The Debacle - Emile Zola [69]
The camp was already awake. Jean and Maurice took the men to Captain Beaudoin, who took them to Colonel de Vineuil. The latter interrogated them, but Sambuc, conscious of his own importance, was determined to see the general, and as General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, who had slept at the house of the parish priest of Oches, had just appeared at the presbytery door, very put out at being woken up in the middle of the night to face another day of famine and fatigue, he gave these men a furious reception.
‘Where have they come from? What do they want? Oh, it’s you, the guerrillas! Another lot of Weary Willies, eh?’
‘Sir,’ explained Sambuc, quite unruffled, ‘we and the others hold the Dieulet woods.’
‘Dieulet woods, where’s that?’
‘Between Stenay and Mouzon, sir.’
‘Stenay, Mouzon, never heard of them! How do you expect me to know where I am with all these new names?’
Colonel de Vineuil, feeling embarrassed, intervened discreetly to remind him that Stenay and Mouzon were on the Meuse, and that as the Germans had cut off the first of these towns they were going to attempt to cross the river by the bridge at the second, further north.
‘Anyway, sir,’ Sambuc went on, ‘we’ve come to warn you that the Dieulet woods are now full of Prussians… Yesterday, as the 5th corps was leaving Bois-les-Dames, it was engaged near Nouart….’
‘What, was there fighting yesterday?’
‘There certainly was, sir. The 5th corps was in a battle and withdrew, and it must be at Beaumont tonight… So while some of our comrades have gone to tell them about the enemy movements, we thought we would come and tell you what the situation is so that you can go to their aid, for they are certainly going to be up against sixty thousand men tomorrow morning.’
This figure made General Bourgain-Desfeuilles shrug his shoulders.
‘Sixty thousand men! Hang it all, why not a hundred thousand?… You’re dreaming, my dear fellow. Fear has made you see double. There can’t be sixty thousand men so near us. We should know if there were!’
He would not be persuaded. In vain Sambuc called on Ducat and Cabasse for corroboration.
‘We have seen the cannons,’ the southerner affirmed, ‘and those buggers must be crazy to risk them on those forest tracks where you sink in up to your shins on account of the rain there’s been these last few days.’
‘Somebody is guiding them, for sure,’ declared Ducat.
But since Vouziers the general had given up believing in this concentration of the two German armies which everybody, he said, had been dinning into his ears. He did not even think it worth while having the men taken to the commander of the 7th corps – to whom, actually, they thought they had been talking. If one had paid attention to all the yokels and tramps who brought so-called information, one wouldn’t have advanced a single step without being shunted right and left into absurd adventures. However, he did order the three men to stay and travel with the column because of their local knowledge.
‘All the same,’ Jean said to Maurice as they went back to fold the tent, ‘those three are decent blokes to have done four leagues cross-country to warn us.’
Maurice agreed, and he knew the men were right, for he too knew the district, and he was just as much a prey to deadly anxiety at the thought that the Prussians were in the Dieulet woods and on the move towards Sommauthe and Beaumont. He was sitting down now, already feeling wretched before the march had even begun, his stomach empty and his heart sick with anguish at the dawn of a day he felt was bound to be terrible.
Upset at seeing him looking so pale, Jean asked