The Debacle - Emile Zola [93]
He sat up with a jerk.
‘All right, give me my gun and I’ll blow my brains out, it will be quicker.’
He pointed to Weiss, standing still and silent.
‘You see, he’s the only sensible one, yes, he’s the only one who has seen clearly… Do you remember, Jean, what he was saying to me outside Mulhouse a month ago?’
‘That’s quite true, he said we should be beaten.’
They recalled the scene, that night of anxiety, that nerve-racking wait during which all the disaster of Froeschwiller could already be sensed in the dismal sky, while Weiss was voicing his misgivings – Germany well prepared, better led, aroused in a great burst of patriotism, France in disarray, a prey to disruption, unprepared and distraught, with neither the commanders, nor the men nor the weapons needed. Now the dreadful prophecy was coming true.
Weiss’s hands trembled as he raised them. His amiable face expressed the deepest grief.
‘Oh, I don’t feel at all triumphant about being right! I’m not very bright, but it was so obvious when you knew how things were… But all the same, if we are beaten we can kill some of those accursed Prussians. That is the one consolation, I still don’t think we shall get out of this, and I want some Prussians not to get out of it either, heaps of Prussians, enough to cover all that land over there!’
He stood up and waved his arm over the whole valley of the Meuse. There was a flame in those bulging, short-sighted eyes that had disqualified him for military service.
‘God, yes, I’d fight if I was free! I don’t know whether it’s because they are now masters in my own part of the country, in Alsace where already the Cossacks had done so much harm before, but I can’t think of them and visualize them here without at once being seized with a furious desire to make a dozen of them bleed to death… Oh, if I hadn’t been turned down on medical grounds, if I were a soldier!’
Then, after a pause:
‘But then, who knows?’
It was the rebirth of hope, the need to believe victory was always possible, held even by the most disillusioned. Maurice, already ashamed of his tears, listened and clung anew to this dream. And indeed, only yesterday hadn’t a rumour run round that Bazaine was at Verdun? Fortune owed a miracle to this France she had made glorious for so long. Henriette had slipped away in silence and when she returned she was not surprised to see her brother up and dressed and ready to go. She insisted on seeing them both eat something. They had to sit down at the table, but each mouthful stuck in their throats and made them feel sick, heavy as they still were with sleep. Being a man of foresight, Jean cut a loaf in two, and put half in Maurice’s pack and half in his own. It was getting dark, they must go. Henriette, standing by the window looking out at the Prussian troops in the distance on La Marfée, the black ants ceaselessly on the move and now gradually disappearing in the growing darkness, let an involuntary moan escape her:
‘Oh war, how atrocious war is!’
Thereupon Maurice teased her, taking his revenge:
‘What, little sister, you urge us to fight and then curse war?’
She turned round and flung at him, valiant as ever:
‘It’s true, I loathe it and think it’s unjust and horrible… Perhaps it’s simply because I am a woman. These killings make me sick. Why can’t they talk it out and come to an understanding?’
Jean, good fellow that he was, nodded in agreement. Nothing seemed easier to him, as a plain, uneducated man, than for everybody to come to terms so long as they produced good reasons. But Maurice, back in his scientific world, was thinking of war as a necessity, war like life itself, the law of the universe. Wasn’t it man, a soft-hearted creature, who introduced the conception of justice and peace, whereas impassive nature is nothing but a continual fight to the death?
‘Come to an understanding!’ he exclaimed. ‘Yes, centuries from now! If all the peoples formed only one nation you might just conceive the coming of that golden age, but even then wouldn’t the