The Downfall (La Débâcle). Emile Zola

the sudden departure of the troops whose protection they had so pressingly implored. So they were to be abandoned, and all the valuable supplies accumulated at the railway station were to be left for the enemy; even the town itself would perhaps be merely a captured town before the evening. Along the country roads, the villagers and the peasants dwelling in wayside homesteads also hurried to their doors in astonishment and dismay. So the regiments they had seen marching to battle only the day before were already retreating, flying from the enemy without even having fought! The commanders were gloomy, and without answering any questions urged on their horses, as though the very fiend were at their heels. Was it true then that the Prussians had crushed the army, and were pouring forth from all sides into France like the waters of a swollen river? And, infected with the growing panic, the peasants fancied they could hear the distant roll of the invasion travelling through the atmosphere and roaring louder and louder every moment. Then carts were filled with furniture, houses were swiftly emptied, and families fled one after another by the roads along which fear was galloping.

      In the confusion of the retreat, whilst skirting the canal from the Rhone to the Rhine, the 106th was brought to a halt near the bridge, after covering only the first thousand yards of the march. The marching orders, given badly enough, had been even worse executed, and had resulted in the whole of the Second Division crowding together at this spot. The passage was so narrow—barely sixteen feet—that the defiling seemed likely to last for ever.

      Two hours elapsed and the 106th was still waiting there, facing the interminable stream of troops that flowed past it. Standing under the fiery sunrays with their knapsacks on their shoulders and their arms grounded, the men at last waxed indignant in their impatience.

      'It seems we belong to the rear-guard,' said Loubet in that waggish voice of his.

      'They are having a fine game with us, letting us roast here,' cried Chouteau in a rage; 'we were the first to arrive, we ought to have gone on ahead.'

      At sight of the broad fertile plain and the level roads intersecting the hop grounds and fields of ripe corn, on the other side of the canal, it was now quite apparent that they were retreating, returning indeed along the same route they had come by the day before, and as this was realised jeers and furious scoffing sped through the ranks.

      'So we are taking to our heels,' resumed Chouteau. 'Well, this march to meet the enemy, which they have been dinning into our ears since the other morning, is a precious funny one. Really now, this is too much bluster! We arrive, and then back we bolt without even having time to eat anything.'

      At this, the men began to laugh again in their bitter rage, and Maurice, who stood near Chouteau, admitted he was in the right. As they had been kept standing there like posts for a couple of hours why hadn't they been allowed to cook their soupe quietly and eat it? They were getting hungry again, and felt the more rancorous that their pots should have been upset before the soupe was ready, as they could not understand the need of all this haste, which seemed to them both cowardly and stupid. Well, they were fine hares and no mistake.

      However, Lieutenant Rochas began to trounce Sergeant Sapin for the disorderly bearing of his men; and hearing the noise, Captain Beaudoin, as dapper as ever, drew near: 'Silence in the ranks!'

      Jean, who like a well-disciplined veteran soldier held his peace, was looking at Maurice, who seemed amused by Chouteau's malignant, passionate raillery: and he was astonished that a gentleman who had received so much schooling should approve of things which, however true they might be, were certainly not things to be said. If each soldier began blaming the generals and giving his opinion, they would certainly not get on together.

      At last, after waiting another hour, the 106th was ordered to advance. The bridge, however, was still so crowded with the fag end of the division that the most deplorable disorder was created. Several regiments became intermingled; some companies were carried along and got across, whilst others, driven to the edge of the roadway, had to stay there marking time. And to make matters worse, a squadron of cavalry insisted on passing, driving the laggards who were already falling out of the ranks of the infantry into the neighbouring fields. After an hour's marching, quite a large party of stragglers stretched along the road, crawling and dawdling at their ease.

      It was thus that Jean found himself in the rear, adrift with his squad, which he had not cared to leave, in the depths of a hollow road. The 106th had disappeared, not another man nor an officer of the company was to be seen—only solitary soldiers, a medley of strange men exhausted at the very outset of the march, and who were walking along leisurely wheresoever the paths might lead them. The sunrays were overpowering, it was extremely hot, and the knapsacks, rendered the heavier by the tents and all the complicated paraphernalia that swelled them out, weighed terribly on the men's shoulders. Many of these stragglers were not habituated to carrying them, and were inconvenienced too by their thick, campaigning great-coats, which seemed to them like leaden vestments. All at once a pale little linesman, whose eyes were full of tears, stopped short and flung his knapsack into a ditch with a deep sigh of relief, the long breath which the man who has been agonising draws as he feels himself coming back to life.

      'He's in the right,' muttered Chouteau, though he himself continued marching along with his shoulders bending under the knapsack's weight. Two other men, however, having disburdened themselves, he could no longer hold out. 'Ah: curse it!' he cried, and with a jerk of his shoulders he tossed his knapsack on to the bank. Half a hundredweight on his shoulders—no, thanks. He had had enough of it. They were not beasts of burden that they should have to drag such things about.

      Immediately afterwards Loubet imitated him, and compelled Lapoulle to do the same. Pache, who crossed himself each time they came upon a wayside cross, unfastened the straps of his knapsack, and carefully deposited it at the foot of a low wall, as if intending to come back and fetch it. And Maurice alone was still laden when Jean, on turning round, saw what his men had done.

      'Take up your knapsacks. I shall have to pay for it if you don't.'

      The men, however, without as yet openly revolting, trudged on silently, with an evil expression on their faces, as they pushed the corporal before them along the narrow road.

      'Take them up or I shall report you!'

      These words stung Maurice as though he had been lashed with a whip across the face. Report them! What! that brute of a peasant report them, because the poor fellows, feeling their muscles quite crushed, had eased themselves? And in a fit of feverish irritation he also unbuckled his straps, and with a defiant look at Jean, let his knapsack fall by the roadside.

      'All right,' calmly said the corporal, realising the futility of a struggle; 'we will settle all that this evening.'

      Maurice's feet caused him intense suffering. They were swelling in his coarse hard shoes, to which he was not habituated. He was far from robust, and though he had rid himself of his knapsack he could still feel a smarting sore on his spine, the unbearable hurt occasioned by his burden. Now, too, the mere weight of his gun, no matter how he carried it, made his breath come short and fast. But he was yet more distressed by the moral agony he experienced, for he was in one of those crises of despair to which he was subject. All at once, without possible resistance on his part, he would see his will-power collapse, and give way to evil instincts and self-abandonment, that subsequently made him sob with very shame. His errors in Paris had never been aught but the madness of 'his other self' as he expressed it, of the weak-minded fellow, capable of any degraded action, that he became in moments of low-spiritedness. And since he had been dragging himself along, under the overpowering sun, in this retreat which resembled a rout, he had become but a unit of the dawdling, disbanded flock spread over the roads. It was the countershock of the defeat, of the thunderbolt that had fallen leagues away, and the echo of which was following close at the heels of these panic-stricken men who fled without having seen an enemy. What could be hoped for now? Was it not all over? They were beaten, and there was nothing to do but to lie down and die.

      'All the same,' shouted Loubet with that market boy's laugh of his; 'all the same we are not going to Berlin.'

      'To Berlin! to Berlin!' Maurice again heard the cry bellowed forth by the swarming crowd on the Boulevards during