The Debacle - Emile Zola [70]
‘Not too good? Is it still that foot of yours?’
Maurice shook his head. His foot was now quite all right with these wide boots.
‘Hungry then?’
Seeing he did not answer, Jean took one of the two biscuits out of his pack without being seen, and then, telling a simple lie:
‘Look here, I have saved you your share… I ate the other one just now.’
Day was breaking as the 7th left Oches, making for Mouzon via La Besace, where it should have slept that night. The accursed supply column had left first with the first division, and if the proper army waggons which had first-rate horses made good speed, the others, the requisitioned ones, mostly empty and useless, dawdled astonishingly on the gradients of the gorge of Stonne. The road climbs, particularly after the hamlet of La Berlière, between wooded hills which overlook it. At about eight, when the two remaining divisions were at last beginning to move, Marshal MacMahon appeared and was furious to find still there troops which he thought had left La Besace that morning with only a few kilometres to do to be right on time at Mouzon. And so he had a violent altercation with General Douay. It was decided that the first division and the supply train should be left to continue their march to Mouzon, but that the two other divisions, so as not to be slowed down any more by the cumbersome advance guard, would take the road to Raucourt and Autrecourt so as to cross the Meuse at Villers. This once again meant turning northwards, in the haste the marshal was making to put the river between his army and the enemy. Cost what it may, they had to be on the right bank that evening. And the rearguard was still at Oches when a Prussian battery opened fire from a distant height near Saint-Pierremont, renewing the tactics of the day before. At first they made the mistake of answering their fire, but then the last troops pulled out.
Until about eleven the 106th made its way slowly along the winding road in the gorge of Stonne, between the high hills. On the left the crests rose bare and precipitous, but on the right woods grew down the gentle slopes. The sun had come out again and it was very hot in the narrow valley, frighteningly lonely. After you leave La Berlière, dominated by its tall, dreary Calvary, there is not a single farm, not a living soul or animal grazing in the meadows. The men, so weary and famished the day before, were already dragging their feet, disheartened and full of smouldering anger.
Then suddenly, as they were halted by the roadside, gunfire thundered to the right. The firing was so clear and loud that the battle could not be more than two leagues away. The effect on these men, so weary of retreating and sick of waiting about, was extraordinary. They all leaped to their feet, full of excitement, forgetting their fatigue: why weren’t they marching? They wanted to fight, to be killed rather than go on running away helter-skelter like this, and without knowing where or why.
General Bourgain-Desfeuilles had just gone up a hill to the right, with Colonel de Vineuil, to reconnoitre the country. They could be seen on the top, between two clumps of trees, field-glasses raised, and at once they sent down an aide-de-camp who was with them to ask for the guerrillas to be sent up if they were still there. A few men, Jean, Maurice and some others, went up with them in case any help should be needed.
As soon as the general saw Sambuc he bawled:
‘What a damn silly place this is with these hills and woods going on for ever… here, you, where is it, where’s the fighting?’
Sambuc, with Ducat and Cabasse always at his heels, listened and scanned the wide horizon without answering. Maurice, who was standing by him, looked too and was impressed by the immense stretch of valleys and hills, like an endless sea with huge, slow waves. Forests made patches of dark green on the yellow earth, and in the blazing sun the distant hilltops faded into a russet haze. Although nothing could be seen, not even a single puff of smoke in the pale sky, the guns were still booming like