Complete Works of Emile Zola (1203 page)

At this point Prosper’s emotion got the better of him; tears choked his utterance and he was obliged to break off. He gulped down another glass of wine and went on with his narrative in disjointed, incomplete sentences. It kept growing darker and darker, until there was only a narrow streak of red light on the horizon at the verge of the battlefield; the shadows of the dead horses seemed to be projected across the plain to an infinite distance. The pain and stiffness in his leg kept him from moving; he must have remained for a long time beside Zephyr. Then, with his fears as an incentive, he had managed to get on his feet and hobble away; it was an imperative necessity to him not to be alone, to find comrades who would share his fears with him and make them less. Thus from every nook and corner of the battlefield, from hedges and ditches and clumps of bushes, the wounded who had been left behind dragged themselves painfully in search of companionship, forming when possible little bands of four or five, finding it less hard to agonize and die in the company of their fellow-beings. In the wood of la Garenne Prosper fell in with two men of the 43d regiment; they were not wounded, but had burrowed in the underbrush like rabbits, waiting for the coming of the night. When they learned that he was familiar with the roads they communicated to him their plan, which was to traverse the woods under cover of the darkness and make their escape into Belgium. At first he declined to share their undertaking, for he would have preferred to proceed direct to Remilly, where he was certain to find a refuge, but where was he to obtain the blouse and trousers that he required as a disguise? to say nothing of the impracticability of getting past the numerous Prussian pickets and outposts that filled the valley all the way from la Garenne to Remilly. He therefore ended by consenting to act as guide to the two comrades. His leg was less stiff than it had been, and they were so fortunate as to secure a loaf of bread at a farmhouse. Nine o’clock was striking from the church of a village in the distance as they resumed their way. The only point where they encountered any danger worth mentioning was at la Chapelle, where they fell directly into the midst of a Prussian advanced post before they were aware of it; the enemy flew to arms and blazed away into the darkness, while they, throwing themselves on the ground and alternately crawling and running until the fire slackened, ultimately regained the shelter of the trees. After that they kept to the woods, observing the utmost vigilance. At a bend in the road, they crept up behind an out-lying picket and, leaping on his back, buried a knife in his throat. Then the road was free before them and they no longer had to observe precaution; they went ahead, laughing and whistling. It was about three in the morning when they reached a little Belgian village, where they knocked up a worthy farmer, who at once opened his barn to them; they snuggled among the hay and slept soundly until morning.

The sun was high in the heavens when Prosper awoke. As he opened his eyes and looked about him, while the two comrades were still snoring, he beheld their entertainer engaged in hitching a horse to a great carriole loaded with bread, rice, coffee, sugar, and all sorts of eatables, the whole concealed under sacks of charcoal, and a little questioning elicited from the good man the fact that he had two married daughters living at Raucourt, in France, whom the passage of the Bavarian troops had left entirely destitute, and that the provisions in the carriole were intended for them. He had procured that very morning the safe-conduct that was required for the journey. Prosper was immediately seized by an uncontrollable desire to take a seat in that carriole and return to the country that he loved so and for which his heart was yearning with such a violent nostalgia. It was perfectly simple; the farmer would have to pass through Remilly to reach Raucourt; he would alight there. The matter was arranged in three minutes; he obtained a loan of the longed-for blouse and trousers, and the farmer gave out, wherever they stopped, that he was his servant; so that about six o’clock he got down in front of the church, not having been stopped more than two or three times by the German outposts.

They were all silent for a while, then: “No, I had enough of it!” said Prosper. “If they had but set us at work that amounted to something, as out there in Africa! but this going up the hill only to come down again, the feeling that one is of no earthly use to anyone, that is no kind of a life at all. And then I should be lonely, now that poor Zephyr is dead; all that is left me to do is to go to work on a farm. That will be better than living among the Prussians as a prisoner, don’t you think so? You have horses, Father Fouchard; try me, and see whether or not I will love them and take good care of them.”

The old fellow’s eyes gleamed, but he touched glasses once more with the other and concluded the arrangement without any evidence of eagerness.

“Very well; I wish to be of service to you as far as lies in my power; I will take you. As regards the question of wages, though, you must not speak of it until the war is over, for really I am not in need of anyone and the times are too hard.”

Silvine, who had remained seated with Charlot on her lap, had never once taken her eyes from Prosper’s face. When she saw him rise with the intention of going to the stable and making immediate acquaintance with its four-footed inhabitants, she again asked:

“Then you say you did not see Honore?”

The question repeated thus abruptly made him start, as if it had suddenly cast a flood of light in upon an obscure corner of his memory. He hesitated for a little, but finally came to a decision and spoke.

“See here, I did not wish to grieve you just now, but I don’t believe Honore will ever come back.”

“Never come back — what do you mean?”

“Yes, I believe that the Prussians did his business for him. I saw him lying across his gun, his head erect, with a great wound just beneath the heart.”

There was silence in the room. Silvine’s pallor was frightful to behold, while Father Fouchard displayed his interest in the narrative by replacing upon the table his glass, into which he had just poured what wine remained in the bottle.

“Are you quite certain?” she asked in a choking voice.

“
Dame
! as certain as one can be of a thing he has seen with his own two eyes. It was on a little hillock, with three trees in a group right beside it; it seems to me I could go to the spot blindfolded.”

If it was true she had nothing left to live for. That lad who had been so good to her, who had forgiven her her fault, had plighted his troth and was to marry her when he came home at the end of the campaign! and they had robbed her of him, they had murdered him, and he was lying out there on the battlefield with a wound under the heart! She had never known how strong her love for him had been, and now the thought that she was to see him no more, that he who was hers was hers no longer, aroused her almost to a pitch of madness and made her forget her usual tranquil resignation. She set Charlot roughly down upon the floor, exclaiming:

“Good! I shall not believe that story until I see the evidence of it, until I see it with my own eyes. Since you know the spot you shall conduct me to it. And if it is true, if we find him, we will bring him home with us.”

Her tears allowed her to say no more; she bowed her head upon the table, her frame convulsed by long-drawn, tumultuous sobs that shook her from head to foot, while the child, not knowing what to make of such unusual treatment at his mother’s hands, also commenced to weep violently. She caught him up and pressed him to her heart, with distracted, stammering words:

“My poor child! my poor child!”

Consternation was depicted on old Fouchard’s face. Appearances notwithstanding, he did love his son, after a fashion of his own. Memories of the past came back to him, of days long vanished, when his wife was still living and Honore was a boy at school, and two big tears appeared in his small red eyes and trickled down his old leathery cheeks. He had not wept before in more than ten years. In the end he grew angry at the thought of that son who was his and upon whom he was never to set eyes again; he rapped out an oath or two.

“
Nom de Dieu!
it is provoking all the same, to have only one boy, and that he should be taken from you!”

When their agitation had in a measure subsided, however, Fouchard was annoyed that Silvine still continued to talk of going to search for Honore’s body out there on the battlefield. She made no further noisy demonstration, but harbored her purpose with the dogged silence of despair, and he failed to recognize in her the docile, obedient servant who was wont to perform her daily tasks without a murmur; her great, submissive eyes, in which lay the chief beauty of her face, had assumed an expression of stern determination, while beneath her thick brown hair her cheeks and brow wore a pallor that was like death. She had torn off the red kerchief that was knotted about her neck, and was entirely in black, like a widow in her weeds. It was all in vain that he tried to impress on her the difficulties of the undertaking, the dangers she would be subjected to, the little hope there was of recovering the corpse; she did not even take the trouble to answer him, and he saw clearly that unless he seconded her in her plan she would start out alone and do some unwise thing, and this aspect of the case worried him on account of the complications that might arise between him and the Prussian authorities. He therefore finally decided to go and lay the matter before the mayor of Remilly, who was a kind of distant cousin of his, and they two between them concocted a story: Silvine was to pass as the actual widow of Honore, Prosper became her brother, so that the Bavarian colonel, who had his quarters in the Hotel of the Maltese Cross down in the lower part of the village, made no difficulty about granting a pass which authorized the brother and sister to bring home the body of the husband, provided they could find it. By this time it was night; the only concession that could be obtained from the young woman was that she would delay starting on her expedition until morning.

When morning came old Fouchard could not be prevailed on to allow one of his horses to be taken, fearing he might never set eyes on it again. What assurance had he that the Prussians would not confiscate the entire equipage? At last he consented, though with very bad grace, to loan her the donkey, a little gray animal, and his cart, which, though small, would be large enough to hold a dead man. He gave minute instructions to Prosper, who had had a good night’s sleep, but was anxious and thoughtful at the prospect of the expedition now that, being rested and refreshed, he attempted to remember something of the battle. At the last moment Silvine went and took the counterpane from her own bed, folding and spreading it on the floor of the cart. Just as she was about to start she came running back to embrace Charlot.

“I entrust him to your care, Father Fouchard; keep an eye on him and see that he doesn’t get hold of the matches.”

“Yes, yes; never fear!”

They were late in getting off; it was near seven o’clock when the little procession, the donkey, hanging his head and drawing the narrow cart, leading, descended the steep hill of Remilly. It had rained heavily during the night, and the roads were become rivers of mud; great lowering clouds hung in the heavens, imparting an air of cheerless desolation to the scene.

Prosper, wishing to save all the distance he could, had determined on taking the route that lay through the city of Sedan, but before they reached Pont-Maugis a Prussian outpost halted the cart and held it for over an hour, and finally, after their pass had been referred, one after another, to four or five officials, they were told they might resume their journey, but only on condition of taking the longer, roundabout route by way of Bazeilles, to do which they would have to turn into a cross-road on their left. No reason was assigned; their object was probably to avoid adding to the crowd that encumbered the streets of the city. When Silvine crossed the Meuse by the railroad bridge, that ill-starred bridge that the French had failed to destroy and which, moreover, had been the cause of such slaughter among the Bavarians, she beheld the corpse of an artilleryman floating lazily down with the sluggish current. It caught among some rushes near the bank, hung there a moment, then swung clear and started afresh on its downward way.

Bazeilles, through which they passed from end to end at a slow walk, afforded a spectacle of ruin and desolation, the worst that war can perpetrate when it sweeps with devastating force, like a cyclone, through a land. The dead had been removed; there was not a single corpse to be seen in the village streets, and the rain had washed away the blood; pools of reddish water were to be seen here and there in the roadway, with repulsive, frowzy-looking debris, matted masses that one could not help associating in his mind with human hair. But what shocked and saddened one more than all the rest was the ruin that was visible everywhere; that charming village, only three days before so bright and smiling, with its pretty houses standing in their well-kept gardens, now razed, demolished, annihilated, nothing left of all its beauties save a few smoke-stained walls. The church was burning still, a huge pyre of smoldering beams and girders, whence streamed continually upward a column of dense black smoke that, spreading in the heavens, overshadowed the city like a gigantic funeral pall. Entire streets had been swept away, not a house left on either side, nor any trace that houses had ever been there, save the calcined stone-work lying in the gutter in a pasty mess of soot and ashes, the whole lost in the viscid, ink-black mud of the thoroughfare. Where streets intersected the corner houses were razed down to their foundations, as if they had been carried away bodily by the fiery blast that blew there. Others had suffered less; one in particular, owing to some chance, had escaped almost without injury, while its neighbors on either hand, literally torn to pieces by the iron hail, were like gaunt skeletons. An unbearable stench was everywhere, noticeable, the nauseating odor that follows a great fire, aggravated by the penetrating smell of petroleum, that had been used without stint upon floors and walls. Then, too, there was the pitiful, mute spectacle of the household goods that the people had endeavored to save, the poor furniture that had been thrown from windows and smashed upon the sidewalk, crazy tables with broken legs, presses with cloven sides and split doors, linen, also, torn and soiled, that was trodden under foot; all the sorry crumbs, the unconsidered trifles of the pillage, of which the destruction was being completed by the dissolving rain. Through the breach in a shattered house-front a clock was visible, securely fastened high up on the wall above the mantel-shelf, that had miraculously escaped intact.