The Debacle - Emile Zola [97]
Maurice’s groping hand had found Jean’s, and only then did he fall asleep, reassured. Nothing was left but one distant bell in Sedan, tolling the hours one by one.
PART TWO
1
AT Bazeilles, in the dark little room, a sudden shock made Weiss leap out of bed. He listened. It was gunfire. He felt for the candle, which he had to light so as to see the time by his watch: four o’clock and only just beginning to get light. He seized his spectacles and looked up and down the main street, the Douzy road which runs through the village, but it was filled with a kind of thick dust and he could not make anything out. So he went into the other room, the window of which looked over on to the fields towards the Meuse, and he realized that the morning mists were coming off the river and obscuring the horizon. The gunfire was louder from over the river, beyond this veil. Suddenly a French battery replied, so near and with such a din that the walls of the little house shook.
The Weisses’ house was about in the centre of Bazeilles, on the right before you reach the Place de l’Eglise. The front, standing a little back, faced the road and had only one storey above the ground floor with three windows, and a loft above, but there was quite a large garden behind which sloped down to the meadows and from which could be seen the immense panorama of the hills from Remilly to Frénois. Weiss, in the excitement of new ownership, had not gone to bed until nearly two after he had buried all the provisions in his cellar and worked out how to protect the furniture as well as possible from bullets by draping the windows with mattresses. He felt anger rising within him when he reflected that the Prussians might come and sack this house he had longed for so much, acquired with so much difficulty and so far enjoyed so little.
But he was hailed by a voice from the road:
‘I say, Weiss, can you hear that?’
Downstairs he found Delaherche, who also had wanted to sleep at his dyeworks, a large brick building adjoining. In any case all the employees had fled through the woods and reached Belgium, and the only person left guarding the premises was the caretaker, a stonemason’s widow named Françoise Quittard. And she was all of a tremble and very upset, and would have gone with the others if she had not had her boy, young Auguste, a lad of ten, so ill with typhoid that he could not be moved.
‘I say,’ Delaherche said again, ‘can you hear that, it’s really starting… It would be wise to get straight back to Sedan.’
Weiss had solemnly promised his wife to leave Bazeilles at the first real sign of danger, and at that time he was quite determined to keep his promise. But so far there was only an artillery duel going on at long range and a bit haphazard in the mists of dawn.
‘For goodness sake let’s wait a bit longer,’ he said, ‘there’s no hurry.’
It should be said that Delaherche’s curiosity was so lively and so busy that it gave him courage. He had not had a wink of sleep because he was so interested in the preparations for the defence. General Lebrun, in command of the 12th corps, had been warned that he would be attacked at dawn and had spent the night taking up position in Bazeilles, for he had orders to prevent at all costs its being occupied. Barricades blocked the main street and all side streets, and every house had its garrison of two or three men, every alleyway and garden was turned into a fortress. By three o’clock, in the inky darkness, the troops had been silently awakened and were manning their combat posts, with rifles freshly greased and pouches