The Debacle - Emile Zola [190]
When Silvine had brought the donkey back on to the road she insisted on an answer from Prosper:
‘Look here, where is it?’
He stood there looking at the four corners of the horizon.
‘There were three trees, I must find those three trees… Bless you, you don’t see all that clearly when you’re fighting, and it isn’t easy to know afterwards which way you went!’
Seeing some people to his left, two men and a woman, he thought he would ask them. But as he went up to them the woman ran off and the men brandished threatening fists. He saw yet more and they all avoided him and ran off into the bushes like cunning, prowling animals, they were dressed in rags, unspeakably dirty, with crafty, evil-looking faces. Then he realized that where these horrible people had passed, the dead, were bootless with bare, grey-looking feet, and he understood that these were the prowling thieves who followed the German armies, the plunderers of corpses, a gypsy crew of vultures who moved in the wake of the invasion. A tall thin fellow rushed away from him with a sack over his shoulder and pockets jingling with watches and silver coins stolen from pockets.
But one boy of thirteen or fourteen let Prosper approach, and when Prosper, realizing the boy was French, told him off roundly, he protested. What, couldn’t you earn your own living now? He picked up rifles and was given five sous for each one he found. That morning he had run away from his village, having had nothing to eat since the day before, and he had been taken on by a Luxembourg dealer who had an arrangement with the Prussians about this harvest of guns on the battlefield. The truth of the matter was that the Prussians were afraid that these weapons, if picked up by peasants in this frontier region, might be taken into Belgium and thence get back into France. So there was quite a swarm of poor devils looking for rifles at five sous a time, ratting about in the grass like those women you see bent double picking dandelions in the meadows.
‘What a dirty trade!’ growled Prosper.
‘Well, you must live,’ said the boy. ‘I’m not robbing anyone.’
As he was a stranger in those parts and could not give any directions he merely pointed out a little farmhouse where he had seen some people.
Prosper thanked him and was moving off to go back to Silvine when he caught sight of a rifle half buried in a furrow. At first he took care not to point it out. But then he suddenly turned back and found himself calling:
‘Look, there’s one over there. That’ll mean another five sous!’
As they were making for the farm Silvine saw other peasants digging long trenches. But these people were working under the direct orders of Prussian officers who were standing stiff and silent with just a switch in their hands, superintending the work. The inhabitants of the villages had been set to work to bury the dead for fear that the rainy weather might hasten decomposition. There were two cartloads of bodies and a gang was unloading them and quickly laying them side by side very close together, without searching them or even looking at their faces, and three men with large shovels followed on and covered the row with such a thin layer of earth that already the rain was opening up little cracks. So hastily was the job done that before a fortnight was up a pestilence would be rising through all these cracks. Silvine could not help stopping on the edge of the trench and looking at these pitiful bodies as they were brought along. She was shuddering with the horrible fear that in each bloody face she would recognize Honoré. Was he that dreadful one with no left eye? Or the one with the broken jaw? If she didn’t hurry up and find him on this featureless, endless plain they would certainly take him away from her and bury him in the dump with the others.
So she rushed back to Prosper, who had gone with the donkey to the farmhouse door.
‘Oh God, where is he? Ask them, keep on asking!’
But there were