The Debacle - Emile Zola [198]
‘More meat for the crows!’ Maurice said sadly, remembering the disturbing numbers of horses he had seen. ‘If we stay here a few more days we shall all be devouring each other… Oh, the poor creatures!’
The night of Tuesday to Wednesday was particularly horrible. Jean, who was beginning to be seriously worried about Maurice’s over-tense state, made him wrap himself up in an old blanket they had bought from a Zouave for ten francs, while he himself, with his cape soaked like a sponge, received the full force of the deluge which went on all night. The position under the poplars was becoming untenable; it was a river of mud, and the saturated earth held the water in deep puddles. The worst of it was that their stomachs were empty, the evening meal having consisted of two beetroots among the six men, and they had not even been able to cook them for want of dry wood, so that the cold sugary taste had soon turned into an intolerable burning sensation; to say nothing of the beginnings of dysentery caused by fatigue, bad food and persistent damp. More than ten times, Jean, propped against the trunk of the same tree, with his legs in the water, had put out his hand to feel whether Maurice had thrown off his covering in his restless sleep. Since his friend had saved him from the Prussians on the plateau of Illy by carrying him in his arms he had been repaying his debt a hundredfold. Without reasoning it out he was giving him his whole being, he was forgetting himself entirely for love of him, and this love was indefinable but imperishable, though he had no words to express what he felt. He had already taken the food out of his own mouth, as the chaps in the squad put it, but now he would have given his own skin to clothe him, protect his shoulders and warm his feet. In the midst of the savage egotism all round him in this corner of suffering humanity maddened by hunger, he probably owed to this total self-abnegation the unlooked-for blessing of keeping his unruffled calm and health of mind, for he was the only one who was still strong and had not lost his head.
And so, after that horrible night, Jean carried out an idea that had been going round in his head.
‘Look here, young fellow-me-lad, as they’re not giving us anything to eat but forgetting all about us in this bloody hole, we’ve got to stir our stumps a bit if we don’t want to peg out… Can you still walk all right?’
Mercifully the sun had come out and Maurice was quite warmed up.
‘Of course, my legs are all right!’
‘O.K., then we’re going off to see what we can find… We’ve got some money, and I’ll be damned if we don’t find something to buy. And don’t let’s bother about the others, they’re just not worth it, let them work it out for themselves!’
As a matter of fact he was disgusted by the sly selfishness of Loubet and Chouteau, who stole everything they could and never shared anything with their mates. Neither was there anything to be got out of Lapoulle, who was a clod, or Pache, who was a worm.
So the two of them took the road Maurice had already been along, by the river. The gardens of La Tour à Glaire and the house had already been laid waste and looted, the lawns ploughed up as though by storm-floods, trees felled, buildings broken into. A bedraggled mob of soldiers, covered with mud, hollow-cheeked and with feverish,