The Debacle - Emile Zola [52]
‘And now look here, boy, I’ve still got some tobacco left. What about a cigarette?’
5
ON the next day, the 26th, Maurice woke up all aches and pains, with his shoulders hurting after a night in the tent. He still had not got used to the hard ground, and as the previous night the men had been ordered not to take off their boots, and sergeants had come round in the dark, feeling to make sure that everybody was booted and gaitered, his foot was not much better and was painful and burning, to say nothing of the fact that he must have got a thorough chill in his legs from being unwise enough to stick them out of the tent to stretch them.
Jean said at once:
‘Look, my boy, if we’ve got to march today you’d do well to see the M.O. and get yourself bunged in a van.’
But nobody knew anything and the most contradictory tales were going round. At one time they thought they were going on, camp was struck and the whole army corps began moving and went through Vouziers, leaving only one brigade of the second division on the left bank of the Aisne to keep an eye on the Monthois road. Then suddenly, at the other side of the town, on the right bank, they halted and piled arms in the fields and meadows stretching along on both sides of the Grand-Pré road. At that moment the departure of the 4th hussars, cantering away along that road, gave rise to all sorts of conjectures.
‘If we’re stopping here I shall stay with you,’ declared Maurice, who hated the thought of the M.O. and the ambulance.
It was soon known that they were to camp there until General Douay had had definite information about the movements of the enemy. Since the moment on the previous day when he had seen the Margueritte division going back towards Le Chêne, he had felt increasingly anxious, knowing that he was no longer covered and that there was not a single man guarding the defiles through the Argonne, so that he could be attacked at any moment. He had therefore dispatched the 4th hussars to reconnoitre as far as the defiles of Grand-Pré and La Croix-aux-Bois, with orders to bring back news at all costs.
On the previous day, thanks to the energy of the mayor of Vouziers, there had been an issue of bread, meat and forage, and that morning at about ten the men had just been authorized to make some stew for fear they might never have time later, when a second departure of troops, the Bordas brigade, which set off down the road taken by the hussars, once again set everyone speculating. What now? Were they off again? Weren’t they going to be left to eat in peace now that the pot was on the fire? But the officers explained that the Bordas brigade was detailed to occupy Buzancy, a few kilometres away. But others, to be sure, said that the hussars had run into a large number of enemy detachments and that the brigade was being sent to relieve them.
These were a few delightful hours of rest for Maurice. He stretched himself out on the grass half way up the hill on which his regiment was camping, and in his listless, exhausted state he looked at the green valley of the Aisne, with the fields and clumps of trees through which the river meanders lazily. In front of him and at the head of the valley Vouziers rose up in an amphitheatre, its terraces of roofs dominated by the church with its narrow spire and domed tower. Down by the river the high chimneys of the tanneries were smoking and at the other end could be seen the buildings of a big flourmill white amid the greenery at the water’s edge. This view of a little town nestling in the green grass seemed full of a gentle charm to him, as though he had recovered his former vision as a sensitive dreamer. His boyhood came back, and the excursions he used to make to Vouziers in the old days when he lived at Le Chêne, his birthplace. For an hour he was lost to the world.
The stew had been eaten a long time ago and still they were waiting about when, at nearly half past two, the whole camp was permeated by a vague but increasing restlessness. Orders flew hither and thither, the fields were evacuated and all the