The Debacle - Emile Zola [219]
area on the right bank of the Moselle. But what valuable time lost, instead of speeding up the retreat on Paris that was to become so difficult later! The Emperor had had to hand over the command to Marshal Bazaine, from whom everybody expected victory. Then, on the 14th, Borny, where the army was attacked exactly when it was at last making up its mind to cross to the left bank, with two German armies against it, that of Steinmetz, standing immovable opposite the fortified camp as a threat, and that of Friedrich Karl, who had crossed the river higher upstream and was coming along the left bank to cut Bazaine off from the rest of France, Borny, the first shots of which were not fired until three in the afternoon, Borny, the victory with no morrow, which left the French corps masters of their positions but immobilized them, straddled across the Moselle, and which the turning movement of the second German army had completed. Then on the 16th, Rezonville, all the French army corps now at last on the left bank, with only the 3rd and 4th in the rear, delayed in the appalling traffic-jam at the crossing of the Etain and Mars-la-Tour roads, the daring attack by the Prussian cavalry and artillery, already cutting these roads in the morning, the slow and confused battle which, until two o’clock, Bazaine could have won as he only had to repulse a handful of men in front
of him, but which in the end he lost owing to his inexplicable fear of being cut off from Metz. The immense struggle covered leagues of hills and plains in which the French, attacked in front and on the flank, had performed miracles so as not to advance, thereby leaving the enemy time to join up and themselves working for the Prussian plan, which was to make them turn back to the other side of the river. And finally on the 18th, after the return to the original position in front of the fortified area, came Saint-Privat, the supreme struggle over a front of thirteen kilometres, two hundred thousand Germans, with seven hundred guns against a hundred and twenty thousand French with only five hundred pieces of equipment, the Germans facing Germany, and the French France, as though the invaders had become the invaded, in this strange pivoting that had come about. From two o’clock onwards there was the most terrible mêlée in which the Prussian Guard was repulsed and cut to pieces and Bazaine was for a long time winning, strong in his unshakable left wing, until towards evening when his weaker right wing was compelled to evacuate Saint-Privat amid horrible carnage, involving
with it the whole army, defeated, thrown back on Metz and from then onwards locked in a ring of iron.
Over and over again as Henriette was reading Jean broke in and said:
‘Well, and all the way from Rheims we were expecting Bazaine!’
The dispatch from the marshal dated the 19th, after Saint-Privat, in which he talked of resuming his retreat via Montmédy, and which had determined the advance of the army of Châlons, now appeared to be nothing but the report of a beaten general anxious to tone down his defeat, and only later, on the 29th, when the news of the approach of a rescuing army reached him through the Prussian lines, had he tried one last effort at Noiseville on the right bank, but so half-heartedly that on 1 September, the very day on which the army