The Debacle - Emile Zola [157]
He looked at all three of them with staring eyes full of the fear of death.
‘Oh, captain, what are you saying?’ murmured Gilberte, trying to smile through her terror. ‘You’ll be up and about in a month.’
He shook his head, now looking only at her, and his eyes betrayed an immense longing for life and dismay at going off like this before his time and without exhausting the joys of life.
‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die… Oh it’s awful!’
Then he caught sight of his dirty, torn uniform and black hands and seemed to be embarrassed about being in such a state in front of women. He felt ashamed of letting himself go like this, and the thought that he was lacking in good manners finally gave him back quite a jaunty air. He managed to go on in a joking tone:
‘Only, if I die I should like to die with clean hands… Madame, it would be so kind of you if you could moisten a towel and give it to me.’
Gilberte ran off and came back with the towel and insisted on wiping his hands herself. From then on he displayed very great courage, anxious to end like a man of good breeding. Delaherche said comforting things and helped his wife to make him presentable. As she watched this dying man, and both husband and wife busying themselves for him in this way, old Madame Delaherche felt her resentment melt away. Once again she would hold her peace, though she knew and had sworn to tell her son everything. What was to be gained by casting a blight on the home since death was washing away the sin?
It was soon over. Captain Beaudoin was losing strength and he relapsed into his exhaustion. His forehead and neck were bathed in icy sweat. He opened his eyes again for a moment and groped as though he were feeling for an imaginary blanket that he began to pull up to his chin with a weak but determined movement of his twisted hands.
‘Oh I’m cold, I’m so cold.’
And he departed, snuffed out with not even a gasp, and his face, calm but drawn, had kept its expression of infinite sadness.
Delaherche saw to it that the body was placed in a near-by coach-house instead of being thrown on to the heap. He tried to force Gilberte, who was weeping uncontrollably, to go indoors. But she said she would be too frightened now to be alone, and preferred to stay with her mother-in-law amid the activity of the ambulance station, which took her mind off things. In a moment she was off to give a drink to a Chasseur d’Afrique who was wandering in delirium, and then she helped an orderly to bandage the hand of a young soldier, a twenty-year-old recruit, who had walked all the way from the battlefield with a thumb off, and as he was nice and funny, joking about his wound with the detached air of a Parisian wag, she even managed to laugh with him.
During the death agony of the captain the bombardment seemed to have got still worse, and a second shell had come down in the garden and had snapped one of the century-old trees. Terrified people were screaming that the whole of Sedan was on fire, and indeed a major fire had broken out in the Cassine district. It was the end of everything if this bombardment went on with such violence for long.
‘It just isn’t possible, I’m going back!’ said Delaherche, beside himself.
‘Where to?’ asked Bouroche.
‘The Sub-Prefecture, of course, to find out whether the Emperor is having us on when he talks about running up the white flag.’
For a few seconds the major remained stunned by this idea of the white flag, defeat, capitulation, coming in the midst of his powerlessness to save all these poor bloodstained devils being brought to him. He made a gesture of furious despair.
‘Oh go to the devil! We’re all done for anyway!’
Outside Delaherche found it more difficult to push his way through the troops who had swelled in numbers. Every minute the streets were getting more crowded with the stream of straggling soldiers. He questioned some of the officers he met and none had seen the white flag over the citadel. Finally a colonel said he had caught a momentary glimpse of it – just being run up and lowered again. That would explain