The Debacle - Emile Zola [163]
And yet once again Maurice and Jean got used to it, and out of the very excess of their panic there grew a sort of don’t-care intoxication which had something brave about it, and they ended by not even hurrying any more through that accursed wood. The horror had intensified still more among this population of bombarded trees killed at their posts and falling on all sides like steadfast, gigantic soldiers. Under the greenwood tree, in the lovely half-light, down in mysterious bowers carpeted with moss, brutal death passed by. The solitary waterbrooks were violated, dying men gasped their lives away in the most secret nooks where hitherto none but lovers had ventured. One man with a bullet through his chest had time to shout ‘Got me!’ as he fell on his face, dead. Another, both of whose legs had been smashed by a shell, went on laughing, not realizing he was wounded, but thinking he had merely stumbled over a tree-root. Others, with limbs shot through and mortally wounded, went on talking and running for a few steps before collapsing in a sudden spasm. At the first moment even the deepest wounds could hardly be felt, and it was only later that the appalling sufferings began and poured themselves forth in screams and tears.
Oh, that treacherous, massacred forest, that amid the sobs of dying trees was gradually filling with the agonized shrieks of the wounded! At the foot of an oak Maurice and Jean saw a Zouave with his entrails exposed, who was howling endlessly like an animal being slaughtered. And further on a man was on fire, his blue belt was burning and the flame reached up to his beard and singed it; but his back must have been broken for he was unable to move and was crying bitterly. And then a captain, with his left forearm gone and his right side slit down to the thigh, was flat on his belly and dragging himself along on his elbows, imploring somebody, in a dreadful high-pitched voice, to finish him off. More and still more were in abominable suffering, scattered along the grassy walks in such numbers that you had to watch out so as not to tread on them as you moved. But wounded and dead had ceased to count. Any comrade who fell was left there and forgotten, with never a glance behind. It was just fate. Now the next – me perhaps!
Suddenly, as they were coming to the edge of the wood, a cry was heard.
‘Help!’
It was the second-lieutenant who was carrying the flag, and he had just had a bullet in the left lung. He had fallen and blood was gushing from his mouth. Seeing somebody coming, he found enough strength to pull himself together and shout:
‘The flag!’
Rochas leaped back in one bound, took the flag, the staff of which had been broken, while the second lieutenant murmured in a voice choking with bloody foam:
‘I’ve got my ticket, I don’t care a damn. Save the flag.’
There he stayed alone, writhing on the moss in this lovely woodland dell, clawing at grass with his clenched hands, his chest heaving in a death-struggle that went on for hours.
At last they were out of this fearful wood. Apart from Maurice and Jean there only remained out of the little group Lieutenant Rochas, Pache and Lapoulle. Gaude, whom they had lost, emerged in his turn from a thicket and ran to rejoin his mates, with his bugle slung over his shoulder. It was a real relief to find themselves in open country and breathing freely. The whistling of bullets had stopped, and shells were not coming down on this side of the valley.
Then they suddenly heard somebody cursing and swearing in front of