The Debacle - Emile Zola [30]
The truck rushed on and on, bearing its load of men in the thick pipe smoke and stifling fug of crowded bodies, hurling the drunken bawling of obscene songs at the anxious crowds on the stations they passed through and the scared peasants standing along the hedges. On 20 August they were in Paris at the Pantin station, and the same evening off they went again, detraining the next day at Rheims, en route for camp at Châlons.
3
VERY much to his surprise Maurice found that the 106th was detraining at Rheims and had orders to camp there. So they weren’t going to join up with the army at Châlons? And two hours later, when his regiment had piled arms a league out of the town on the Courcelles side in the broad plain along the Aisne-Marne canal, his surprise was still greater as he learned that the whole army of Châlons had been falling back since that morning and was coming to camp at the same place. And indeed, as far as the eye could see, as far as Saint-Thierry and La Neuvillette and even beyond the Laon road, tents were going up and the fires of four army corps were blazing by evening. Obviously the plan that had prevailed was to take up a position before Paris and wait for the Prussians. He was very pleased about it. Wasn’t it wiser?
That afternoon of the 21st Maurice spent wandering round the camp hunting for news. They were quite free, and discipline seemed still more relaxed, and men just came and went as they liked. Eventually he calmly went back to Rheims where he wanted to cash a draft for a hundred francs he had had from his sister Henriette. In a café he heard a sergeant talking about the mutinous spirit of the eighteen battalions of the Garde Mobile de la Seine, which had been sent back to Paris – the sixth in particular had almost killed their officers. Over in the camp generals were being insulted every day, and since Froeschwiller soldiers weren’t even saluting Marshal MacMahon. Voices filled the café and a violent argument broke out between two peaceful-looking gentlemen about the number of men the marshal would have under his command. One talked of 300,000, that was silly. The other more reasonably named the four army corps: the 12th brought up to strength with difficulty in the camp with the help of infantry regiments and a division of marines; the 1st, remnants of which had been coming in since 14 August, and which they were re-forming as best they could; and finally the 5th, defeated without a fight and scattered in a rout, and the 7th, which had just arrived, also demoralized and minus its first division which it had just rediscovered in odd units at Rheims – a hundred and twenty thousand men at the most, counting reserve cavalry and the Bonnemain and Margueritte divisions. But the sergeant who had joined in the argument treated this army with withering scorn as a rag-bag of men with no cohesion, a flock of innocents led to the slaughter by fools, and the two gentlemen, afraid of being compromised, made themselves scarce.
Out in the street Maurice tried to find some newspapers, and stuffed his pockets with all the ones he could buy, reading them as he walked along under the big trees in the magnificent boulevards which surround the town. Where were the German armies, then? They seemed to have got lost. There were probably two on the Metz front: the first under the command of General Steinmetz covering the fortress, the second under Prince Friedrich Karl trying to follow the right bank of the Moselle so as to cut Bazaine’s route to Paris. But the third army, that of the Crown Prince of Prussia, and the victorious army of Wissembourg and Froeschwiller which was pursuing the 1st and 5th corps, where was it really, in the muddle of contradictory reports? Still in camp at Nancy? Had it been threatening Châlons, which would explain their leaving the camp in such haste, burning stores, equipment, forage and all kinds of provisions? And then again more confusion and the most contradictory theories about plans the generals might have. As though he had been cut off