The Debacle - Emile Zola [15]
Weiss was quite taken aback. ‘But, lieutenant,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to discourage anybody. On the contrary, I wish everyone knew what I know, because it’s best to know so as to be forewarned and forearmed… Now just look at Germany…’
He proceeded in his reasonable way to explain his fears: the growth of Prussia after Sadowa, the nationalist movement which put her at the head of the other German states, a great empire in formation, rejuvenated with the enthusiasm and irresistible impetus to achieve its unity; the system of compulsory military service which set up a whole nation in arms, trained, disciplined and with powerful weapons, ready for a long war and still intoxicated with her shattering triumph over Austria; the intelligence and moral strength of this ‘army, under the command of officers almost all young and obeying a commander-in-chief who seemed about to modernize the whole art of war, a man of incomparable prudence and foresight and miraculous clarity of vision. And with that Germany he had the courage to contrast France: the Empire grown old, still acclaimed in a plebiscite but basically rotten because it had weakened the idea of patriotism by destroying liberty, and then turning back to liberalism too late and thereby hastening its own undoing because it was ready to collapse as soon as it stopped satisfying the lust for pleasure it had let loose; the army certainly admirable as a brave lot of men, and still wearing the laurels of the Crimea and Italy, but adulterated by the system of paid substitutes, still in the old routine of the Africa school, too cocksure of victory to face the great effort of modern techniques; and then the generals, most of them nonentities and eaten up with rivalries and some of them quite stupefyingly ignorant, and at their head the Emperor, a sick man and vacillating, deceived and self-deceiving, and all facing this terrible adventure into which they were blindly hurling themselves, with no serious preparation, like a stampede of scared sheep being led to the slaughter.
Rochas listened to all this, gaping and goggling. His terrible nose was screwed up. Then he suddenly made up his mind to laugh – a huge ear-to-ear laugh.
‘What do you think you’re waffling about? What does all that cock-and-bull story add up to? It doesn’t make sense, it’s too silly for me to rack my brains to understand. Go and tell all that to the recruits, but not to me, with my twenty-seven years’ service!’
He banged his chest with his fist. The son of a working stonemason from Limousin, himself born in Paris and hating his father’s trade, he had enlisted at eighteen. As a soldier of fortune he had been in the ranks, become a corporal in Africa, sergeant at Sebastopol and lieutenant after Solferino, having put in fifteen years of hard existence and heroic gallantry to achieve this rank, but so lacking in education that he would never make the grade of captain.
‘But this is something you don’t know about, Mr Knowall… Yes, at Mazagran I was hardly nineteen and we were a hundred and twenty-three men, not one more, and we held out for four days against twelve thousand Arabs… Oh yes, for years and years in Africa, at Mascara, Biskra, Dellys and later on the Grande Kabylie and later still Laghouat, if you had been with us, Mister, you would have seen all those bloody wogs bunking off like hares as soon as we came on the scene… And at Sebastopol, sir, blimey, you couldn’t say that was a picnic either. Gales fit to blow your hair off, perishing cold, constant alerts, and then those savages ended by making everything hop! But never mind, we made them hop too, oh yes, with music and in a big frying-pan, what’s more!… And Solferino, you weren’t there yourself, sir, so why do you talk about it? Yes, at Solferino, where it was so hot although more rain had come down that day than you have seen in your life, perhaps – at Solferino the thrashing we gave those Austrians – you should have seen them galloping away from our bayonets, going arse over tip to run faster, as if