• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2026 0

shining eyes, were camping out like a lot of gypsies, living like wolves in rooms filthy with excrement, for they dared not go out in case they lost their places for the night. And further on, up the slopes, they went through the cavalry and artillery, formerly so well drilled but now demoralized, too, going to pieces in this torturing hunger which maddened the horses and sent men off over the meadows in marauding bands. On the right they saw an endless queue of artillerymen and Chasseurs d’Afrique slowly moving past a mill where the miller was selling flour, two handfuls of it in their handkerchiefs for a franc. But they were afraid of waiting too long and went on, hoping to find something better in the village of Iges. But when they reached there they were filled with consternation to find it bare and grim like an Algerian village after the locusts have passed, not a scrap left of anything to eat, bread, vegetables or meat, and the miserable houses looked as though people had scratched all through them with their nails. It was said that General Lebrun had put up in the mayor’s house. He had tried in vain to arrange an issue of vouchers payable after the war so as to facilitate the feeding of the troops. There was nothing left, and money was useless. Even the day before one biscuit had fetched two francs, a bottle of wine seven, a little tot of brandy one franc, a pipeful of tobacco fifty centimes. And now officers had to guard the general’s house and the surrounding hovels with drawn swords because continual bands of marauders were breaking down doors and stealing even lamp-oil to drink.

Three Zouaves hailed Maurice and Jean. With five of them they might be able to pull something off.

‘Come on… There are some horses pegging out, and if only we had some dry wood…’

Then they made a rush at a peasant’s cottage, broke off cupboard doors and tore the thatch off the roof. Some officers with revolvers dashed up and drove them away.

When they saw that the few inhabitants left in Iges were as miserable and starved as the soldiers, Jean was sorry they had turned their noses up at the flour at the mill.

‘Let’s go back, there may still be some left.’

But Maurice was beginning to get so tired and weak for want of food that Jean left him in a hole in a quarry, sitting on a rock, staring at the broad horizon of Sedan. Jean, after queueing for threequarters of an hour, came back eventually with some flour in a bit of rag. And all they could do was eat it just like that, out of their hands. It wasn’t too bad, it had no smell and an insipid taste like dough, but it did cheer them up a bit. They were even lucky enough to find a natural pool of pure rain-water in a rock and they joyfully quenched their thirst.

Jean suggested staying there for the afternoon, but Maurice impatiently dismissed the idea.

‘No, no, not here! It’d make me ill to have all this in front of my eyes for long.’

With a trembling hand he pointed at the immense horizon, Le Hattoy, the plateaux of Floing and Illy, the Garenne woods, all these hateful scenes of massacre and defeat.

‘While I was waiting for you just now I had to turn my back on it, for I should have ended up by screaming with rage, yes, howling like a dog being teased beyond endurance… You can’t imagine how it hurts me, it’s driving me mad!’

Jean looked at him, and this wounded and bleeding pride astonished him, and he was perturbed to catch once again the wild look of insanity in his eyes that he had seen already. He tried to make a joke of it.

‘All right, that’s easy, we’ll have a change of scene.’

So they wandered about until evening wherever the paths took them. They explored the low-lying part of the peninsula hoping to find some more potatoes, but the artillerymen had taken the ploughs and turned over the fields, gleaning and picking up everything. They retraced their steps and once again passed through crowds of idle, slowly dying men, starving soldiers walking about in their hunger or lying on the ground listless, having collapsed with exhaustion in their hundreds in the hot sun. They