The Debacle - Emile Zola [242]
At first Delaherche had a great deal to put up with from the soldiers and officers billeted on him. Men of all sorts of nationalities tramped through his home, with pipes in their mouths. Every night there suddenly fell upon the town, without warning, two thousand men, three thousand men – infantry, cavalry, artillery – and although these men only had a right to shelter and fire, you often had to run about and find them food. The rooms where they slept were left in a revoltingly filthy state. Often the officers came in drunk and were more unbearable than the men. Yet discipline was so strict that acts of violence or pillage were rare. In the whole of Sedan there were only two women known to have been raped. It was only later, when Paris resisted, that they made their domination brutally felt, for they were exasperated that the struggle looked like going on for ever, and were always afraid of a mass uprising and the savage warfare declared on them by the guerrillas.
Delaherche had just had to have a commanding officer in the cavalry who slept in his boots and left behind filth even on the mantelpiece, when Captain von Gartlauben arrived in his house one pouring wet night in the second half of September. The first hour was pretty rough. He talked at the top of his voice, demanded the best room, clanking his sword as he came up the stairs. But once he saw Gilberte he went very formal, shut himself up in his room, passed people stiffly and bowed politely. He lived in constant adulation because everyone knew that a word from him to the colonel in command at Sedan would be enough to get a requisition mitigated or a man released. Recently his uncle, the Governor-General at Rheims, had issued a coldly ferocious proclamation declaring a state of siege and punishing with the death penalty any person helping the enemy, whether as a spy or by causing German troops to take the wrong route when they were responsible for transporting them, or by destroying bridges and cannon or damaging telegraph wires and railways. The enemy meant the French, and the hearts of the people were outraged when they read the big white poster on the door of the headquarters which made a crime out of their anguish and hopes. It was so hard to learn about fresh victories of the Germans through hurrahs from the garrison! Every day brought its own grief, soldiers lit big bonfires, sang and caroused all through the night, while the population, now forced to be indoors by nine, listened in their darkened houses, beside themselves with uncertainty and guessing it meant yet another disaster. It was in one of these situations, towards mid October, that Captain von Gartlauben showed the first sign of some delicacy of mind. Since that morning a new hope had been born in Sedan, for there was a rumour of a great success for the army of the Loire on its way to relieve Paris. But so many times already the best news had turned into tidings of disaster! And indeed by that evening it was known that the Bavarian army had taken Orleans. In the rue Maqua, in a house opposite the mill, some soldiers were bellowing so loud that the captain, seeing Gilberte looking very upset, went and stopped them, for he himself thought that all this row was uncalled for.