The Debacle - Emile Zola [38]
‘Well, fancy meeting you, Monsieur Maurice!’
But he was in no hurry and led the steaming horses round to the stable, giving a fatherly look, especially at his own. Love of horses, acquired no doubt in childhood when he led the animals to the plough, had made him choose the cavalry.
‘We’ve just come from Monthois, over ten leagues at one go,’ he went on when he came back, ‘and Zephir will be glad to have something.’
Zephir was his horse. But he himself refused to have anything to eat and just accepted a coffee. He was waiting for his officer, who was waiting for the Emperor. It might be five minutes or two hours. So his officer had told him to put the horses in the shade. And when Maurice’s curiosity was aroused and he tried to find out more, he shrugged it off:
‘I dunno… some errand of course… papers to deliver.’
Rochas looked with a kindly eye at the cavalryman, whose uniform brought back his memories of Africa.
‘Where were you over there, my boy?’
‘Medeah, sir.’
Medeah! That made them fall to chattering as friends, in spite of rank. Prosper had taken to this life of continual alarms, always on horseback, off to battle as some people go off to the shoot, for some big battue of Arabs. They had one messtin for a gang of ten men, and each gang was a family: one did the cooking, another did the washing, the others set up the tent, looked after the animals, kept the weapons polished. They rode morning and afternoon, loaded with enormous kit, with suns shining down like lead. In the evening they lit big fires to keep off the mosquitoes, and round them they sang the songs of France. Often in the middle of the starlit night they had to get up and pacify the horses who, irritated by the hot wind, would suddenly bite each other and pull out their tethering posts with furious whinnyings. And then there was the coffee, lovely coffee, which was quite a business to make – they crushed it in a messtin and strained it through a red uniform belt. But there were dark days too, far from any inhabited place and facing the enemy. And then no more singing, no more fun. Sometimes they suffered terribly from lack of sleep, from thirst and hunger. Never mind, they loved this existence of improvisation and adventure, this war of skirmishes, just the kind to bring out the glory of personal bravery, and as much fun as taking over a desert island, enlivened by forays, wholesale theft and looting and the petty pilfering of scroungers, whose legendary feats made everybody laugh, even the generals.
‘Ah,’ said Prosper, coming over quite serious, ‘it isn’t like it was there. Here they fight quite differently.’
Answering a fresh question from Maurice, he told of their disembarking at Toulon and long and difficult journey to Lunéville, where they had heard about Wissembourg and Froeschwiller. After that he wasn’t sure, he got the towns all mixed up: from Nancy to Saint-Mihiel, from Saint-Mihiel to Metz. On the 14th there must have been a big battle, the horizon was on fire, but all he had seen was four Uhlans behind a hedge. On the 16th more fighting and heavy gunfire from six in the morning, and he had been told that on the 18th the dance had started up again, more terrible still. But the Chasseurs weren’t there then because on the 16th, while they were waiting by the roadside at Gravelotte to go up to the line, the Emperor, tearing off in his carriage, had picked them up to escort him to Verdun. A nice ride that was, forty-two kilometres at the gallop for fear of being cut off by the Prussians at every moment.
‘And what about Bazaine?’ asked Rochas.
‘Bazaine? They say he was jolly glad the Emperor had left him alone.’
But the lieutenant meant was Bazaine coming? Prosper made a vague gesture: how could anyone say? Since the 16th they had been spending the days in marches and counter-marches in the rain, reconnaissances, outposts that had never seen an enemy. Now he was attached to the army of Châlons. His regiment, two others of the Chasseurs