The Downfall. Emile Zola

the vacillating MacMahon, in their dread to see the Emperor return to Paris and their inflexible determination to push the army forward in one supreme attempt to save the dynasty; and the poor Emperor, that wretched man for whom there was no place in all his vast empire, was to be bundled to and fro among the baggage of his army like some worthless, worn-out piece of furniture, condemned to the irony of dragging behind him in his suite his imperial household, cent-gardes, horses, carriages, cooks, silver stew-pans and cases of champagne, trailing his flaunting mantle, embroidered with the Napoleonic bees, through the blood and mire of the highways of his retreat.

      At midnight Maurice was not asleep; he was feverishly wakeful, and his gloomy reflections kept him tossing and tumbling on his pallet. He finally arose and went outside, where he found comfort and refreshment in the cool night air. The sky was overspread with clouds, the darkness was intense; along the front of the line the expiring watch-fires gleamed with a red and sullen light at distant intervals, and in the deathlike, boding silence could be heard the long-drawn breathing of the hundred thousand men who slumbered there. Then Maurice became more tranquil, and there descended on him a sentiment of brotherhood, full of compassionate kindness for all those slumbering fellow-creatures, of whom thousands would soon be sleeping the sleep of death. Brave fellows! True, many of them were thieves and drunkards, but think of what they had suffered and the excuse there was for them in the universal demoralization! The glorious veterans of Solferino and Sebastopol were but a handful, incorporated in the ranks of the newly raised troops, too few in number to make their example felt. The four corps that had been got together and equipped so hurriedly, devoid of every element of cohesion, were the forlorn hope, the expiatory band that their rulers were sending to the sacrifice in the endeavor to avert the wrath of destiny. They would bear their cross to the bitter end, atoning with their life’s blood for the faults of others, glorious amid disaster and defeat.

      And then it was that Maurice, there in the darkness that was instinct with life, became conscious that a great duty lay before him. He ceased to beguile himself with the illusive prospect of great victories to be gained; the march to Verdun was a march to death, and he so accepted it, since it was their lot to die, with brave and cheerful resignation.

      IV

      On Tuesday, the 23d of August, at six o’clock in the morning, camp was broken, and as a stream that has momentarily expanded into a lake resumes its course again, the hundred and odd thousand men of the army of Chalons put themselves in motion and soon were pouring onward in a resistless torrent; and notwithstanding the rumors that had been current since the preceding day, it was a great surprise to most to see that instead of continuing their retrograde movement they were leaving Paris behind them and turning their faces toward the unknown regions of the East.

      At five o’clock in the morning the 7th corps was still unsupplied with cartridges. For two days the artillerymen had been working like beavers to unload the materiel, horses, and stores that had been streaming from Metz into the overcrowded station, and it was only at the very last moment that some cars of cartridges were discovered among the tangled trains, and that a detail which included Jean among its numbers was enabled to bring back two hundred and forty thousand on carts that they had hurriedly requisitioned. Jean distributed the regulation number, one hundred cartridges to a man, among his squad, just as Gaude, the company bugler, sounded the order to march.

      The 106th was not to pass through Rheims, their orders being to turn the city and debouch into the Chalons road farther on, but on this occasion there was the usual failure to regulate the order and time of marching, so that, the four corps having commenced to move at the same moment, they collided when they came out upon the roads that they were to traverse in common and the result was inextricable confusion. Cavalry and artillery were constantly cutting in among the infantry and bringing them to a halt; whole brigades were compelled to leave the road and stand at ordered arms in the plowed fields for more than an hour, waiting until the way should be cleared. And to make matters worse, they had hardly left the camp when a terrible storm broke over them, the rain pelting down in torrents, drenching the men completely and adding intolerably to the weight of knapsacks and great-coats. Just as the rain began to hold up, however, the 106th saw a chance to go forward, while some zouaves in an adjoining field, who were forced to wait yet for a while, amused themselves by pelting one another with balls of moist earth, and the consequent condition of their uniforms afforded them much merriment.

      The sun suddenly came shining out again in the clear sky, the warm, bright sun of an August morning, and with it came returning gayety; the men were steaming like a wash of linen hung out to dry in the open air: the moisture evaporated from their clothing in little more time than it takes to tell it, and when they were warm and dry again, like dogs who shake the water from them when they emerge from a pond, they chaffed one another good-naturedly on their bedraggled appearance and the splashes of mud on their red trousers. Wherever two roads intersected another halt was necessitated; the last one was in a little village just beyond the walls of the city, in front of a small saloon that seemed to be doing a thriving business. Thereon it occurred to Maurice to treat the squad to a drink, by way of wishing them all good luck.

      “Corporal, will you allow me – ”

      Jean, after hesitating a moment, accepted a “pony” of brandy for himself. Loubet and Chouteau were of the party (the latter had been watchful and submissive since that day when the corporal had evinced a disposition to use his heavy fists), and also Pache and Lapoulle, a couple of very decent fellows when there was no one to set them a bad example.

      “Your good health, corporal!” said Chouteau in a respectful, whining tone.

      “Thank you; here’s hoping that you may bring back your head and all your legs and arms!” Jean politely replied, while the others laughed approvingly.

      But the column was about to move; Captain Beaudoin came up with a scandalized look on his face and a reproof at the tip of his tongue, while Lieutenant Rochas, more indulgent to the small weaknesses of his men, turned his head so as not to see what was going on. And now they were stepping out at a good round pace along the Chalons road, which stretched before them for many a long league, bordered with trees on either side, undeviatingly straight, like a never-ending ribbon unrolled between the fields of yellow stubble that were dotted here and there with tall stacks and wooden windmills brandishing their lean arms. More to the north were rows of telegraph poles, indicating the position of other roads, on which they could distinguish the black, crawling lines of other marching regiments. In many places the troops had left the highway and were moving in deep columns across the open plain. To the left and front a cavalry brigade was seen, jogging along at an easy trot in a blaze of sunshine. The entire wide horizon, usually so silent and deserted, was alive and populous with those streams of men, pressing onward, onward, in long drawn, black array, like the innumerable throng of insects from some gigantic ant-hill.

      About nine o’clock the regiment left the Chalons road and wheeled to the left into another that led to Suippe, which, like the first, extended, straight as an arrow’s flight, far as the eye could see. The men marched at the route-step in two straggling files along either side of the road, thus leaving the central space free for the officers, and Maurice could not help noticing their anxious, care-worn air, in striking contrast with the jollity and good-humor of the soldiers, who were happy as children to be on the move once more. As the squad was near the head of the column he could even distinguish the Colonel, M. de Vineuil, in the distance, and was impressed by the grave earnestness of his manner, and his tall, rigid form, swaying in cadence to the motion of his charger. The band had been sent back to the rear, to keep company with the regimental wagons; it played but once during that entire campaign. Then came the ambulances and engineer’s train attached to the division, and succeeding that the corps train, an interminable procession of forage wagons, closed vans for stores, carts for baggage, and vehicles of every known description, occupying a space of road nearly four miles in length, and which, at the infrequent curves in the highway, they could see winding behind them like the tail of some great serpent. And last of all, at the extreme rear of the column, came the herds, “rations on the hoof,” a surging, bleating, bellowing mass of sheep and oxen, urged on by blows and raising clouds of dust, reminding one of the old warlike peoples of the East and their migrations.

      Lapoulle meantime would every now and then give a hitch of his