The Debacle - Emile Zola [99]
Weiss nodded, cast his eye round the horizon, then ventured hesitantly, as though talking to himself:
‘Oh no, oh no, that isn’t it… I’m afraid of something else, yes, and I daren’t put it into words.’
He fell silent. All he did was open his arms very wide, like the jaws of a vice, and turning to the north he brought his hands together as if the two jaws were suddenly closed.
That was what he had been afraid of since the day before, with his local knowledge and in view of the movements of the two armies. Even now, when the great valley lay spread out in the radiant sunshine, his eyes went over to the hills on the left bank where, all through a day and a night, such a black swarm of German troops had been marching by. A battery was firing from above Remilly. Shells were beginning to come over from another that had taken up its position at Pont-Maugis on the river bank. He folded his eyeglasses, putting one lens over the other so as to examine the wooded slopes more carefully, but all he could see was the little puffs of smoke from the guns surmounting more of the heights every minute: then, that river of men that had been flowing over there – where was it massing at the present time? Above Noyers and Frénois, on La Marfée, he did eventually make out, at the corner of a clump of pines, a group of uniforms and horses, probably officers, some headquarters staff. And the loop of the Meuse was further away, barring the west, and in that direction there was no way of retreat towards Mézières except one narrow road through the Saint-Albert gap between the river and the forest of the Ardennes. That was why the day before he had ventured to mention this sole line of retreat to a general he had chanced to meet in a cutting in the valley of the Givonne and who, he found out later, was General Ducrot, commander of the 1st corps. If the army did not withdraw at once by that route, but waited to be cut off by the Prussians as they crossed the Meuse at Donchery, it would certainly be immobilized with its back to the frontier. It was already too late by that evening, for it was reported that the bridge was occupied by Uhlans – yet another bridge that had not been blown up, this time because nobody had thought to bring any gunpowder. In despair Weiss told himself that the flood of men, the black swarm, must be in the plain of Donchery and making for the Saint-Albert gap, throwing its advance guard to Saint-Menges and Floing, where he had taken Jean and Maurice the evening before. In the brilliant sunshine the church tower of Floing could be seen a long way off, like a fine white needle.
Then eastwards there was the other jaw of the vice. Although he could see to the north, from the plateau of Illy to that of Floing, the whole battle-line of the 7th corps, supported in a feeble way by the 5th, which had been stationed in reserve beneath the ramparts, he could not know what was going on further east along the valley of the Givonne, where the 1st corps was stretched from the Garenne woods to the village of Daigny. But guns were roaring in that direction as well, and the battle must be joined in the Chevalier wood at this end of the village. His disquiet came from the fact that some country folk had said the day before that the Prussians had reached Francheval, so that the movement going on in the west via Donchery was also happening in the east via Francheval, and the jaws of the vice would succeed in meeting over in the north at the Calvary of Illy if the double pincer movement was not halted. He knew nothing about military science, had nothing but his own common sense, and he shuddered as he contemplated this immense triangle, one side of which was the Meuse and the two others were made up by the 7th corps on the north and the 1st on the east, while the 12th occupied the extreme point on the south, and all three had their backs to the others, waiting, God knew how or why, for an enemy coming from all directions.