The Debacle - Emile Zola [203]
In spite of the bright sunshine it was another terrible day. There were alerts, two bugle calls that made Jean run to the shed where rations were supposed to be issued. But both times all he got out of it was jostling in the crush. The Prussians, so remarkably organized themselves, still showed a callous indifference towards the defeated army. As a result of complaints from Generals Douay and Lebrun they had indeed had a few sheep and cartloads of bread brought in, but they took so few precautions that the sheep were stolen and the carts ransacked as soon as they reached the bridge, so that troops camped more than a hundred metres away still got nothing. Only prowling thieves and gangs who attacked convoys got anything to eat. And so Jean, tumbling to it, as he put it, took Maurice with him to the bridge so that they too could lie in wait for food.
It was already four in the afternoon, and they had still had nothing to eat on this lovely sunny Thursday, when to their great joy they suddenly caught sight of Delaherche. A few of the better-off people in Sedan were managing with much trouble to get an authorization to go and see prisoners and take food to them, and more than once already Maurice had expressed his surprise at having no news of his sister. As soon as they recognized Delaherche a long way off, carrying a basket and with a loaf of bread under each arm, they made a rush, but even then they reached him too late, for there had been such an immediate pushing and shoving that the basket and one of the loaves had stayed in the scrum, been wafted away, done the vanishing trick. And Delaherche hadn’t even noticed.
‘Oh my poor friends,’ he stammered, dumbfounded, deflated, having come with a smile on his lips and the jolly man-to-man tone he adopted in his desire for popularity.
Jean had seized the last loaf and was defending it, and while Maurice and he sat at the roadside and devoured it in great mouthfuls Delaherche told them the news. His wife, thank God, was very well. He was a bit worried about the colonel, who had fallen into a state of great exhaustion, although Madame Delaherche sat with him from morning till night.
‘What about my sister?’ asked Maurice.
‘Oh yes, of course, your sister… She came with me and she carried the two loaves. But she had to stay there on the other side of the canal. The guards would never agree to let her pass… You know the Prussians have absolutely prohibited women from coming into the peninsula.’
Then he told them about Henriette and her vain efforts to see her brother and help him. By chance she had come face to face with cousin Gunther in Sedan – he was a captain in the Prussian Guard. He was going past with his stiff, hard look, pretending not to see her. And she herself, feeling sick as though he were one of her husband’s murderers, had at first quickened her step. But then, in a sudden reversal of mood that she did not understand herself, she had gone back and told him everything about Weiss’s death in a harsh, reproachful voice. On hearing about this horrible death of a relation of his he had simply made a gesture: it was the fortune of war and he might just as well have been killed himself. Hardly any change of expression had shown on his soldier’s face. Then, when she had mentioned her brother,