The Debacle - Emile Zola [76]
Jean looked back at the pontoon bridge below.
‘Just look at that! The whole thing’s buggered up and we shall never get across.’
The fires on both sides of the river were blazing higher and their light was so intense that the frightening scene stood out with nightmarish clarity. Under the weight of the cavalry and artillery passing over since morning the pontoons supporting the baulks of timber had sunk lower, so that the flooring was a few centimetres under water. At that moment the cuirassiers were crossing two by two in an uninterrupted line, emerging from the shadows on one bank and disappearing into the shadows on the other, and as the bridge itself could no longer be seen they appeared to be walking in the water, or on top of water luridly ablaze with dancing fires. The horses were whinnying as, manes standing on end and legs stiff, they moved forward in terror of the shifting ground they felt giving way beneath them. Standing in the stirrups and tugging the reins, the cuirassiers went on and on, draped in their long white cloaks and showing only their helmets flaming with red reflected fire. They might have been taken for phantom horsemen riding to a ghostly war with hair flaming.
A deep lament rose from Jean’s parched throat:
‘Oh, I am famished!’
But most of the men round them had gone to sleep in spite of the clawing at their stomachs. Excess of fatigue had taken away their fear and knocked them out on their backs, with their mouths gaping, dead to the world under the moonless sky. From end to end of the bare hills the time of waiting had sunk into a deathly silence.
‘Oh, I am hungry, so hungry I could eat earth!’
This was the cry that Jean, usually so tough and so silent, could not hold in any longer, but let out in spite of himself in the delirium of hunger, having had nothing to eat for nearly thirty-six hours. And then Maurice made up his mind, seeing that their regiment would probably not cross the Meuse for two or three hours.
‘Look here, I’ve got an uncle not far from here, Uncle Fouchard, you know, I told you about him. It’s up there, only five or six hundred yards, and I was wondering, but as you are hungry… My uncle will give us some bread, so what the hell!’
He took his friend away, and Jean let himself be led. Old Fouchard’s little farmhouse was at the end of the Haraucourt defile, near the plateau on which the reserve artillery had taken up its position. It was a low house with a fair number of outbuildings, a barn, cowshed and stable, and on the opposite side of the road, in a sort of coach-house, he had set up his business as a travelling butcher, his own abattoir where he slaughtered the animals himself, which he then hawked round the villages in his cart.
As they drew near Maurice was surprised to see no light.
‘Oh, the old skinflint will have barricaded everything up, and he won’t open the door.’
What he saw then made him stop still in the middle of the road. In front of the farmhouse there were a dozen or so soldiers on the prowl, marauders no doubt looking for what they could pick up. They had begun by calling out, then they had knocked, and now, seeing that the house was black and silent, they were banging on the door with rifle-butts trying to break the lock. Voices were bawling:
‘Go on, for God’s sake, knock the fucking thing in, there’s nobody at home!’
Suddenly the shutter of an attic window flew open and a lanky old man in a smock, bareheaded, appeared with a candle in one hand and a gun in the other. His face jutted out under his tousled white mane, a deeply wrinkled face with a strong nose, big pale eyes and a firm chin.
‘Are you a lot of thieves breaking everything down?’ he shouted in a harsh voice. ‘What do you want?’
The soldiers fell back, a bit abashed.
‘We’re dying of hunger, we want something to eat.’
‘I’ve got nothing, not even a crust… Do you think we can feed hundreds of thousands of men, just like that?… This morning it was another lot, yes, General Ducrot’s lot, and they came through and took everything.’
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