The Debacle - Emile Zola [196]
Now, with his staring, sleepless eyes, he could see nothing but darkness lit here and there by camp fires. Yet beyond the pale ribbon of the Meuse he could still make out the motionless forms of the sentries. In the starlight they stood there straight and black, and at intervals he could hear their guttural calls – the menacing call of the watch tailing off into the swash of the river. These harsh foreign syllables cutting through a lovely starlit night in France revived in him all the nightmare of two days earlier, in the places he had seen but an hour ago, on the plain of Illy still strewn with dead, and in the horrible outskirts of Sedan where a whole world had collapsed. Lying there with his head on the root of a tree in the dampness of the woodland, he relapsed into the despair that had gripped him the day before on the sofa in Delaherche’s home. What hurt his injured pride still more and tortured him now was the question of the morrow. He felt an urge to measure the extent of the fall and know what sort of ruins yesterday’s world had left. Now that the Emperor had surrendered his sword to King William, didn’t it mean that this hateful war was over? But he recalled what two of the Bavarian soldiers escorting the prisoners to Iges had said to him: ‘Us in France! Us all in Paris!’ In a half-doze he suddenly realized what was happening: the Empire swept away amid universal execration, a Republic proclaimed in an outburst of patriotic fervour, and the legend of 1792 conjuring up shadowy figures, soldiers in the mass uprising, armies of volunteers purging the homeland of the foreigner. It was all jumbled up in his poor sick head, the extortions of the conquerors, the bitterness of conquest, the determination of the conquered to fight to their last drop of blood, captivity for the eighty thousand men held there, first in this peninsula and later in German fortresses for weeks, months, possibly years. Everything was breaking up and crashing down for ever in endless woe.
The cry of the sentries gradually grew louder and then burst into a shout right opposite him. Now wide awake, he was turning over on the hard earth when a shot tore through the silence, followed by a splashing sound and the short struggle of a body falling straight down into the water. Presumably some poor devil had been shot through the heart while trying to escape by swimming across the Meuse.
Maurice was up by sunrise. The weather was still bright and he was anxious to rejoin Jean and the rest of his company. He thought for a moment of searching once again in the middle of the peninsula, but then decided to finish going right round. And as he reached the bank of the canal he saw what was left of the 106th, about a thousand men camping on the towpath and only sheltered by a thin row of poplars. If on the night before he had turned to the left instead of going straight on he would have caught up with his regiment at once. Almost all the regiments of the line were huddled together there along the canal bank from La Tour à Glaire to the Château de Villette, another country house surrounded by a few hovels away in the direction of Donchery; and they had all planted themselves near the bridge, that is near the only .way out, with the same instinct for freedom that makes large flocks of sheep crush each other to death against the gate leading out of the fold.
Jean shouted for joy:
‘Oh, it’s you at last! I thought you were in the river!’
There he was, with the rest of the squad, Pache and Lapoulle, Loubet and Chouteau. The last two, having slept in a doorway in Sedan, had been brought in again in the big round-up. The whole company had no other leader now but the corporal, death having cut down Sergeant Sapin,