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By Root 1980 0

complicated moment in French history so recent that all the events were clearly remembered by all Zola’s readers over the age of forty, or even younger, and many details could be immediately verified or challenged. When the book appeared in 1892 the events it described were more recent than those of the 1939–45 war are today. Zola could not risk being caught out on a point of fact, date, time or place, and many of the real persons, soldiers or politicians, mentioned in the story were still there, or their representatives were, and could answer back. Now this peculiar necessity for accuracy in reporting events of extreme complexity, many of them simultaneous and apparently confused but cumulatively of inexorable logic, carries with it the danger that the book might become a tedious chronicle of endless to-ings and fro-ings, comings and goings, to say nothing of repetitions and recapitulations, a sort of game of chess with commentary. All the more so because Zola wanted to make all aspects of the national disaster clear – the causes going back into the Second Empire, the mistakes and miscalculations, incompetence and sheer bad luck, with the resulting demoralization of the troops and the effects upon the lives of civilians of all kinds. How does he achieve clearness while avoiding the dullness of the minute-by-minute list of events? Mainly by skill in construction and by frequently changing the point of view, at the risk of seeming specious and contrived. It is as though he felt compelled by the very complexity of his material to present it in an arrangement remarkably regular and symmetrical even by his own standards, for many of his novels have some orderly arrangement of chapters or parts. Here there are three parts, each of eight chapters, and each part is a very distinct act in the drama.

Act I. The trap. From 6 August, near Mulhouse, we follow the movements of the 7th army corps, mostly through the eyes of one squad of its increasingly weary and demoralized soldiers, as it is moved back through Belfort, by train to Paris but immediately forward again to Rheims, its advance as far. as Vouziers, the fatal waste of time there and the false advance and return to Vouziers, then on to Remilly in the Meuse valley and thence into Sedan, surrounded by hills and narrow defiles, every one of which was occupied or dominated by German forces or artillery. And at every stage muddles, supplies sent to wrong places, fuel sent where there was nothing to cook, raw meat where there was no fuel, fodder where there were no horses, guns in one place and ammunition in another, marches and counter-marches. The civilian elements are brought in as the march proceeds, and the exhaustion, hunger and exasperation of the troops become increasingly serious. The stages of this terrible progress from Rheims to Sedan can be followed very easily on the Michelin maps of France, sheets 56 and 53. I have adopted Zola’s method of distinguishing between French and German forces by using arabic figures or roman respectively, e.g. 7th army corps (French), IXth army corps (German).

Act II. The disaster. The battle of Sedan, fought on the outskirts of the town and in surrounding villages. The whole action takes place in just over twenty-four hours, from very early in the morning of 1 September until 6 a.m. on the 2nd. The problem is to see clearly the different actions going on in different neighbourhoods and at the same time what was going on inside the town itself in all its complicated detail and from different points of view, and to keep the eye on all these things as they move on simultaneously towards the inevitable catastrophe in which a huge French army, with its wounded, guns, material and horses, is rolled back into a small town quite incapable of feeding or housing it. See map 1.

Act III. The aftermath. 3 September 1870 until May 1871. First, the horrors of the battlefield and captivity of the whole French army in a loop of the river Meuse, the Iges peninsula, where for a week, mostly in bad weather, they had no shelter, next to no food, and droves