The Debacle - Emile Zola [168]
‘Look, Maurice,’ Henriette suddenly said, ‘isn’t that dead man just over there a soldier in the Prussian Guard?’
For a few minutes she had been looking at one of the bodies left behind by the enemy, a stocky fellow with a bushy moustache, lying on his side on the gravel of the terrace. His spiked helmet had rolled down near them, its chinstrap broken. The corpse was indeed wearing the Guard’s uniform – dark-grey trousers, blue tunic, white braid, and rolled coat slung round like a bandolier.
‘I tell you, he’s a guardsman… I’ve got a picture at home… And then what about the photo cousin Gunther sent us?’
She stopped talking and walked calmly over to the dead man before they could stop her, and leaned over him.
‘Red shoulder-straps,’ she called out, ‘oh, I could have taken a bet on it!’
She came back with a hail of bullets whistling about her ears.
‘Yes, red shoulder-straps, it just had to be… Cousin Gunther’s regiment!’
After that neither Maurice nor Jean could get her to keep still under cover. She was constantly on the move, sticking out her head, determined, come what may, to watch the little wood, with one fixed idea. They went on firing and jerked her back with their knees if she ventured too far out. Presumably the Prussians were beginning to think they were now sufficiently numerous and ready to attack, for they were now showing themselves in a flood spilling out between the trees, and they were sustaining terrible losses as each French bullet was accurate and picked off its man.
‘Look,’ said Jean, ‘perhaps that’s your cousin. That officer coming out of the house with the green shutters opposite.’
It was certainly a captain, recognizable by the gold collar of his tunic and the golden eagle shining on his helmet in the light of the afternoon sun. He had no epaulettes, had a sabre in his hand and was shouting an order in staccato tones, and the distance was so short, a bare two hundred metres, that he could be seen quite clearly, with his slim build, pink, hard face and little fair moustache.
Henriette scrutinized him with her piercing eyes.
‘Yes, it’s him all right,’ she said without any surprise. ‘I recognize him perfectly.’
With a furious movement Maurice was already taking aim.
‘Our cousin!… Oh Christ, he’s going to pay for Weiss!’
But she leaped up in terror and pushed the rifle to one side, and the shot spent itself in the sky.
‘No, no, not between relations, not between people who know each other… It’s an abomination!’
She became a woman again, and collapsed behind the tree, weeping hysterically. She was overcome with horror, full of nothing but terror and grief.
Meanwhile Rochas was having his moment of triumph. Round him the firing of a handful of soldiers, inspired by his stentorian voice, had so intensified at the sight of the Prussians that the latter fell back into the little wood.
‘Stick to it, boys! Don’t slack off!… Look at those fat pigs doing a bunk! We’ll settle their hash!’
He was cheerful and now apparently full of immense confidence again. There hadn’t been any defeats. That handful of men opposite was the German army, and he was going to kick them arse over tip, nothing easier. His tall lean body, his long bony face with its beak of a nose coming down over his big mouth, was all laughing with a bragging joy, the joy of the trooper who has conquered the world between having his girl and a bottle of good wine.
‘It goes without saying, boys, that’s what we’re all here for, to give them a bloody licking. Can’t finish any other way, it would be too much of a change to be beaten, now wouldn’t it? Beaten! Is that possible? One more effort, lads, and they’ll piss off like hares!’
He bawled and waved his arms, such a fine chap with his ignorant illusions that the soldiers laughed with him. Suddenly he shouted:
‘With kicks up the arse! With kicks up the arse all the way to the frontier! Victory! Victory!’
But then, just when the enemy opposite really looked as though he was falling back, a terrible fusillade burst out on the