The Debacle - Emile Zola [96]
‘Come on, corporal, you’re a sly one, you are!’ Chouteau repeated with a leer. ‘Oh, it’s not for myself, I’ve had a very good meal with Loubet at a lady’s house.’
Anxious faces looked towards Jean, the squad had been waiting, especially Lapoulle and Pache, the unlucky ones, who hadn’t picked anything up, counting on him, for he could have got flour out of a stone, as they put it. So Jean, moved with pity and conscience-stricken at having abandoned his men, divided between them the half loaf he had in his pack.
‘Oh Christ, oh Christ!’ Lapoulle kept on saying as he chewed, finding no other word in his growl of satisfaction, while Pache said under his breath a Paternoster and an Ave to make sure that God would send him his daily bread again tomorrow.
The bugler Gaude had blown roll-call at full blast, but not retreat, and the camp fell at once into deep silence. And it was then, when he had checked that his half-section was complete, that Sergeant Sapin, with his sickly-looking face and screwed-up nose, said quietly:
‘There will be a lot missing this time tomorrow.’
As Jean looked at him he added with quiet certainty, gazing far away into the darkness:
‘Oh, as for me, I shall be killed tomorrow.’
By now it was nine, and the night looked like being bitterly cold, for the mists had risen off the Meuse, hiding the stars. Maurice, lying beside Jean under a hedge, shivered and said they would do well to go and lie down in the tent. But neither of them could get to sleep, for since the rest they had had they were more tired and aching than ever. They envied Lieutenant Rochas near them who, scorning any cover, and simply wrapped in a blanket, was snoring like an old campaigner on the wet ground. Then for a long time they watched with interest the little candle flame burning in a large tent where the colonel and some officers were sitting up late. All the evening Monsieur de Vineuil had looked very worried because he had had no orders for the following morning. He felt his regiment was exposed too far forward, although he had already drawn back and abandoned the forward outpost occupied that morning. General Bourgain-Desfeuilles had not been seen – he was said to be ill in bed at the Hôtel de la Croix d’Or, and the colonel had to decide to send an officer to warn him that the new position looked dangerous, the 7th corps being so spread out because it was obliged to defend too long a line from the loop of the Meuse to the Garenne woods. It was certain that the battle would begin with the daylight, so there were not more than seven or eight hours of this great black calm left. Maurice was very surprised to see, as the little glimmer of light in the colonel’s tent went out, Captain Beaudoin pass quite close to him, skirting the hedge with furtive steps, and disappear in the direction of Sedan.
The night steadily thickened as the vapours rising from the river obscured everything in a dismal fog.
‘Are you asleep, Jean?’
He was, and so Maurice was alone. The thought of joining Lapoulle and the others in the tent made him feel sick and tired. He listened to their snores answering those of Rochas, and felt envious. It may well be that if great captains sleep soundly on the eve of a battle it is simply because they are tired out. Nothing could now be heard coming from the great camp, lost in the darkness, but the heavy breath of sleep, a gigantic but gentle breathing. Nothing really existed clearly, he only knew that the 5th corps must be camping down there beneath the ramparts, that the 1st stretched from the Garenne woods to the village of La Moncelle, while the 12th, over on the other side of the town, was occupying Bazeilles; and everything was asleep, and the slow pulse of sleep was coming from the first tents to the last from the intangible depths of shadow over more than a league. Then beyond all that there was another unknown, and its sound also sometimes