Читать книгу The Downfall (La Débâcle) - Emile Zola - Страница 9

Maurice was greatly surprised when, on detraining at Rheims, the 106th received orders to encamp there. Were they not going to join the army at Châlons then? And a couple of hours later, when his regiment had piled arms at a league from the city, over towards Courcelles, amid the vast plain skirting the canal from the Aisne to the Marne, his astonishment increased on learning that the entire army of Châlons had been falling back since the morning and would bivouac on this very spot. And, indeed, tents were being pitched from one end of the horizon to the other, as far away as St. Thierry and La Meuvillette, and even beyond the high road to Laon; and the fires of all four army corps would be blazing there that same evening. Evidently enough, the plan of taking up a position under Paris, there to await the Prussians, had prevailed, and Maurice was delighted, for was not this plan the wisest?

He spent most of the afternoon of August 21 in strolling through the camp in search of news. Great latitude was allowed, there seemed less discipline than ever, and the men went off and came back just as they pleased. Maurice himself was able to return to Rheims to cash a post-office order for a hundred francs which he had received from his sister. Whilst there he entered a café, where he heard a sergeant talking of the factious disposition of the eighteen battalions of the Garde Mobile of the Seine, which had been sent back to Paris. The sixth battalion had almost murdered its officers. At Châlons the generals had constantly been insulted, and since the Frœschweiler defeat the men no longer saluted MacMahon. The café was filling with chatterers, and a violent discussion arose between two peaceful civilians respecting the number of men that the marshal might have under his orders. One of the disputants talked of 500,000 men, which was absurd. The other, more sensible, passed the four corps in review: the Twelfth, completed with difficulty at the camp by means of marching regiments and a division of Marine Infantry; the First, the disbanded remnants of which had been arriving since August 14, and were now being more or less successfully reorganised; then the Fifth, defeated without having fought, carried away and broken up in the rout; and the Seventh, just arriving, which was likewise in a demoralised state, and lacked its first division, mere shreds of which it had now found at Rheims. Altogether there were at the utmost 120,000 men, including the Bonnemain and Margueritte divisions of the reserve cavalry. However, the sergeant having mixed himself up in the dispute, alluding to the army with furious contempt as a mere jumble of men, a flock of innocents led by idiots to the slaughter, the two civilians became alarmed and took themselves off, fearing lest they might be compromised.

Maurice followed their example, and endeavoured to obtain some newspapers. He filled his pockets with every number he could buy, and read them as he walked along under the spreading trees of the magnificent promenades that engirdle the town. Where could the German armies be? It seemed as if they had been lost. Two of them, no doubt, were near Metz—the first, under General Steinmetz, watching the fortress; the second, under Prince Frederick Charles, trying to make its way up the right bank of the Moselle so as to cut off Bazaine's communications with Paris. But where—so confused and contradictory were the newspaper statements—could the third army really be—the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia, victorious at Weissenburg and Frœschweiler, and launched in pursuit of the First and Fifth French corps? Was it still camping at Nancy, or was it on the point of reaching Châlons that the camp should have been so hastily abandoned, and the magazines, accoutrements, forage, quite an incalculable wealth of supplies, fired and destroyed? There was the same confusion, and the same contradictory suppositions were indulged in with respect to the plans of the French generals. Hitherto separated from the rest of the world, it was only now that Maurice learnt what had been occurring in Paris—the thunderbolt of defeat falling on a people confident of victory, the terrible emotion in the streets, the convocation of the Chambers, the fall of the Liberal ministry[12] that had organised the Plebiscitum, and the Emperor's deposition from the post of commander-in-chief, which he had been obliged to surrender to Marshal Bazaine. The Emperor had been at the camp of Châlons since August 16, and all the papers spoke of a great council held there on the 17th, and attended by Prince Napoleon and several generals. None of the accounts agreed, however, as to the decisions that had been arrived at, apart from the incidents that had immediately followed, such as the appointment of General Trochu as governor of Paris and of Marshal MacMahon as commander of the army of Châlons, which implied the complete effacement of the Sovereign. A general scare, prodigious irresolution, conflicting plans following swiftly one upon the other—all these could be divined. But ever the same question arose in Maurice's mind: Where were the German armies? Who were right—those who pretended that Bazaine's movements were free, and that he was effecting his retreat by way of the northern fortresses, or those who asserted that he was already blockaded under Metz? There were persistent rumours of gigantic battles, heroic struggles sustained during an entire week, from the 14th to the 20th, but from these there was evolved only a formidable echo of conflict, waged far away.

His legs sinking from fatigue, Maurice seated himself at last on a bench. The town around him seemed to be living its daily life. Nurses were minding children under the beautiful trees, and petty cits were slowly taking their usual walk. Maurice scanned his papers again, and in doing so came upon an article he had not previously noticed in one of the most fiery of the Republican opposition journals. This threw a vivid light on the situation. At the council held at the camp of Châlons on August 17, so this newspaper asserted, the retreat of the army upon Paris had been decided on, and General Trochu's appointment as governor of the capital had been made solely with the view of preparing the Emperor's return. But the newspaper added that these decisions had been frustrated by the attitude which the Empress-Regent and the new ministry[13] had taken up. According to the Empress Eugénie a revolution was certain if the Emperor returned to Paris. 'He would not reach the Tuileries alive,' she was asserted to have said. And she obstinately insisted on a forward march, on MacMahon effecting a junction, despite every obstacle, with the army of Metz; in which views she was supported by the minister of war, General de Palikao, who had planned a victorious, lightning march for MacMahon, so that the latter might join hands with Bazaine. Gazing dreamily in front of him, with his paper lying on his knees, Maurice now fancied that he could understand everything: The two conflicting plans; MacMahon's hesitation to undertake this dangerous flank march with such indifferent troops; and the impatient, increasingly fretful orders which reached him from Paris, urging him into this madly rash adventure. Whilst picturing the tragical struggle, Maurice had a clear vision of the Emperor, deprived of his imperial authority which he had confided to the Empress-Regent, and divested of the supreme command of the army which he had entrusted to Marshal Bazaine, so that he had now become a mere nothing—a vague, undefined shadow of an Emperor, a nameless and cumbersome inutility, whom no one knew what to do with, whom Paris rejected, and who no longer had any place in the army since he had undertaken not to give it a single order.

On the following morning, when Maurice awoke after a stormy night, which he had spent rolled up in his blanket outside his tent, he was relieved to hear that the plan of retreating upon Paris had gained the upper hand. There was some talk of a fresh council held the previous evening, which had been attended by the ex-vice-Emperor,[14] M. Rouher, whom the Empress had despatched to head quarters in view of hastening the march upon Verdun, but whom Marshal MacMahon seemed to have convinced of the danger that would attend such a movement. Had any bad news of Bazaine come to hand? No one dared to assert this. However, the absence of news was sufficiently significant. All the officers with any common sense pronounced themselves in favour of waiting for the enemy under Paris; and, feeling convinced that he and his comrades would begin falling back the very next day, since it was said that orders to that effect had been issued, Maurice in his delight determined to satisfy a childish craving. He wished, once in a way, to escape the mess-platter and to breakfast somewhere at a cloth-spread table, with a bottle of wine, a decanter of water, and a plate before him—all the things which it seemed to him he had been deprived of for many months. He had some money in his pocket, so he slipped away with a beating heart, as if bent on some spree, and began to search about him for an inn.

It was on the outskirts of the village of Courcelles, beyond the canal, that he found the breakfast he had dreamt of. He had been told the day before that the Emperor had taken up his quarters at a private house in this village, and having strolled there out of curiosity, he remembered having noticed at the corner of a couple of roads a tavern with an arbour, where dangled some beautiful bunches of grapes already ripe and golden. There were some green-painted tables under the creeping vine, and through the open doorway of the spacious kitchen one could espy the loud-ticking clock, the cheap coloured prints pasted on the walls, and the fat hostess attending to the roasting-jack. A bowling alley stretched in the rear of the house, and the whole place had the gay, attractive, free-and-easy aspect of an old-fashioned guinguette.

A well-built, full-breasted girl, who showed her white teeth, came to ask Maurice if he wished to breakfast.

'Of course I do. Give me some eggs, a chop, and some cheese—and some white wine.' Then calling her back he asked, 'Isn't the Emperor quartered in one of those houses?'

'Yes, in the one in front of us; but you can't see it—it is behind the trees that rise above that high wall.'

Maurice then installed himself in the arbour, took off his belt that he might be more at his ease, and selected a table on which the sunrays, filtering through the vine leaves, were casting golden spots. His eyes kept on returning to that high yellow wall which screened the Emperor from view. The house was indeed a hidden and mysterious one; not even the tiles of the roof could be seen. The entrance was on the other side, facing the village street—a narrow street, where neither shop nor even window was to be seen, for it wound along between monotonous blank walls. The grounds in the rear of the house looked like an ait of dense verdure amid the neighbouring buildings. Among these, on the other side of the highway, Maurice noticed a large courtyard surrounded by stables and coach-houses, and filled with vans and carriages, amid which men and horses were continually coming and going.

'And are all those traps for the Emperor?' Maurice jokingly asked the servant, as she spread a clean white cloth on his table.

'Yes, for the Emperor and no one else,' she answered, with a gay sprightly air, pleased to have an opportunity of showing her fresh white teeth. Then she began to enumerate all there was; having learnt this, no doubt, from the grooms who had been coming to drink at the tavern since the day before. To begin with, there was the staff of twenty-five officers, the sixty Cent-Gardes, the escort-detachment of Guides,[15] the six Gendarmes of the provostship service; then the household, comprising seventy-three persons, chamberlains, valets and footmen, cooks and scullions; next four saddle-horses and two carriages for the Emperor, ten horses for the equerries, and eight for the outriders and grooms, without counting forty-seven posting horses; then a char à bancs and twelve baggage vans, two of which, reserved to the cooks, had excited the girl's admiration by the large quantity of kitchen utensils, plates, and bottles that could be seen inside them, all in beautiful order. 'Ah! sir,' she said to Maurice, 'I never saw such saucepans before! They shine like the sun! And there are all sorts of dishes and vessels, and things I can't even tell the use of! And wine, too—bordeaux, and burgundy, and champagne enough to give a splendid wedding feast.'

Well pleased at sight of the clean white cloth and the light golden wine sparkling in his glass, Maurice ate a couple of boiled eggs with a gluttonous enjoyment he had never before experienced. Whenever he turned his head to the left he obtained, through one of the entrances to the arbour, a view of the vast tent-covered plain, the swarming city that had just sprung up amid the stubble between Rheims and the canal. Only a few meagre clumps of trees dotted the grey expanse, where three mills upreared their slender arms. Above the confused roofs of Rheims, intermingled with the crests of chestnut trees, the colossal pile of the cathedral stood out in the blue atmosphere, looking, though far away, quite gigantic by the side of the low houses. And, on seeing it, recollections of schoolboy days came back to Maurice. Lessons that he had learnt and hemmed and hawed over returned to his mind: the coronations of the French Kings in Rheims Cathedral, the holy oil, Clovis, Joan of Arc—all the departed glories of ancient France.

Then, again thinking of the Emperor hidden away in that modest private house so discreetly closed, Maurice turned his eyes once more on the high yellow wall, and was surprised to read on it the inscription, 'Vive Napoléon!' traced in huge letters with a bit of charcoal, beside some clumsy obscene drawings. The rain had washed away the yellow distemper that had previously concealed the writing, and the inscription was evidently an old one. How singular to find upon that wall this acclamation, born of the warlike enthusiasm of long ago, and intended, undoubtedly, for the uncle, the conquering Napoleon, not his nephew! At sight of it, all Maurice's childhood arose before him, carolling in his mind, and again he listened to the tales of his grandfather, a soldier of the Grand Army. His mother was dead, and his father had been obliged to accept a post of tax collector, no opportunities for winning glory being vouchsafed to the sons of the heroes of France after the fall of the First Empire. And the grandfather lived with them on a most meagre pension, fallen to the level of this modest home, and having but one consolation, that of recounting his campaigns to his grandchildren, the twins, boy and girl, each with the same fair hair, and whose mother he, in some measure, was. He would seat Henriette on his left knee, and Maurice on his right, and then, during long hours, there followed Homeric tales of battle.

These tales did not seem to belong to history; different periods were blended, and all the nations of the earth met together in one great, fearful collision. The English, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians passed by—now in turn, now all at the same time—just as alliances willed it, and without it being possible to say why some were beaten rather than others. But beaten they were, inevitably beaten in advance by a great dash of heroism and genius which swept armies away as if they had been merely chaff. There was Marengo, the classical engagement on level ground, with the long lines of troops skilfully deployed, and the faultless retreat in échelon order of the battalions so silent and impassive under fire. This was the legendary battle lost at three o'clock, won at six; the battle when eight hundred grenadiers of the Consular Guard arrested the onslaught of the entire Austrian cavalry; when Desaix came up to meet his death and to change an impending rout into an immortal victory. Then there was Austerlitz, with its beautiful sun of glory shining through the wintry mist; Austerlitz, commencing with the capture of the plateau of Pritzen and ending with the terrifying disruption of the ice on the frozen lakes, when an entire Russian army corps, men and horses, sank into the water amid a frightful crash; whilst the god-like Napoleon, who had naturally foreseen everything, completed the disaster with his round shot. Next there was Jena, where Prussia's power was entombed; at first, the skirmishers firing through the October fog, and Ney, by his impatience, almost compromising everything; then Augereau's advance that extricated Ney, the great onslaught, so violent that it swept away the enemy's entire centre; and finally the panic, the sauve-qui-peut of an over-vaunted cavalry, whom the French Hussars mowed down like ripe oats, strewing the romantic valley with men and horses. Then there was Eylau—Eylau, the abominable—the most bloody of battles, when such was the slaughter that the hideously disfigured bodies lay on the ground in heaps; Eylau, blood red under its snow storm, with its mournful cemetery of heroes; Eylau still loudly re-echoing the thunderous charge of Murat's eighty squadrons, which cut right through the Russian army and strewed the field with such a depth of corpses that even Napoleon himself wept at the sight.