The Debacle - Emile Zola [26]
At first the soldiers began to laugh. What a face, silly old geezer! But then the words came through as the old woman shouted:
‘Swine! Blackguards! Cowards! Cowards!’
Her voice screamed higher and higher as she spat the insult of cowardice right in their faces. And the laughter died, and a chill ran through the ranks. The men lowered their heads and looked away.
‘Cowards! Cowards! Cowards!’
Suddenly she seemed to grow taller still. She drew herself up, gaunt and tragic in her shabby old dress, moving her skinny arm from west to east with such an immense gesture that it seemed to fill the heavens.
‘Cowards, the Rhine isn’t that way… The Rhine is over there, cowards, cowards!’
At last the march was resumed, and at that moment Maurice caught sight of Jean’s face and saw that his eyes were filled with tears. A shudder came over him and his own suffering became still more acute when he realized that even those oafs had felt the insult which they didn’t deserve but had to swallow. Everything was falling to pieces in his poor aching head, and he never knew how he got to the end of that day’s march.
The 7th corps had taken the whole day to cover the twenty-three kilometres between Dannemarie and Belfort, and once again night was falling and it was very late when the troops finally bivouacked under the walls of the fortress at the very place from which they had set off to march against the foe four days before. In spite of the late hour and their extreme fatigue the soldiers insisted on lighting their cookhouse fires and making some stew. At last, for the first time since their departure, they were having something hot to eat. Round the fires, in the cool of the evening, noses were buried in messtins and grunts of satisfaction were beginning to be heard when a rumour ran round that astounded the camp. Two new dispatches had come in one after the other: the Prussians had not crossed the Rhine at Markolsheim and there wasn’t a single Prussian left in Huningue. The crossing of the Rhine at Markolsheim, the bridge of boats thrown across by the light of huge electric lamps, in fact all these alarming tales were nothing but a nightmare, an unexplained hallucination on the part of the sub-prefect of Schlestadt. And as for the army corps threatening Huningue, the famous army corps of the Black Forest before which Alsace trembled, it was merely composed of a tiny detachment from Württemberg – two battalions and one squadron – which by means of skilful tactics, repeated marches and counter-marches, sudden unexpected appearances, had given the impression that thirty or forty thousand men were involved. To think that that very evening they had almost blown up the Dannemarie viaduct! Twenty leagues of rich country had been laid waste for no reason whatever, in the most idiotic of panics, and at the thought of what they had seen during that deplorable day – populations fleeing in terror, driving their flocks up into the mountains, the stream of carts loaded with chattels flowing towards the town and mingled with multitudes of women and children – the soldiers lost their tempers and exclaimed with ugly sneers.
‘No, really, it’s beyond a joke!’ spluttered Loubet with his mouth full, waving his spoon. ‘What! Is that the enemy we were marched against? Nobody there!… Twelve leagues forwards, twelve leagues backwards, and