The Debacle - Emile Zola [251]
‘Good-bye, good-bye.’
That night Henriette was back in Remilly and on duty at the hospital. During her long vigil she was suddenly seized with a terrible fit of crying, and she cried and cried, on and on, trying to stifle her grief between her clasped hands.
7
THE very day after Sedan the two German armies resumed the movement of their floods of men towards Paris, the army of the Meuse coming round to the north from the valley of the Marne and the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia crossing the Seine at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges and making for Versailles round the south of the city. On that warm September morning when General Ducrot, who had been put in command of the 14th corps, which had only just been formed, decided to attack the Crown Prince’s army while it was executing its flanking march, Maurice, in camp in the woods to the left of Meudon with his new regiment, the 115th, only received marching orders when disaster was already certain. Just one or two shells had been enough, and a frightful panic had broken out in a battalion of Zouaves made up of recruits, and the rest of the troops had been swept along in such disarray that the stampede never stopped until they were inside the Paris fortifications, where the alarm was intense. All forward positions ahead of the forts to the south were lost, and that same evening the last thread linking the city to France, the telegraph line of the Western Railway, was cut. Paris was separated from the rest of the world.
It was an evening of terrible distress for Maurice. If the Germans had dared, they could have camped that night in the Place du Carrousel. But they were strictly prudent people, resolved to have a
siege according to the rules, and they had already plotted the exact points of investment, with the cordon of the army of the Meuse to the north from Croissy to the Marne, passing through Epinay, and the other cordon of the third army to the south from Chennevières to Châtillon and Bougival, while the Prussian General Headquarters, with King William, Bismarck and von Moltke, controlled everything from Versailles. This gigantic blockade, believed to be impossible, was an accomplished fact. This city, with its bastioned wall eight and a half leagues in circumference, with its fifteen forts and six detached redoubts, was about to find itself so to speak in prison. The defending army consisted only of the 13th corps, rescued and brought back by General Vinoy, and the 14th, still being formed under General Ducrot, making between them a strength of eighty thousand soldiers, to which should be added the fourteen thousand marines, fifteen thousand volunteers, a hundred and fifteen thousand militia, apart from the three hundred thousand National Guards spread over the nine sectors of the ramparts. There might well be a whole people under arms, but there was a lack of
seasoned and disciplined soldiers. Men were being equipped and drilled, and Paris was one huge armed camp. Preparations for defence grew more feverish hour by hour, roads were closed, houses in the military zone demolished, the two hundred heavy-calibre guns and the two thousand smaller ones all in use, with others being cast, a whole arsenal was rising out of the ground thanks to the great patriotic inspiration of the minister, Dorian. After the breaking off of negotiations at Ferrières when Jules Favre had made known the demands of Bismarck – cession of Alsace, internment of the garrison at Strasbourg, indemnity of three milliards – a howl of rage went up and the continuation of the war and resistance were acclaimed as indispensable conditions of the survival of France. Even with no hope of victory Paris had to defend herself so that the homeland might live.
One Sunday in late September Maurice was sent on fatigue duty right across the city, and the streets he went along and the open spaces he crossed filled him with new hope. Since the rout at Châtillon he felt that courage had risen to face the great task. Yes, the Paris he had known, so mad