The Debacle - Emile Zola [261]
trophies of red flags flapped in the wind, he had made the effort to forget everything, and once again was borne away by boundless hopes. And so illusion began again in the crisis atmosphere of a disease at its climax, made up of the lies of some and the starry-eyed faith of others. All through the month of April Maurice was fighting near Neuilly. An early spring brought out the lilacs, and the fighting went on amid the fresh green of the gardens, and National Guards came home at night with bunches of flowers on the ends of their rifles. By now the troops assembled at Versailles were so numerous that they had been formed into two armies, a front line one under the orders of Marshal MacMahon, and a reserve army, commanded by General Vinoy. The Commune on its side had nearly a hundred thousand active National Guards and almost as many militiamen, but only fifty thousand at the most were really fighters. And each day the Versailles tactics became clearer: after Neuilly they had occupied the château of Bécon, then Asnières, simply to close up their line of investment, for they planned to enter by the Point-du-Jour as soon as they could force the rampart by means of convergent fire from the forts of the Mont-Valérien and Issy. The Mont-Valérien was in their hands, and their whole effort was directed at capturing the fort of Issy, which they attacked by utilizing the breastworks made by the Prussians. From mid April the rifle-fire and bombardment were continuous. At Levallois and Neuilly there was non-stop fighting, with snipers firing every minute, day and night. Heavy guns on armoured trucks moved along the Ceinture railway and fired over Levallois at Asnières. But the bombardment was fiercest at Vanves and Issy, and every window in Paris shook, as they had during the worst days of the siege. On 9 May when, after an earlier alarm, the fort of Issy definitely fell into the hands of the Versailles army the defeat of the Commune was inevitable and a panic set in which prompted the wildest excesses.
Maurice approved of the setting up of a Committee of Public Safety. He recalled pages of history – had not the time come for energetic measures if their country was to be saved? Only one of the many acts of violence had really given him a secret pang of sorrow, and that was the overthrowing of the Vendôme column, and he reproached himself for that as though it were a childish weakness, for he still had ringing in his ears his grandfather’s
stories of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Wagram and Borodino, and these epic tales thrilled him still. But that the murderer Thiers’s house should be razed to the ground, that they should keep hostages as a safeguard and threat, wasn’t that fair reprisal for the increasing fury of Versailles in its shelling of Paris, where shells were smashing in roofs and killing women? The black lust of destruction was mounting in him as the awakening from his dream drew near. If the ideal of justice and vengeance were to be crushed in bloodshed, well, let the earth open and be transformed in one of those cosmic upheavals by which life has been renewed! Let Paris collapse and burn like a huge sacrificial fire rather than be given back to its vices, miseries and the old social system corrupted with abominable injustice! And he indulged in another bleak dream, the gigantic city in ashes, nothing left on both sides of the river but smoking embers, the wound cauterized by fire, an unspeakable, unparalleled catastrophe out of which a new people would emerge. So the tales going round excited him more and more: whole neighbourhoods mined, the catacombs filled with gunpowder,