The Debacle - Emile Zola [209]
When they went through Bazeilles Jean and Maurice thought of Weiss and looked for the ashes of the little house that had been so valiantly defended. At the Camp of Hell they had been told about the devastation of the village, the fires and the massacres, but what they saw was worse than their most horrible dreams. After twelve days the heaps of ruins were still smoking. Tottering walls had fallen and not ten houses were left intact. They did find some consolation in the numbers of barrows and carts they saw full of Bavarian helmets and rifles picked up after the battle. This proof that they had killed a lot of these murderers and fire-raisers was some comfort.
The halt for lunch was to be at Douzy. They did not reach there without considerable suffering because the prisoners tired very quickly in their half-starved condition. Even the ones who had blown themselves out with food the day before were giddy, liverish and tired; for, far from restoring their lost strength, this gluttony had weakened them still more. And so when they stopped in a meadow to the left of the village the poor devils dropped on the grass, too dispirited to eat. There was no wine, and kind women who had tried to come with bottles were chased away by the guards. One of them fell and twisted her ankle, and there were cries and tears and a harrowing scene while the Prussians, who had confiscated the bottles, drank them. This pity and kindness of the countryfolk towards the wretched soldiers who were being taken away into captivity was manifest at every step, but it was said that they treated the generals with surly rudeness. Here in Douzy only a day or two earlier the inhabitants had booed a party of generals going on parole to Pont-à-Mousson. The highways were not safe for officers – men in overalls, escaped soldiers, possibly deserters, went for them with pitchforks and tried to kill them as if they were cowards and traitors, and this legend of the betrayal was still, twenty years later, to condemn all officers who had worn epaulettes to the execration of this part of the country.
Maurice and Jean ate half their loaf, which they were lucky enough to wash down with a sip or two of the brandy with which a friendly farmer had managed to fill their bottle. But the terrible thing was to set off again. They were to sleep at Mouzon, and although it was a short lap the effort involved seemed too dreadful. Men couldn’t get up without crying out because the shortest rest made their weary limbs go so stiff. Many had bleeding feet and took off their boots so as to go on walking. They were still ravaged by dysentery, and one fell out after the first kilometre and had to be left propped against a bank. Two others collapsed by a hedge a little further on, and were only picked up that evening by an old woman. Everybody was staggering and using sticks which the Prussians had let them cut at the edge of a wood – in derision, no doubt. They were now a mere rabble of tramps, covered with sores, emaciated and gasping for breath. And the brutalities went on, men who fell out, even for a call of nature, being chased back with blows. The escort platoon bringing up the rear had orders to hurry along any laggards by sticking a bayonet up their behinds. A sergeant refused to go any further, and the captain made two men seize him under the arms and drag him along until he decided to walk again. That was the worst torment of all, the face you wanted to hit, the little bald-headed officer who took advantage of his good French to insult the prisoners in their own language in biting, lashing phrases like strokes with a whip.
‘Oh!’ Maurice raged again. ‘Oh to get hold of that man and let out all his blood, drop by drop!’
He was at the end of his tether and more sick with anger than with fatigue. Everything was getting him down, even the harsh blarings of the Prussian trumpets, which so upset him physically