down into a vegetable garden between rows of beans and peas. Walls everywhere. So to get out of it they had to go through a gardener’s cottage. The boy went first, whistling and swinging his arms, ready for anything. He pushed open a door, found himself in a room, went through to another in which there was an old woman, probably the only living soul still there. She looked dazed, and was standing by a table. She watched these two unknown people walking like this through her home, but didn’t say a word to them, nor they to her. They were out at the other side in a narrow lane that they were able to follow for a short distance. Then fresh difficulties arose, and so it went on for nearly a kilometre, walls had to be scaled or hedges got through, they took the shortest cuts they could, through coach-house doors, windows of houses, just as it chanced on the route they managed to follow. Dogs barked, and -they were nearly knocked down by a madly galloping cow. But they must be getting near now, for there was a smell of burning, and at every moment big, ruddy clouds like floating, gauzy material veiled the sun.
Suddenly the boy stopped and planted himself in front of Henriette.
‘I say, Missis, where are you off to like this?’
‘But you can see, I’m going to Bazeilles.’
He whistled and gave vent to a high-pitched laugh like a truant from school who is having a grand time.
‘Bazeilles… Oh no, I don’t want that, I’m off somewhere else. Ta-ta!’
He turned on his heel and went off as he had come, without her knowing where he came from or where he was going. She had found him in a hole in the ground, she lost sight of him at the corner of a wall, and would never see him again.
Left alone, Henriette felt strangely frightened. That puny child with her was hardly a protection, but his chatter had been a distraction. Now, though normally so courageous, she was trembling. The shells were no longer coming over, the Germans had stopped firing on Bazeilles, no doubt for fear of killing their own men, now masters of the village. But for some minutes she had heard bullets whistling, that buzzing of big flies she had heard about and which she recognized. In the background so many hellish noises were mingled together that she could not even pick out the sound of the rifle fire from the violence of the din. As she rounded the corner of a house, right by her ear there was a dull thud and plaster falling which pulled her up; a bullet had chipped a lump off the façade, and she went very pale. Then before she had time to wonder whether she dared go any further she felt a kind of hammer-blow on the forehead and fell to her knees, dazed. A second bullet had ricocheted and caught her just above her left eyebrow, but it had only made a nasty graze. When she put both hands to her forehead and took them away they were red with blood. But she had felt her skull solid and unharmed under her fingers, and said aloud, to give herself courage:
‘It isn’t anything, it isn’t anything