The Debacle - Emile Zola [44]
The little clock-tower at Dontrien struck six and Loubet shouted:
‘Supper-time!’
The squad solemnly sat round in a ring. At the last moment Loubet had discovered some vegetables at a near-by peasant’s. Complete banquet: a stew smelling of carrots and leeks, as soft on the stomach as velvet! Spoons banged hard in the little messtins. Then Jean, who was serving, had to share out the beef that day with the strictest impartiality, for eyes were sharp and there would have been grumblings if one portion had looked bigger than another. They mopped up everything and were up to their eyes in it.
‘Oh Christ,’ declared Chouteau, lying back when he had finished, ‘well, anyhow that’s better than a kick up the backside!’
Maurice, too, was very full and very happy, having stopped thinking about his foot where the pain had gone off a bit. He was now quite reconciled to this brutish comradeship that brought him down to the common level of mateyness which comes from sharing the physical needs of life. And that night, too, he slept the same deep sleep as his five tentmates, all in a heap together and glad to be warm in these heavy dews. It should be added that Lapoulle, egged on by Loubet, had gone and pinched great armfuls of straw from a near-by rick, and in this the six chaps snored away as in a feather bed. Under the clear night sky, from Aubérive to Heutrégiville, all along the pleasant banks of the Suippe which meanders between the willows, the camp fires of the hundred thousand men lit up the five leagues of plain like a trail of stars.
At sunrise coffee was made by crushing the beans in a messtin with a rifle-butt and throwing them into boiling water, then the grouts were precipitated to the bottom by adding a drop of cold water. That morning the sun rose with regal magnificence amid great clouds of purple and gold, but even Maurice no longer paid any attention to these spectacles of horizon and sky, and only Jean, the discerning countryman, looked anxiously at the red dawn which warned of rain. And, as just before leaving there had been an issue of the bread baked the day before and the squad had received three long loaves, he went for Loubet and Pache who had tied them outside their packs. But tents were folded and bags tied up and they took no notice. It was striking six by all the village churches when the whole army moved off, gaily resuming its advance in the early morning confidence of a new day.
In order to rejoin the Rheims–Vouziers road the 106th cut through almost at once on cross-country roads and climbed through fields for over an hour. Below them and to the north they could see Bétheniville, where it was said the Emperor had spent the night. When they were on the Vouziers road the plains of the previous day began again, the poor fields of barren Champagne rolled on and on with heartbreaking monotony. Now the Arne, a miserable little stream, ran along to their left, while to the right the bare fields stretched on for ever, prolonging the horizon with their flat lines. They went through villages, Saint-Clément with a single line of houses winding on each side of the roadway, Saint-Pierre, a bigger place with prosperous folk who had barricaded their doors and windows. At about ten came the main halt near another village, Saint-Etienne, where the soldiers were over-joyed to find some tobacco still left. The 7th corps had been divided into several columns and the 106th was marching alone with nothing behind it but a battalion of Chasseurs and the reserve artillery, and Maurice looked back in vain at each bend of the road for the immense column which had interested him the day before: the herds had gone and there was nothing but guns rolling along, magnified by these bare plains and looking like black, long-legged grasshoppers.
Past Saint-Etienne the road became atrocious, climbing by gentle humps amid the vast barren fields in which the only growth was the eternal pinewoods with their black foliage, so depressing against