The Debacle - Emile Zola [21]
So it was that Jean found himself in the rear, lost in a sunken lane with his squad, that he was determined not to let out of his sight. The 106th had vanished and there was not a single man or even officer of the company left. There were only isolated soldiers, a mob of unknown men, worn out at the very start of the day’s march, each going at his own pace wherever the paths took him. The sun was killing, it was terribly hot, and their packs, made heavier by the tents and complicated gear which distended them, weighed cruelly on their shoulders. Many of them were unaccustomed to carrying a pack, and in any case they were hampered by their thick service capes that felt as though they were made of lead. All of a sudden a pallid young soldier, whose eyes were filled with tears, stopped and threw his kit into a ditch with a heavy sigh of relief, like the deep breathing of a dying man coming back to life.
‘There’s somebody with some sense,’ murmured Chouteau.
But he went on marching, with his back bent beneath the load. However, when two others had unburdened themselves also, he could hold out no longer.
‘Oh, to hell with it,’ he said.
And with a jerk of his shoulder he pitched his pack against a bank. No thank you! Twenty-five kilos on his spine, he’d had enough! They weren’t beasts of burden, to have to carry all that.
Almost at once Loubet imitated him and forced Lapoulle to do the same. Pache, who made the sign of the cross at every Calvary he came to, loosened the straps and carefully placed all his kit at the foot of a low wall, as though he would be coming back for it. Maurice was the only one still loaded when Jean turned round and saw the men with their shoulders free.
‘Pick up your packs; I’m the one who’ll cop it!’
But although the men were not yet in open revolt they walked on, grim-faced and silent, pushing the corporal ahead of them along the narrow lane.
‘Will you pick up your packs, or I’ll report you!’
It was like a whiplash across Maurice’s face. Report them! This clodhopper was going to report them because some poor devils were seeking relief for their aching muscles! In a fit of blind rage he loosened his straps too, and dropped his pack by the roadside, staring at Jean in defiance.
‘All right,’ said Jean in his sensible voice, for he couldn’t risk starting a fight, ‘we’ll settle this tonight.’
Maurice was having terrible trouble with his feet. The big, hard boots that he was quite unused to had turned his flesh into a bloody mess. He was not very robust, and although he had thrown off his knapsack he still felt a sort of open sore all down his spine from the intolerable rubbing of the kit, he didn’t know which arm to carry his rifle with, and the weight of it was enough to wind him. But he was even more tormented by the moral agony of one of the fits of depression to which he was subject. These would suddenly come over him quite irresistibly, and then he would witness the collapse of his own will-power and give way to evil instincts, abdicate from his real self, and later cry with shame. His misdeeds in Paris had never been anything but mad fits of ‘the other one,’ as he called him, the weakling he turned into in his cowardly moments, and who was capable of the meanest actions. And since he had been dragging along in the scorching sun, in this retreat that was more like a rout, he was nothing but an animal in this lost, wandering herd strung out along the roads. It was the after-effect of defeat, of