The Debacle - Emile Zola [50]
pleased him. Then the awful thing happened: one evening two weeks later Silvine, who had sworn to wait for him, found herself in the arms of a farm-hand who had been taken on a few months before, Goliath Steinberg, the Prussian as they called him, a big, good-natured fellow with close cropped fair hair and round pink face always smiling, who had been the friend and boon companion of Honoré. Had old Fouchard slyly encouraged this to happen? Had Silvine given herself in a moment of thoughtlessness, or had she been half raped when she was sick with misery and still worn out with weeping over the separation? She did not know herself and was aghast, pregnant and now accepting the necessity of marriage to Goliath. Not that he refused on his side, ever smiling, but he put off the formality until the baby’s arrival. Then suddenly, on the very eve of the birth, he vanished. It was said later that he went and worked at another farm near Beaumont. Three years had gone by since then, and nobody now doubted that this Goliath, such a nice chap, who so enjoyed giving babies to the girls, was one of those spies with whom Germany filled our eastern provinces. When Honoré had heard this story in Africa he spent three months in hospital, as though the fierce sun of those parts had felled him with a hot iron on the back of the neck, and he had never used a leave to go back home, for fear of seeing Silvine and the child.
While Maurice was reading the letter Honoré’s hands were trembling. The letter was from Silvine and it was the first and only one she had ever sent him. What emotion had stirred this submissive, silent girl, whose beautiful dark eyes would sometimes take on an expression of extraordinarily fixed determination in her life of continual service? She simply wrote that she knew he was at the war and that should she never see him again it hurt her too much to think he might die believing she didn’t love him. She still loved him, she had never loved anybody else, and she repeated this for four pages in the same sentences that came back again and again, with no attempt to find excuses or even to explain what had happened. And not a word about the child, nothing but an infinitely sad good-bye.
The letter touched Maurice deeply, for his cousin had told him the whole story long ago. He looked up and saw that he was in tears, and he put a brotherly arm round him.
‘Poor Honoré!’
But already the sergeant was fighting down his emotion. He carefully put the letter away in his breast pocket and buttoned up his coat.
‘Yes, things like that upset you… Oh, the swine! If only I could have strangled him! Oh well, we shall see.’
The bugles sounded for striking camp, and they had to run to get back to their own tents. As a matter of fact the preparations for departure were held up, and the troops waited about with full kit on until nearly nine. The commanders seemed to be in some uncertainty, and already the fine determination of the first two days had gone, when the 7th corps had covered sixty kilometres in two stages. And a fresh piece of news, rather strange and alarming, had been going the rounds since first thing: the march northwards of the three other army corps, the 1st to Juniville, the 5th and 12th to Rethel, was quite illogical, and it was being explained by lack of supplies. Weren’t they making for Verdun, then? Why a day lost? The worst thing was that the Prussians couldn’t be far away now, for the officers came and warned the men not to lag behind because any laggard was liable to be picked up by reconnoitring enemy cavalry.
It was the 25th of August, and later, remembering Goliath’s disappearance, Maurice was convinced that he was one of those who gave information to the German High Command on the exact route of the march of the army of Châlons and who influenced the change of tactics of the third army. The very next day the Crown Prince of Prussia left Ruvigny and the manoeuvre was under way, the flanking attack, the