The Debacle - Emile Zola [202]
‘I’ll go with the pan,’ said Jean.
They all protested.
‘Oh no! We don’t want to be poisoned, it’s full of corpses!’
It was true, the Meuse was carrying along bodies of men and horses. They could be seen floating past every minute, with swollen bellies and already decomposing and going green. Many of them had got caught in the weeds near the banks and were filling the air with stench as they constantly bobbed up and down in the water. Nearly all the soldiers who had drunk this abominable water had had sickness and dysentery after frightful colic.
And yet they had to make up their minds to it. Maurice explained that the water would no longer be dangerous once it had been boiled.
‘All right, I’ll go,’ said Jean again, taking Lapoulle with him.
By the time the pan was on the fire, full of water and with the meat in it, it was really dark. Loubet had peeled the beetroots so as to cook them in the broth – a stew that would be out of this world, as he put it – and they all kept the flames up by pushing pieces of the barrow under the pan. Their long shadows danced weirdly in this rocky cavern. But then they could wait no longer and threw themselves on to this disgusting brew and tore the meat into shares with wild, impatient fingers, without waiting to use a knife. But all the same it made them heave. It was the lack of salt in particular that upset them, for their stomachs refused to keep down this insipid mess of beetroot and bits of half-cooked, gluey meat tasting like earth. Almost at once they began throwing it up. Pache could not go on, Chouteau and Loubet cursed the devil’s own nag they had had so much trouble to turn into a stew and which was now giving them the belly-ache. Lapoulle was the only one who dined copiously, but later in the night it nearly did him in when he had gone back with the three others to sleep under the poplars.
On the way Maurice, without a word, had taken Jean’s arm and pulled him down a side path. The others filled him with a kind of furious disgust, and he had made a plan which was to go and sleep in the little copse where he had spent the first night. It was a good idea, and Jean strongly approved of it when he had lain down on sloping ground quite dry and sheltered by dense foliage. They stayed there until broad daylight and even slept a deep sleep which somewhat restored their strength.
The following day was a Thursday, but they no longer knew how they were living, and were simply glad that the fine weather seemed to have come back. Jean persuaded Maurice, in spite of his reluctance, to go back to the canal to see whether the regiment was to leave that day. Each day now prisoners were leaving for German fortresses in detachments of a thousand to twelve hundred. Two days earlier they had seen a party of officers and generals setting off for the train at Pont-à-Mousson. Everybody was in a frenzy of desire to get away from this awful Camp of Hell. Oh, if only their turn could come! When they found the 106th still camping on the towpath, in the growing confusion of so much suffering, they really were in despair.
And yet that day Jean and Maurice really thought they were going to get something to eat. Beginning that morning, quite a system of trading had developed between the prisoners and the Bavarians across the canal. Money was thrown to them in a handkerchief and they returned the handkerchief with some black bread or coarse tobacco scarcely dried Qut. Even the soldiers who had