The Debacle - Emile Zola [226]
‘Never mind, if there are no soldiers left some more will spring up. Metz has surrendered, Paris itself might give in, but France will not be finished. Yes, as our countryfolk say, if the body’s still in good shape we’ll pull through.’
But he was clearly forcing himself to hope. He spoke of the new army being formed on the Loire which, it was true, had not made a very good beginning near Arthenay, but it would find its fighting feet and march to the help of Paris. He was particularly excited by the proclamations of Gambetta, who had got away from Paris in a balloon on 7 October and two days later set himself up in Tours, calling all citizens to arms and using a style at one and the same time so virile and so moderate that the whole country was acquiescing in this dictatorship for the public safety. And wasn’t there also a question of raising another army in the north and yet another in the east, conjuring soldiers up out of the ground by the sheer power of faith? In fact the awakening of the provinces, an indomitable will to create whatever was lacking, to fight on to the last sou and the last drop of blood.
‘After all,’ the doctor concluded as he stood up to go, ‘I’ve often given up patients who were back on their feet a week later!’
Jean smiled.
‘Doctor, cure me quickly so that I can go back to my post.’
Nevertheless Henriette and he remained very gloomy after this bad news. That same evening there was a snowstorm, and the next day Henriette came back very upset from the hospital and said that Gutmann was dead. This very cold spell was decimating the wounded and emptying rows of beds. The poor dumb creature, with his tongue cut out, had been moaning for two days in his last agony. During his last hours she had stayed by his bed, for he gazed at her with such imploring eyes. He was talking to her with his tear-dimmed eyes, perhaps telling her his real name and that of the far-off village in which a woman and her children were waiting. And he had departed unknown, trying with his groping fingers to send her a last kiss to thank her once again for all her care. She was the only one who went with him to the cemetery, where the frozen earth, heavy foreign earth, thudded on his deal coffin with lumps of snow.
Then once more, the very next day, Henriette said as she came in:
‘Poor Kid is dead.’
For this one she was in tears.
‘If you could have seen him in his delirium! He called me Mum, Mum! And held out his arms so affectionately that I had to take him on my lap. Oh, poor fellow, his sufferings had taken so much out of him that he weighed no more than a little boy… And I rocked him so that he could die happy. Yes, I rocked him, he called me his mother, and I was only a few years older than him… He cried and I couldn’t help crying myself, and I still am…’
Her voice gave out and she had to stop for a moment.
‘When he died he whispered over and over again those two words he used of himself: Poor Kid, Poor Kid. Oh yes, all these brave fellows are poor kids, and some of them are so young, and your horrible war tears off their limbs and makes them suffer so much before it throws them into the ground!’
Every day now Henriette came back like this, shattered by some death-scene, and this suffering of others drew the two of them closer still during the weary hours they spent so much alone together in that big, quiet room. Yet they were very beautiful hours for, as they gradually came to know each other, there had developed between their two hearts an affection which they thought was fraternal. His serious mind had risen to new heights during their long intimacy and she, seeing him so good and sensible, forgot that he was a humble man who had followed the plough before becoming a soldier. They understood each other perfectly and made an ideal couple, as Silvine said with her grave smile. Nor had any awkwardness arisen between them, and she went on attending to his leg without ever turning away those candid eyes. Always in her black widow’s weeds, she seemed to have ceased to be a woman.