Complete Works of Emile Zola (1168 page)

“Little Charlot is asleep there in his room; she surely won’t be long away, now.”

Honore, with quivering lips, looked so intently at his father that the old man began to pace the floor again.
Mon Dieu!
yes, the child was there; doubtless he would have to look on him. A painful silence filled the room, while he mechanically cut himself more bread and began to eat again. Jean also continued his operations in that line, without finding it necessary to say a word. Maurice contemplated the furniture, the old sideboard, the antique clock, and reflected on the long summer days that he had spent at Remilly in bygone times with his sister Henriette. The minutes slipped away, the clock struck eleven.

“The devil!” he murmured, “it will never do to let the regiment go off without us!”

He stepped to the window and opened it, Fouchard making no objection. Beneath lay the valley, a great bowl filled to the brim with blackness; presently, however, when his eyes became more accustomed to the obscurity, he had no difficulty in distinguishing the bridge, illuminated by the fires on the two banks. The cuirassiers were passing still, like phantoms in their long white cloaks, while their steeds trod upon the bosom of the stream and a chill wind of terror breathed on them from behind; and so the spectral train moved on, apparently interminable, in an endless, slow-moving vision of unsubstantial forms. Toward the right, over the bare hills where the slumbering army lay, there brooded a stillness and repose like death.

“Ah well!” said Maurice with a gesture of disappointment, “‘twill be to-morrow morning.”

He had left the window open, and Father Fouchard, seizing his gun, straddled the sill and stepped outside, as lightly as a young man. For a time they could hear his tramp upon the road, as regular as that of a sentry pacing his beat, but presently it ceased and the only sound that reached their ears was the distant clamor on the crowded bridge; it must be that he had seated himself by the wayside, where he could watch for approaching danger and at slightest sign leap to defend his property.

Honore’s anxiety meantime was momentarily increasing; his eyes were fixed constantly on the clock. It was less than four miles from Raucourt to Remilly, an easy hour’s walk for a woman as young and strong as Silvine. Why had she not returned in all that time since the old man lost sight of her in the confusion? He thought of the disorder of a retreating army corps, spreading over the country and blocking the roads; some accident must certainly have happened, and he pictured her in distress, wandering among the lonely fields, trampled under foot by the horsemen.

But suddenly the three men rose to their feet, moved by a common impulse. There was a sound of rapid steps coming up the road and the old man was heard to cock his weapon.

“Who goes there?” he shouted. “Is it you, Silvine?”

There was no reply. He repeated his question, threatening to fire. Then a laboring, breathless voice managed to articulate:

“Yes, yes, Father Fouchard; it is I.” And she quickly asked: “And Charlot?”

“He is abed and asleep.”

“That is well! Thanks.”

There was no longer cause for her to hasten; she gave utterance to a deep-drawn sigh, as if to rid herself of her burden of fatigue and distress.

“Go in by the window,” said Fouchard. “There is company in there.”

She was greatly agitated when, leaping lightly into the room, she beheld the three men. In the uncertain candle-light she gave the impression of being very dark, with thick black hair and a pair of large, fine, lustrous eyes, the chief adornment of a small oval face, strong by reason of its tranquil resignation. The sudden meeting with Honore had sent all the blood rushing from her heart to her cheeks; and yet she was hardly surprised to find him there; he had been in her thoughts all the way home from Raucourt.

He, trembling with agitation, his heart in his throat, spoke with affected calmness:

“Good-evening, Silvine.”

“Good-evening, Honore.”

Then, to keep from breaking down and bursting into tears, she turned away, and recognizing Maurice, gave him a smile. Jean’s presence was embarrassing to her. She felt as if she were choking somehow, and removed the
foulard
that she wore about her neck.

Honore continued, dropping the friendly
thou
of other days:

“We were anxious about you, Silvine, on account of the Prussians being so near at hand.”

All at once her face became very pale and showed great distress; raising her hand to her eyes as if to shut out some atrocious vision, and directing an involuntary glance toward the room where Charlot was slumbering, she murmured:

“The Prussians — Oh! yes, yes, I saw them.”

Sinking wearily upon a chair she told how, when the 7th corps came into Raucourt, she had fled for shelter to the house of her godfather, Doctor Dalichamp, hoping that Father Fouchard would think to come and take her up before he left the town. The main street was filled with a surging throng, so dense that not even a dog could have squeezed his way through it, and up to four o’clock she had felt no particular alarm, tranquilly employed in scraping lint in company with some of the ladies of the place; for the doctor, with the thought that they might be called on to care for some of the wounded, should there be a battle over in the direction of Metz and Verdun, had been busying himself for the last two weeks with improvising a hospital in the great hall of the
mairie
. Some people who dropped in remarked that they might find use for their hospital sooner than they expected, and sure enough, a little after midday, the roar of artillery had reached their ears from over Beaumont way. But that was not near enough to cause anxiety and no one was alarmed, when, all at once, just as the last of the French troops were filing out of Raucourt, a shell, with a frightful crash, came tearing through the roof of a neighboring house. Two others followed in quick succession; it was a German battery shelling the rear-guard of the 7th corps. Some of the wounded from Beaumont had already been brought in to the
mairie
, where it was feared that the enemy’s projectiles would finish them as they lay on their mattresses waiting for the doctor to come and operate on them. The men were crazed with fear, and would have risen and gone down into the cellars, notwithstanding their mangled limbs, which extorted from them shrieks of agony.

“And then,” continued Silvine, “I don’t know how it happened, but all at once the uproar was succeeded by a deathlike stillness. I had gone upstairs and was looking from a window that commanded a view of the street and fields. There was not a soul in sight, not a ‘red-leg’ to be seen anywhere, when I heard the tramp, tramp of heavy footsteps, and then a voice shouted something that I could not understand and all the muskets came to the ground together with a great crash. And I looked down into the street below, and there was a crowd of small, dirty-looking men in black, with ugly, big faces and wearing helmets like those our firemen wear. Someone told me they were Bavarians. Then I raised my eyes again and saw, oh! thousands and thousands of them, streaming in by the roads, across the fields, through the woods, in serried, never-ending columns. In the twinkling of an eye the ground was black with them, a black swarm, a swarm of black locusts, coming thicker and thicker, so that, in no time at all, the earth was hid from sight.”

She shivered and repeated her former gesture, veiling her vision from some atrocious spectacle.

“And the things that occurred afterward would exceed belief. It seems those men had been marching three days, and on top of that had fought at Beaumont like tigers; hence they were perishing with hunger, their eyes were starting from their sockets, they were beside themselves. The officers made no effort to restrain them; they broke into shops and private houses, smashing doors and windows, demolishing furniture, searching for something to eat and drink, no matter what, bolting whatever they could lay their hands on. I saw one in the shop of Monsieur Simonin, the grocer, ladling molasses from a cask with his helmet. Others were chewing strips of raw bacon, others again had filled their mouths with flour. They were told that our troops had been passing through the town for the last two days and there was nothing left, but here and there they found some trifling store that had been hid away, not sufficient to feed so many hungry mouths, and that made them think the folks were lying to them, and they went on to smash things more furiously than ever. In less than an hour, there was not a butcher’s, grocer’s, or baker’s shop in the city left ungutted; even the private houses were entered, their cellars emptied, and their closets pillaged. At the doctor’s — did you ever hear of such a thing? I caught one big fellow devouring the soap. But the cellar was the place where they did most mischief; we could hear them from upstairs smashing the bottles and yelling like demons, and they drew the spigots of the casks, so that the place was flooded with wine; when they came out their hands were red with the good wine they had spilled. And to show what happens, men when they make such brutes of themselves: a soldier found a large bottle of laudanum and drank it all down, in spite of Monsieur Dalichamp’s efforts to prevent him. The poor wretch was in horrible agony when I came away; he must be dead by this time.”

A great shudder ran through her, and she put her hand to her eyes to shut out the horrid sight.

“No, no! I cannot bear it; I saw too much!”

Father Fouchard had crossed the road and stationed himself at the open window where he could hear, and the tale of pillage made him uneasy; he had been told that the Prussians paid for all they took; were they going to start out as robbers at that late day? Maurice and Jean, too, were deeply interested in those details about an enemy whom the girl had seen, and whom they had not succeeded in setting eyes on in their whole month’s campaigning, while Honore, pensive and with dry, parched lips, was conscious only of the sound of
her
voice; he could think of nothing save her and the misfortune that had parted them.

Just then the door of the adjoining room was opened, and little Charlot appeared. He had heard his mother’s voice, and came trotting into the apartment in his nightgown to give her a kiss. He was a chubby, pink little urchin, large and strong for his age, with a thatch of curling, straw-colored hair and big blue eyes. Silvine shivered at his sudden appearance, as if the sight of him had recalled to her mind the image of someone else that affected her disagreeably. Did she no longer recognize him, then, her darling child, that she looked at him thus, as if he were some evocation of that horrid nightmare! She burst into tears.

“My poor, poor child!” she exclaimed, and clasped him wildly to her breast, while Honore, ghastly pale, noted how strikingly like the little one was to Goliah; the same broad, pink face, the true Teutonic type, in all the health and strength of rosy, smiling childhood. The son of the Prussian,
the Prussian
, as the pothouse wits of Remilly had styled him! And the French mother, who sat there, pressing him to her bosom, her heart still bleeding with the recollection of the cruel sights she had witnessed that day!

“My poor child, be good; come with me back to bed. Say good-night, my poor child.”

She vanished, bearing him away. When she returned from the adjoining room she was no longer weeping; her face wore its customary expression of calm and courageous resignation.

It was Honore who, with a trembling voice, started the conversation again.

“And what did the Prussians do then?”

“Ah, yes; the Prussians. Well, they plundered right and left, destroying everything, eating and drinking all they could lay hands on. They stole linen as well, napkins and sheets, and even curtains, tearing them in strips to make bandages for their feet. I saw some whose feet were one raw lump of flesh, so long and hard had been their march. One little group I saw, seated at the edge of the gutter before the doctor’s house, who had taken off their shoes and were bandaging themselves with handsome chemises, trimmed with lace, stolen, doubtless, from pretty Madame Lefevre, the manufacturer’s wife. The pillage went on until night. The houses had no doors or windows left, and one passing in the street could look within and see the wrecked furniture, a scene of destruction that would have aroused the anger of a saint. For my part, I was almost wild, and could remain there no longer. They tried in vain to keep me, telling me that the roads were blocked, that I would certainly be killed; I started, and as soon as I was out of Raucourt, struck off to the right and took to the fields. Carts, loaded with wounded French and Prussians, were coming in from Beaumont. Two passed quite close to me in the darkness; I could hear the shrieks and groans, and I ran, oh! how I ran, across fields, through woods, I could not begin to tell you where, except that I made a wide circuit over toward Villers.

“Twice I thought I heard soldiers coming and hid, but the only person I met was another woman, a fugitive like myself. She was from Beaumont, she said, and she told me things too horrible to repeat. After that we ran harder than ever. And at last I am here, so wretched, oh! so wretched with what I have seen!”

Her tears flowed again in such abundance as to choke her utterance. The horrors of the day kept rising to her memory and would not down; she related the story that the woman of Beaumont had told her. That person lived in the main street of the village, where she had witnessed the passage of all the German artillery after nightfall. The column was accompanied on either side of the road by a file of soldiers bearing torches of pitch-pine, which illuminated the scene with the red glare of a great conflagration, and between the flaring, smoking lights the impetuous torrent of horses, guns, and men tore onward at a mad gallop. Their feet were winged with the tireless speed of victory as they rushed on in devilish pursuit of the French, to overtake them in some last ditch and crush them, annihilate them there. They stopped for nothing; on, on they went, heedless of what lay in their way. Horses fell; their traces were immediately cut, and they were left to be ground and torn by the pitiless wheels until they were a shapeless, bleeding mass. Human beings, prisoners and wounded men, who attempted to cross the road, were ruthlessly borne down and shared their fate. Although the men were dying with hunger the fierce hurricane poured on unchecked; was a loaf thrown to the drivers, they caught it flying; the torch-bearers passed slices of meat to them on the end of their bayonets, and then, with the same steel that had served that purpose, goaded their maddened horses on to further effort. And the night grew old, and still the artillery was passing, with the mad roar of a tempest let loose upon the land, amid the frantic cheering of the men.