The Debacle - Emile Zola [34]
going on at ten o’clock at night. Wagram, the Austrians out to cut us off from the Danube and constantly reinforcing their right wing to beat Masséna who, though wounded, went on commanding from an open carriage, while Napoleon, crafty Titan, let them get on with it and then suddenly opened a terrible bombardment with a hundred pieces of artillery on their depleted centre, throwing it back over a league whilst the right, appalled at its isolation, gave way before Masséna, the now victorious Masséna, and carried the rest of their army away in the devastation of a broken dam. And finally Borodino, when the bright sun of Austerlitz shone for the last time, a terrifying confusion of men, a turmoil of numbers and obstinate courage, hillocks taken under incessant fire, redoubts carried by storm with naked swords, ceaseless counter-offensives disputing every inch of ground, such fanatical bravery by the Russian guards that victory was only achieved by the furious charges of Murat, the thunder of three hundred cannon firing together and the valour of Ney, whose triumph made him prince of the day. Whatever the battle, the flags floated with the same swirl of glory on the evening air and the same cries of Vive Napoléon re-echoed as the camp fires were lit on conquered positions, everywhere France was at home as a conqueror and carried her invincible eagles from end to end of Europe. She had only to plant her foot on a foreign realm and the defeated peoples were swallowed up in the earth.
Maurice was finishing his cutlet, more intoxicated by so much glory rising up and singing in his memory than by the white wine twinkling in his glass, when his eye fell on two soldiers in tatters and covered with mud, like bandits sick of roaming the roads, and he heard them asking the waitress for information about the exact whereabouts of the regiments camping along the canal.
He called them over.
‘Come over here, mates… But you belong to the 7th corps!’
‘Yes of course, first division! Oh I can tell you I fucking well do! And if you want to know, I was at Froeschwiller, where it wasn’t cold, you can take it from me!… And my mate here is in the 1st corps and he was at Wissembourg, another hell of a place.’
They told him their stories, how they were swept on in panic and rout, stayed in the bottom of a trench half dead with fatigue and actually both slightly wounded, and after that they had dragged along in the wake of the army and were obliged to stop in towns with exhausting attacks of fever, and were now so far behind the rest that they had only just arrived, feeling a bit recovered and now looking for their squads.
Deeply touched, Maurice, on the point of attacking a piece of Gruyère, noticed their eyes staring voraciously at his plate.
‘Mademoiselle, some more cheese, please, and bread and wine… You’ll join me, won’t you, mates? I’m having a blow-out. Here’s to your very good health.’
They sat down, thrilled. But he felt a chill come over him as he looked at these disarmed soldiers in their pitiful state, with their red trousers and capes so tied up with string and patched with so many odds and ends that they looked like rag-pickers or gypsies wearing out the clothes picked up on some battlefield.
‘Oh fuck it, yes,’ the taller one began again, with his mouth full, ‘it wasn’t at all funny there… You have to have seen it – you tell him, Coutard.’
The smaller one told him, waving his bread about by way of illustration.
‘I was just washing my shirt while they were doing the stew . . Just think of it, a filthy hole, a real crater with woods all round that had let those Prussian bastards creep up on all fours without anybody even suspecting… Then at seven, lo and behold, shells falling into our saucepans. Christ! We didn’t give them