Complete Works of Emile Zola (1208 page)

“More bones for the crows to pick!” sorrowfully said Maurice, remembering the great droves of horses that he had encountered on a previous occasion. “If we remain here a few days we shall all be devouring one another. Poor brutes!”

The night between Tuesday and Wednesday was most terrible of all, and Jean, who was beginning to feel seriously alarmed for Maurice’s feverish state, made him wrap himself in an old blanket that they had purchased from a zouave for ten francs, while he, with no protection save his water-soaked capote, cheerfully took the drenching of the deluge which that night pelted down without cessation. Their position under the poplars had become untenable; it was a streaming river of mud, the water rested in deep puddles on the surface of the saturated ground. What was worst of all was that they had to suffer on an empty stomach, the evening meal of the six men having consisted of two beets which they had been compelled to eat raw, having no dry wood to make a fire with, and the sweet taste and refreshing coolness of the vegetables had quickly been succeeded by an intolerable burning sensation. Some cases of dysentery had appeared among the men, caused by fatigue, improper food and the persistent humidity of the atmosphere. More than ten times that night did Jean stretch forth his hand to see that Maurice had not uncovered himself in the movements of his slumber, and thus he kept watch and ward over his friend — his back supported by the same tree-trunk, his legs in a pool of water — with tenderness unspeakable. Since the day that on the plateau of Illy his comrade had carried him off in his arms and saved him from the Prussians he had repaid the debt a hundred-fold. He stopped not to reason on it; it was the free gift of all his being, the total forgetfulness of self for love of the other, the finest, most delicate, grandest exhibition of friendship possible, and that, too, in a peasant, whose lot had always been the lowly one of a tiller of the soil and who had never risen far above the earth, who could not find words to express what he felt, acting purely from instinct, in all simplicity of soul. Many a time already he had taken the food from his mouth, as the men of the squad were wont to say; now he would have divested himself of his skin if with it he might have covered the other, to protect his shoulders, to warm his feet. And in the midst of the savage egoism that surrounded them, among that aggregation of suffering humanity whose worst appetites were inflamed and intensified by hunger, he perhaps owed it to his complete abnegation of self that he had preserved thus far his tranquillity of mind and his vigorous health, for he among them all, his great strength unimpaired, alone maintained his composure and something like a level head.

After that distressful night Jean determined to carry into execution a plan that he had been reflecting over since the day previous.

“See here, little one, we can get nothing to eat, and everyone seems to have forgotten us here in this beastly hole; now unless we want to die the death of dogs, it behooves us to stir about a bit. How are your legs?”

The sun had come out again, fortunately, and Maurice was warmed and comforted.

“Oh, my legs are all right!”

“Then we’ll start off on an exploring expedition. We’ve money in our pockets, and the deuce is in it if we can’t find something to buy. And we won’t bother our heads about the others; they don’t deserve it. Let them take care of themselves.”

The truth was that Loubet and Chouteau had disgusted him by their trickiness and low selfishness, stealing whatever they could lay hands on and never dividing with their comrades, while no good was to be got out of Lapoulle, the brute, and Pache, the sniveling devotee.

The pair, therefore, Maurice and Jean, started out by the road along the Meuse which the former had traversed once before, on the night of his arrival. At the Tour a Glaire the park and dwelling-house presented a sorrowful spectacle of pillage and devastation, the trim lawns cut up and destroyed, the trees felled, the mansion dismantled. A ragged, dirty crew of soldiers, with hollow cheeks and eyes preternaturally bright from fever, had taken possession of the place and were living like beasts in the filthy chambers, not daring to leave their quarters for a moment lest someone else might come along and occupy them. A little further on they passed the cavalry and artillery, encamped on the hillsides, once so conspicuous by reason of the neatness and jauntiness of their appearance, now run to seed like all the rest, their organization gone, demoralized by that terrible, torturing hunger that drove the horses wild and sent the men straggling through the fields in plundering bands. Below them, to the right, they beheld an apparently interminable line of artillerymen and chasseurs d’Afrique defiling slowly before the mill; the miller was selling them flour, measuring out two handfuls into their handkerchiefs for a franc. The prospect of the long wait that lay before them, should they take their place at the end of the line, determined them to pass on, in the hope that some better opportunity would present itself at the village of Iges; but great was their consternation when they reached it to find the little place as bare and empty as an Algerian village through which has passed a swarm of locusts; not a crumb, not a fragment of anything eatable, neither bread, nor meat, nor vegetables, the wretched inhabitants utterly destitute. General Lebrun was said to be there, closeted with the mayor. He had been endeavoring, ineffectually, to arrange for an issue of bonds, redeemable at the close of the war, in order to facilitate the victualing of the troops. Money had ceased to have any value when there was nothing that it could purchase. The day before two francs had been paid for a biscuit, seven francs for a bottle of wine, a small glass of brandy was twenty sous, a pipeful of tobacco ten sous. And now officers, sword in hand, had to stand guard before the general’s house and the neighboring hovels, for bands of marauders were constantly passing, breaking down doors and stealing even the oil from the lamps and drinking it.

Three zouaves invited Maurice and Jean to join them. Five would do the work more effectually than three.

“Come along. There are horses dying in plenty, and if we can but get some dry wood—”

Then they fell to work on the miserable cabin of a poor peasant, smashing the closet doors, tearing the thatch from the roof. Some officers, who came up on a run, threatened them with their revolvers and put them to flight.

Jean, who saw that the few villagers who had remained at Iges were no better off than the soldiers, perceived he had made a mistake in passing the mill without buying some flour.

“There may be some left; we had best go back.”

But Maurice was so reduced from inanition and was beginning to suffer so from fatigue that he left him behind in a sheltered nook among the quarries, seated on a fragment of rock, his face turned upon the wide horizon of Sedan. He, after waiting in line for two long hours, finally returned with some flour wrapped in a piece of rag. And they ate it uncooked, dipping it up in their hands, unable to devise any other way. It was not so very bad; It had no particular flavor, only the insipid taste of dough. Their breakfast, such as it was, did them some good, however. They were even so fortunate as to discover a little pool of rain-water, comparatively pure, in a hollow of a rock, at which they quenched their thirst with great satisfaction.

But when Jean proposed that they should spend the remainder of the afternoon there, Maurice negatived the motion with a great display of violence.

“No, no; not here! I should be ill if I were to have that scene before my eyes for any length of time—” With a hand that trembled he pointed to the remote horizon, the hill of Hattoy, the plateaux of Floing and Illy, the wood of la Garenne, those abhorred, detested fields of slaughter and defeat. “While you were away just now I was obliged to turn my back on it, else I should have broken out and howled with rage. Yes, I should have howled like a dog tormented by boys — you can’t imagine how it hurts me; it drives me crazy!”

Jean looked at him in surprise; he could not understand that pride, sensitive as a raw sore, that made defeat so bitter to him; he was alarmed to behold in his eyes that wandering, flighty look that he had seen there before. He affected to treat the matter lightly.

“Good! we’ll seek another country; that’s easy enough to do.”

Then they wandered as long as daylight lasted, wherever the paths they took conducted them. They visited the level portion of the peninsula in the hope of finding more potatoes there, but the artillerymen had obtained a plow and turned up the ground, and not a single potato had escaped their sharp eyes. They retraced their steps, and again they passed through throngs of listless, glassy-eyed, starving soldiers, strewing the ground with their debilitated forms, falling by hundreds in the bright sunshine from sheer exhaustion. They were themselves many times overcome by fatigue and forced to sit down and rest; then their deep-seated sensation of suffering would bring them to their feet again and they would recommence their wandering, like animals impelled by instinct to move on perpetually in quest of pasturage. It seemed to them to last for years, and yet the moments sped by rapidly. In the more inland region, over Donchery way, they received a fright from the horses and sought the protection of a wall, where they remained a long time, too exhausted to rise, watching with vague, lack-luster eyes the wild course of the crazed beasts as they raced athwart the red western sky where the sun was sinking.

As Maurice had foreseen, the thousands of horses that shared the captivity of the army, and for which it was impossible to provide forage, constituted a peril that grew greater day by day. At first they had nibbled the vegetation and gnawed the bark off trees, then had attacked the fences and whatever wooden structures they came across, and now they seemed ready to devour one another. It was a frequent occurrence to see one of them throw himself upon another and tear out great tufts from his mane or tail, which he would grind between his teeth, slavering meanwhile at the mouth profusely. But it was at night that they became most terrible, as if they were visited by visions of terror in the darkness. They collected in droves, and, attracted by the straw, made furious rushes upon what few tents there were, overturning and demolishing them. It was to no purpose that the men built great fires to keep them away; the device only served to madden them the more. Their shrill cries were so full of anguish, so dreadful to the ear, that they might have been mistaken for the howls of wild beasts. Were they driven away, they returned, more numerous and fiercer than before. Scarce a moment passed but out in the darkness could be heard the shriek of anguish of some unfortunate soldier whom the crazed beasts had crushed in their wild stampede.

The sun was still above the horizon when Jean and Maurice, on their way back to the camp, were astonished by meeting with the four men of the squad, lurking in a ditch, apparently for no good purpose. Loubet hailed them at once, and Chouteau constituted himself spokesman:

“We are considering ways and means for dining this evening. We shall die if we go on this way; it is thirty-six hours since we have had anything to put in our stomach — so, as there are horses plenty, and horse-meat isn’t such bad eating—”

“You’ll join us, won’t you, corporal?” said Loubet, interrupting, “for, with such a big, strong animal to handle, the more of us there are the better it will be. See, there is one, off yonder, that we’ve been keeping an eye on for the last hour; that big bay that is in such a bad way. He’ll be all the easier to finish.”

And he pointed to a horse that was dying of starvation, on the edge of what had once been a field of beets. He had fallen on his flank, and every now and then would raise his head and look about him pleadingly, with a deep inhalation that sounded like a sigh.

“Ah, how long we have to wait!” grumbled Lapoulle, who was suffering torment from his fierce appetite. “I’ll go and kill him — shall I?”

But Loubet stopped him. Much obliged! and have the Prussians down on them, who had given notice that death would be the penalty for killing a horse, fearing that the carcass would breed a pestilence. They must wait until it was dark. And that was the reason why the four men were lurking in the ditch, waiting, with glistening, hungry eyes fixed on the dying brute.

“Corporal,” asked Pache, in a voice that faltered a little, “you have lots of ideas in your head; couldn’t you kill him painlessly?”

Jean refused the cruel task with a gesture of disgust. What, kill that poor beast that was even then in its death agony! oh, no, no! His first impulse had been to fly and take Maurice with him, that neither of them might be concerned in the revolting butchery; but looking at his companion and beholding him so pale and faint, he reproached himself for such an excess of sensibility. What were animals created for after all,
mon Dieu
, unless to afford sustenance to man! They could not allow themselves to starve when there was food within reach. And it rejoiced him to see Maurice cheer up a little at the prospect of eating; he said in his easy, good-natured way:

“Faith, you’re wrong there; I’ve no ideas in my head, and if he has got to be killed without pain—”

“Oh! that’s all one to me,” interrupted Lapoulle. “I’ll show you.”

The two newcomers seated themselves in the ditch and joined the others in their expectancy. Now and again one of the men would rise and make certain that the horse was still there, its neck outstretched to catch the cool exhalations of the Meuse and the last rays of the setting sun, as if bidding farewell to life. And when at last twilight crept slowly o’er the scene the six men were erect upon their feet, impatient that night was so tardy in its coming, casting furtive, frightened looks about them to see they were not observed.

“Ah,
zut
!” exclaimed Chouteau, “the time is come!”

Objects were still discernible in the fields by the uncertain, mysterious light “between dog and wolf,” and Lapoulle went forward first, followed by the five others. He had taken from the ditch a large, rounded boulder, and, with it in his two brawny hands, rushing upon the horse, commenced to batter at his skull as with a club. At the second blow, however, the horse, stung by the pain, attempted to get on his feet. Chouteau and Loubet had thrown themselves across his legs and were endeavoring to hold him down, shouting to the others to help them. The poor brute’s cries were almost human in their accent of terror and distress; he struggled desperately to shake off his assailants, and would have broken them like a reed had he not been half dead with inanition. The movements of his head prevented the blows from taking effect; Lapoulle was unable to despatch him.