The Debacle - Emile Zola [189]
‘But where is it?’ Silvine repeated.
Then they skirted a ploughed field covered all over with knapsacks. Some regiment being hard pressed must have got rid of them there in a fit of panic. Odds and ends scattered over the ground bore witness to episodes in the fight. Képis here and there in a field of beet looked like big poppies, and bits of uniform, shoulder-tabs, sword-belts spoke of fierce contact in one of the few hand-to-hand fights in the formidable twelve-hour artillery duel. Most frequently of all they were continually tripping over weapons, swords, bayonets, rifles, and in such quantities that they seemed to be growing out of the ground, a harvest that had sprung up in one abominable day. Messtins and water-bottles were strewn over the roads, all sorts of things that had fallen out of torn knapsacks – rice, brushes, cartridges. Field after field of immense devastation, fences torn down, trees looking as if they had been burnt in a fire, the earth itself pitted with shell-holes, trodden down hard by stampeding mobs and so ravaged that it seemed condemned to eternal sterility. Everything was soaked in the dismal rain, and there rose a pungent smell, the smell of battlefields, made up of rotting staw and burnt cloth, a mixture of decay and gunpowder.
Weary of these fields of death through which she felt she had been walking for leagues, Silvine looked round her with growing anguish.
‘Where is it? Where is it, then?’
Prosper made no answer for he was getting worried himself. What upset him even more than the corpses of his mates were the bodies of the horses, poor horses lying on their sides, which they kept meeting in large numbers. There were some really pitiful ones in dreadful attitudes, decapitated or with bellies split open and entrails coming out. Many were on their backs, with bellies swollen and four legs sticking up in the air like snow posts, dotting the plain as far as you could see. Some of them were still not dead after two days of agony, and at the least sound they raised their suffering heads, turned right and left and dropped them again; others did not move but occasionally uttered a loud scream, the plaint of a dying horse, so unmistakable and so terribly grief-stricken that the very air trembled. Prosper’s heart ached as he thought of Zephir and that he might possibly see him again.
Suddenly he felt the ground shake under the galloping hoofs of a furious charge. He turned round and just had time to shout to Silvine:
‘Mind the horses! The horses! Get down behind that wall!’
Over the top of a near-by slope some hundred horses, riderless, some still carrying a full pack, were bearing down on them at breakneck speed. These were the stray animals left on the field of battle, who had instinctively gathered in a herd. They had had no hay or oats for two days, and had eaten the scanty grass, cropped hedges and even gnawed the bark of trees. Whenever hunger caught them in the belly like a prick of the spurs, they all set off together in a mad stampede, charging straight through the empty, silent country, trampling on the dead and finishing off the wounded.
The storm was approaching and Silvine just had time to pull the donkey and trap into the shelter of the low wall.
‘Oh God! They’ll smash everything!’
But they leaped over the obstacle and nothing was left but the rumbling of thunder, and already