The Debacle - Emile Zola [60]
‘I saw you from down there, on my way back from the Hôtel de Ville, so I came up to say… Just think of it, they haven’t let me go to bed, and for the past two hours the mayor and I have been dealing with fresh requisitions… Yes, once again the whole thing has been changed… Oh, that officer who didn’t want the wire to be sent to Paris was bloody well right!’
He went on for a long time in short, disconnected sentences, and in the end the young man understood, and he was silent and sick at heart. At about midnight a telegram from the War Office had reached the Emperor in reply to that of the marshal. The exact text was not known, but an aide-de-camp had said out loud at the Hôtel de Ville that the Empress and cabinet were afraid of a revolution in Paris if the Emperor returned there and left Bazaine in the lurch. The telegram was misinformed about the true position of the Germans and, appearing to believe that the army of Châlons had advanced further than it really had, it insisted in extraordinarily passionate terms on a march straight ahead come what may.
‘The Emperor sent for the marshal,’ went on the chemist, ‘and they were shut up together for nearly an hour. Of course, I don’t know what they can have said, but what all the officers have repeated is that the retreat is off and the march to the Meuse is on again… We have requisitioned all the bakehouses in the town for the 1st corps which will replace the 12th here in the morning. The 12th’s artillery, as you see, is now leaving for La Besace… This really is the end, and you are off to battle!’
He stopped, for he, too, was looking at the lighted window at the notary’s. Then he went on in an undertone, as though tortured by curiosity:
‘What can they have said to each other, I wonder?… Funny all the same, to fall back at six in the evening before the threat of danger, and at midnight to rush headlong into the same danger, although the situation remains identical!’
Maurice was still listening to the rumbling of the guns down there through the dark little town, this uninterrupted trotting past, this stream of men flowing towards the Meuse, to the terrible unknown of tomorrow. On the ordinary, thin curtains over the window he could still see the shadow of the Emperor regularly passing to and fro. This sick man, kept up by insomnia, was pacing up and down, feeling the need to keep moving in spite of his pain, his ears filled with the noise of those horses and men he was allowing to be sent to their death. So only a few hours had been enough and it was now disaster, deliberately chosen, accepted. What indeed could the Emperor and the marshal have said to each other, both perfectly aware of the doom towards which they were moving, convinced in the evening of defeat in the appalling circumstances in which the army would find itself and surely not able to change their minds by morning, when the peril was increasing hour by hour? General Palikao’s plan, an all-out march on Montmédy, which already by the 23rd was on the rash side, still perhaps just possible on the 25th, became by the 27th an act of pure lunacy, given the continual vacillating of the command and the growing demoralization of the troops. If they were both aware of all this why were they giving in to the pitiless voices hounding them on in their indecision. Perhaps the marshal was merely a blinkered and obedient soldier showing his greatness by his abnegation. And the Emperor, no longer in command, was just waiting for fate to decide. Their lives, and the lives of the army, were being asked for and they were giving them. This was the night of the crime, the abominable night of the murder of a nation, for from that moment onwards the army was in peril, a hundred thousand men were being sent to the slaughter.
Thinking over these things, shivering in despair, Maurice still followed that shadow on Madame Desroches’s thin muslin – that feverish, pacing shadow driven on by the relentless voice from Paris.