The Debacle - Emile Zola [144]
So once again the battery was in confusion. Foolhardy heroism could not be taken any further. The order to fall back definitely could not long be delayed.
‘Get a move on, chums!’ Honoré kept urging them. ‘We’ll take her away with us anyway, and they won’t get her!’
That was his idea – his gun must be saved, just as you save the flag. And he was still talking when he was struck down, his right arm torn off and his left side split open. He fell over his gun and there he stayed as though lying on a bed of state, his head straight on his shoulders and his face intact and beautiful in its anger as it turned towards the foe. A letter had slipped out of his torn uniform, clenched in his fingers, and his blood was staining it drop by drop.
The only lieutenant still alive called the order:
‘Limber up!’
One waggon had blown up with a noise like fireworks fizzing and exploding. They had to decide to take the horses from another ammunition waggon to save a gun whose team was laid out. And this last time, when the drivers had wheeled round and coupled the four remaining guns, they galloped off and never stopped for a thousand metres until they were behind the first trees of the Garenne wood.
Maurice had seen it all. With a little shiver of horror he went on repeating in a mechanical voice:
‘Oh, poor devil! Poor devil!’
This sorrow seemed to make his gut-twisting pain worse than ever. The animal within him was in revolt, he was at the end of his tether and he was dying of hunger. His eyes were worrying him, and he did not even realize the danger the regiment was now in since the battery had had to retire. At any minute the plateau could be attacked by heavy forces.
‘Look here,’ he said to Jean, ‘I’ve got to have something to eat. I’d rather eat and let them kill me afterwards!’
He opened his pack and took out the loaf with both hands shaking, and began to bite into it voraciously. Bullets whistled by and two shells went off only a few metres away. But nothing existed for him any more, there was only his hunger to be appeased.
‘Want some, Jean?’
Jean was watching him dully, with goggling eyes, for his own stomach was tortured by the same desire.
‘Yes, damn it, I do. It hurts too much.’
They shared it out and finished the loaf off greedily, not bothering about anything else as long as a mouthful was left. It was only afterwards that they caught sight of the colonel again, on his tall horse with his bleeding boot. The 106th was broken on all sides. Some companies had already had to take to flight. So, forced to yield to the torrent, he raised his sword and said with tears in his eyes:
‘Boys, you are in God’s hands, though He hasn’t found much use for us!’
He was surrounded by groups of fugitives, and disappeared into a dip in the ground.
Then, without knowing how they got there, Jean and Maurice found themselves behind the hedge with the remnants of their company. There were only forty men left at the most, commanded by Lieutenant Rochas, and the flag was with them: the second lieutenant carrying it had rolled the silk round the staff to try to save it. They ran along to the end of the hedge and threw themselves down among some little trees on a slope, where Rochas made them reopen fire. The men were now scattered like snipers and were under cover and could hold out, especially as a big cavalry manoeuvre was going on to their right, and regiments were being brought back into line to support it.
Then Maurice understood the slow, inexorable encircling movement that had just reached its completion. In the morning he had seen the Prussians pouring out through the Saint-Albert gap, reaching Saint-Menges, then Fleigneux, and now behind the Garenne wood he could hear the thundering cannon of the Guards