The Debacle - Emile Zola [36]
Coutard and Picot were still violently resentful in their ragged uniforms, grey with dust, as they cut slices of bread and great hunks of cheese, trying to get out of their minds their nightmare memories, there under the pretty trellis with its ripe clusters of grapes pierced by golden shafts of sunlight. Now they came to the fearful rout that had followed: regiments in disorder, demóralized, famished, streaming across the fields, and main roads jammed with a dreadful confusion of men, horses, waggons, cannons, all the wreckage of a shattered army lashed along by the frantic wind of panic. Since they had not had the sense to fall back properly and defend the passes through the Vosges, where ten thousand men could have halted a hundred thousand, they should at least have blown up the bridges and blocked the tunnels. But no, the generals galloped on like mad, and everybody was in such a dazed state, losers and winners alike, that for a time the two armies had lost touch in a blind-man’s-buff pursuit in broad daylight, MacMahon scurrying for Lunéville while the Crown Prince of Prussia was hunting for him in the Vosges. On the 7th the remnants of the 1st corps were passing through Saverne like a muddy river in spate bearing away bits of wreckage. On the 8th, at Sarrebourg, the 5th corps tumbled into the 1st like one raging torrent into another; it was in flight too, without having fought, bearing along with it its commander, the pitiful General de Failly, quite unhinged because people were tracing the responsibility for the defeat back to his inaction. On the 9th and 10th the stampede went on, a mad rush that never even glanced behind. On the 11th, in driving rain, they came down towards Bayon in order to avoid Nancy because of a false rumour that that city was in enemy hands. On the 12th they camped at Haroué, the 13th at Vicherey and on the 14th they reached Neufchâteau, where at last the railway gathered up this moving mass of men and shovelled them for three whole days into trains to transport them to Châlons. Twenty-four hours after the departure of the last train the Prussians arrived.
‘Oh, what a bloody balls-up!’ was Picot’s conclusion. ‘How we had to use our legs!… And us left behind in hospital!’
Coutard was emptying the rest of the bottle into his own glass and his mate’s.
‘Yes, we had to do a bunk and we’re running still… Oh well, we feel a bit better all the same because we can drink to the health of those who haven’t been done in.’
Then Maurice understood. After the idiotic surprise of Wissembourg the crushing defeat of Froeschwiller was the flash of lightning whose sinister light had suddenly shown up the terrible truth. We were unprepared, with second-rate artillery, less manpower than we had been given to believe, incompetent generals, and the much despised enemy emerged strong, solid and numberless, with perfect discipline and tactics. The thin screen of our seven army corps, stretched out all the way from Metz to Strasbourg, had been dented in by the three German armies as though by three powerful wedges. Hence we were alone, and neither Austria nor Italy would come in, and the Emperor’s plan had foundered because of the slowness of the operations and the incompetence of the officers. Even fate worked against us, accumulating tiresome accidents and awkward coincidences, facilitating the Prussians’ plan which was to cut our armies in two and roll one part back on Metz to keep it isolated from France while they would march on Paris after destroying the remainder. Now it could be seen to be mathematically