The Debacle - Emile Zola [131]
And it was true. She got to her feet again and walked on among the bullets with the detachment of a person outside herself, beyond reasoning, prepared to give her life. She even gave up protecting herself, walking straight in front of her, head held high, only quickening her step in the hope of getting there sooner. Bullets spattered round her, and a score of times she might have been killed, but she appeared not to notice. Her lithe step, with her quiet, unfussed efficiency, seemed to help her to slip, slender and supple, through the danger that she escaped. She was in Bazeilles at last, and cut across a field of lucerne to rejoin the main road, the village high street. As she emerged on to it she saw, two hundred metres to her right, her house on fire. In the bright sun the flames could not be seen, but half the roof had already fallen in and the windows were belching clouds of black smoke. She rushed forward, running for all she was worth.
Weiss had been marooned there since eight in the morning, cut off from the withdrawing troops. Suddenly his return to Sedan had become impossible, for the Bavarians, who had come out through the park of Montvillers, had cut the line of retreat. He was alone with his gun and the remaining rounds of ammunition, when he saw ten soldiers in front of his door who like him had been left behind, isolated from their comrades, and they were looking round for some shelter where they could at least sell their lives as dearly as possible. He at once ran downstairs and opened the door to them, and from then on the house had a garrison, a captain, a corporal and eight men, all in a fury of desperation and determined never to surrender.
‘What, you one of them, Laurent!’ exclaimed Weiss, amazed to find among them a lanky fellow with a rifle picked up beside some dead body.
Laurent, in his blue shirt and trousers, was a gardener in the village, about thirty, who had recently lost his mother and his wife in the same influenza epidemic.
‘Why shouldn’t I be in it?’ he answered. ‘I’ve got nothing left but my own carcass, and that’s mine to give if I want to… And besides, you know, I enjoy it because I’m not a bad shot and it’s going to be fun to finish off one of those buggers with each go!’
The captain and corporal were already looking over the house. Nothing doing on the ground floor, and they just pushed the furniture against the door and windows to barricade them as securely as they could. So it was in the three little rooms on the first floor and in the loft that they organized the defence, and they approved of the preparations already made by Weiss, the mattresses reinforcing the venetian blinds and the loopholes he had made here and there between the slats. As the captain ventured to lean out to take stock of the surroundings he heard a child crying.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
There came back into Weiss’s mind the sight of the sick child Auguste, with his face flushed with fever against the white sheets, calling his mother who could never answer again, lying on the pavement with her head smashed. With a gesture of grief at this vision he replied:
‘A poor little kid whose mother has been killed by a shell, and he’s crying there next door.’
‘Oh Christ,’ muttered Laurent, ‘we’ve got to make them pay for all this!’
So far only a few stray bullets were hitting the front of the house. Weiss and the captain, together with the gardener and two of the men, had gone up into the attic from which it was easier to keep an eye on the road. They could see at an angle as far as the Place de l’Eglise, which was now in the hands of the Bavarians, who were still advancing only with great difficulty and with extreme caution. At the corner of a lane a few infantrymen still held them at bay for nearly a quarter of an hour with such murderous fire that the dead were piling up. And then it was a single house, even an angle between two walls that they had to take before being able to move on. Sometimes through the smoke a woman could be seen with a rifle shooting from