The Debacle - Emile Zola [193]
A little way below the Garenne wood, as they were bearing left to go back the same way as in the morning, a German post demanded to see their permit. This time, instead of keeping them out of Sedan, the guard ordered them to go through the town, or else they would be arrested. There was no answering back, it was fresh orders. In any case that would shorten their return journey by two kilometres, and as they were dead tired they were glad. However, in Sedan itself they were very badly held up. As soon as they had passed through the fortifications they were overcome by a foul stench, and a bed of filth came up to their knees. The town was disgusting, an open sewer in which the defecation and urine of a hundred thousand men had been piling up for three days. All sorts of other muck had thickened this human dunghill – straw and hay itself rotting with the droppings of animals. Even worse, the carcasses of horses which had been slaughtered and cut up in the open street poisoned the air. Offal was decaying in the sun, heads and bones were lying in the street, alive with flies. Plague would certainly break out unless this layer of horrible filth was quickly swept down into the drains, for in the rue du Ménil and rue Maqua and even the Place Turenne it was as much as twenty centimetres deep. Moreover white posters had been put up by the Prussian authorities mustering all inhabitants for the next day and ordering all persons, whoever they were, workmen, shopkeepers, professional people, magistrates, to set to work with brooms and shovels under the threat of the severest penalties if the town was not clean by evening. Already the chief magistrate could be seen in front of his home raking over the roadway and shovelling the muck into a wheelbarrow.
Silvine and Prosper, who had taken the Grande-Rue, could only proceed very slowly through the fetid slime. And besides at every moment the way through the town was barred by some uproar, because it was the time when the Prussians were combing through the houses to dig out hidden soldiers determined not to give themselves up. At about two o’clock on the day before, when General de Wimpffen had come back from the Château de Bellevue after
signing the capitulation, a rumour had run round at once that the army taken prisoner was to be interned in the Iges peninsula while waiting for arrangements to be made for it to be moved to Germany. A very few officers thought they would take advantage of the clause giving them their freedom on condition that they signed an undertaking not to fight again. Only one general, it was said, had made the undertaking, and that was General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, using his rheumatism as a pretext. That morning he had been booed on his departure, as he climbed into a carriage in front of the Hôtel de la Croix d’Or. Disarmament had been going on since first light; the soldiers were made to file across the Place Turenne and throw their arms – rifles and bayonets – on to a pile in a corner that grew like a tip of scrap-iron. A Prussian detachment was there, commanded by a young officer, a tall, pale fellow in a sky-blue tunic and wearing a round cap with cock’s feathers, who superintended the operation with an air of lofty correctness, wearing white gloves. When a Zouave in a moment of revolt had refused to give up his rifle the officer had him taken away, saying without a trace of German accent: ‘Shoot that man!’ The others went on miserably filing past, throwing their rifles down mechanically, anxious to have done with it. But how many were already disarmed, the ones whose rifles lay scattered all over the countryside! And how many had been in hiding since yesterday, dreaming of disappearing in the indescribable confusion! Houses had been taken over and were full of these stubborn men who refused to answer and buried themselves in corners. The German patrols scouring the town found some of them even crouching under furniture. And as many of them, even when discovered,