The Debacle - Emile Zola [239]
It was at that moment that Jean made up his mind to open the door of his room gently. Although he never bothered about the sounds in the house, he was surprised this time by the comings and goings and loud voices he heard. And so it was into his quiet room that Silvine tumbled sobbing and shaken in such a paroxysm of distress that at first he could not make any sense out of the disconnected words she muttered through clenched teeth. She kept repeating the same gesture, as though she were thrusting aside an atrocious vision. But at length he did understand, and he also pieced together the story of the ambush, the mother standing by, the child clinging to her skirt, the face of the father with his throat cut and life-blood ebbing away; it froze him, and the heart of this peasant and soldier was rent with anguish. Oh war, abominable war, that turned all these poor people into wild beasts, sowed dreadful hatreds, the son splashed with his father’s blood, perpetuating national hatred and doomed to grow up in time to execrate his father’s family, whom some day perhaps he would go and exterminate! Murderous seed sown to produce appalling harvests!
Silvine collapsed on to a chair, wildly kissing Chariot who was crying on her breast, and she repeated on and on the same sentence, the cry of her bleeding heart.
‘Oh my poor child, they’ll never call you a Prussian again!… Oh my poor child, they’ll never call you a Prussian again!’
Down in the kitchen old Fouchard had arrived. He had rapped on the door with the master’s authority, and they had decided to let him in. And certainly he had had an unpleasant surprise, finding this dead man on his table and a tub full of blood underneath. Naturally, with his not very patient nature, he had lost his temper.
‘Look here, you bloody tikes, couldn’t you have done your dirty work outside? Do you take my house for a dunghill, coming and fouling up the furniture with things like this?’
As Sambuc began making apologies and explanations he grew more alarmed and more annoyed.
‘What the hell do you suppose I’m going to do with this dead body of yours? Do you think it’s the way to behave, to come and land a dead body on someone without thinking what he’ll do with it? Suppose a patrol were to come in, I should be in a nice pickle! You lot couldn’t care less, you never asked yourselves whether it would cost me my life. Well, by Christ, you’ll have me to reckon with if you don’t take your corpse away at once! Do you hear, take it by the head or by the feet or anyhow you like, but don’t you let it hang about here, and don’t let there be a hair left three minutes from now!’
In the end Sambuc got a sack from old Fouchard, much as the latter’s heart bled at having to give something else away. He chose it from among the worst he could find, saying that a sack with holes in was still too good for a Prussian. But Cabasse and Ducat had a terrible job to get Goliath into the sack – his body was too big, too long, and the feet stuck out. Then they took him outside and loaded him on to the barrow they used to carry the bread.
‘I’ll give you my word of honour,’ declared Sambuc, ‘that we’ll chuck him into the Meuse.’
‘Above all,’ insisted Fouchard, ‘tie two big stones to the feet so that the bugger doesn’t come up again!’
The little procession disappeared over the snow into the black night, and the only sound to be heard was the melancholy squeaking of the barrow.
Sambuc always swore by the head of his father that he really had tied two heavy stones to the feet. Yet the body came up and the Prussians discovered it three days later at Pont-Maugis, caught in the reeds, and their fury was terrible when they found in the sack this dead man who had been bled from the neck like a porker. There were terrible threats, harsh