The Debacle - Emile Zola [206]
‘Oh, look!’
They had heard a splash, and then they saw Lapoulle, who had made up his mind to drop into the river, having thrown off his cape so as to be freer in his movements, and his shirt was clearly visible as a light patch moving on the dark current. He began to swim and slowly went upstream, no doubt looking for a suitable place to land, but on the opposite bank the slender outlines of the motionless sentries could clearly be seen. A sudden flash tore through the darkness and the sound of a shot echoed as far as the rocks of Montimont. The water merely swirled as though a pair of oars were badly churning it up. That was all, and Lapoulle’s body, the white patch, was left to float gently downstream.
The next day, Saturday, at dawn, Jean took Maurice back to the camp of the 106th with the fresh hope that they would leave that day. But there were no orders, and it looked as though their regiment had been forgotten. Many had gone and the peninsula was emptying, and those left behind were falling into black depression. For eight long days minds had been getting more and more unhinged in this hell. The rain had stopped, but the pitiless glaring sun had only changed the kind of torture. The heat wave put the finishing touch to the men’s exhaustion and bade fair to turn the cases of dysentery into an alarming epidemic. The dung and urine of all this army of sick men filled the air with the vilest stenches. It was now impossible to walk along the Meuse or the canal, so overpowering was the stink of drowned horses and men rotting among the reeds. In the fields the horses that had died of starvation were now decomposing, and the pestilential smell was so violent that the Prussians, who were beginning to be afraid for themselves as well, had brought some picks and shovels and were forcing the prisoners to bury the bodies.
And yet that Saturday saw the end of the famine. As they were fewer and provisions were coming in from all directions, they went abruptly from extreme deprivation to the most generous abundance. They had as much bread, meat and even wine as they wanted, and ate from morn till night enough to kill themselves. Night came and they were still eating, and went on until the next morning. Many died of it.
All day long Jean had been wholly taken up with watching Maurice who, he felt, was capable of any folly. He had been drinking and was talking of clouting a German officer so as to be taken away. And in the evening, having discovered a free corner in a cellar in the outbuildings of La Tour à Glaire, Jean thought it might be wise to go and sleep there with his friend who might be calmed down by a good night’s rest. But it was the most terrible night of their stay, a night of sheer horror during which they never closed their eyes. The cellar was full of other soldiers, and two of them were lying in the same corner as them, dying of dysentery which had drained their bodies. As soon as it was quite dark they kept up a continuous inarticulate moaning, with disjointed cries that became a death-struggle of increasing intensity. In the pitch darkness this death-rattle was so horrible that the other men lying near-by who wanted to get to sleep lost their tempers and shouted to the dying men to shut up. They did not hear, and the death-rattle went on, swelled up and drowned everything else, while from the outside came the drunken bawlings of comrades who were still gorging, still not getting enough.
Then a time of distress set in for Maurice. He had tried to get away from this dreadful painful moaning which brought him out into a cold sweat of anguish, but as he was feeling his way on to his feet he had trodden on somebody’s limbs