The Debacle - Emile Zola [186]
came from the ruins themselves of this village of Bazeilles, so pretty only three days earlier, with its gay houses in their gardens, and now smashed to smithereens, reduced to nothing but bits of wall blackened by flames. The church was still burning like a huge funeral pyre of smoking beams in the middle of the square, and from it rose an unceasing column of black smoke, spreading out over the sky like the plumes on a hearse. Whole streets had gone, with nothing left on either side, nothing but heaps of calcined stones beside the gutters, a mess of soot and ash like thick inky mud covering everything. On all four corners of every crossroads the corner houses were flattened out and it looked as though they had been blown away by the tempest of fire. Others were less damaged, and one was standing in isolation whilst the ones on each side of it were riddled by bullets and their carcasses stood there like fleshless skeletons. An unbearable stench arose, the sickening smell of fire, and in particular the pungent smell of paraffin, which had been poured freely all over the floors. Then there was the silent pathos of what people had tried to save, poor little bits of furniture thrown out of windows and smashed on the pavements, rickety tables with broken legs, cupboards with sides off or fronts split, clothes lying about, torn or dirty, all the pitiful odds and ends of pillage disintegrating in the rain. Through a gaping house-front and collapsed floors, a clock could be seen quite intact on a mantelpiece high up a wall.
‘Oh the swine!’ growled Prosper, whose blood, the blood of a soldier until two days before, was boiling at the sight of such an abomination.
He was clenching his fists, and Silvine, very scared, had to calm him down with a look every time they met a picket along the road. The Bavarians had posted sentries in front of houses still burning, and these men, with rifles loaded and fixed bayonets, seemed to be guarding the fires so as to let the flames finish their work. Sightseers or interested parties wandering round were headed off with a threatening gesture and a guttural oath if they persisted. Groups of inhabitants, keeping their distance, said nothing but were boiling with rage inside. One quite young woman, with unkempt hair and mud-stained dress, would not be moved from in front of the ruins of a little house, wanting to search among the red-hot cinders in spite of the sentry keeping people away. It was said that her child had been burnt to death in that house. Suddenly, as the Bavarian was savagely pushing her away, she spat her furious despair in his face, curses made up of blood and filth, obscene words in which she at last found some slight relief. He obviously did not understand, but looked at her nervously and moved back. Three of his companions ran up and freed him from the woman, whom they took away screaming. In front of the ruins of another house a man and two little girls had collapsed on the ground with fatigue and misery, and they were crying together, with nowhere to go, having seen everything they possessed disappear into ashes. A patrol came along and cleared off the sightseers, and the street was left empty with only the grim, hard sentries keeping a watch to make sure that their dastardly orders were respected.
‘The swine! The swine!’ Prosper repeated under his breath. ‘It’d be a pleasure to strangle one or two of them!’
Once again Silvine made him keep quiet. She shuddered with horror. In a coach-house untouched by the fire a dog that had been shut in and forgotten for two days was howling with a continuous moan so heartrending that it seemed to fill with terror a louring sky from which a grey drizzle had started to come down. And then it was that they met something just outside the Montvillers park. There were three big carts loaded with dead, those refuse carts that come along the streets every morning, and into which men shovel the muck of the day before. In a similar way they had been filled with corpses, stopping by