WHAT PAUL SAW AT ORNEQUIN
Paul Delroze was awakened at dawn by the bugle-call. And, in the
artillery duel that now began, he at once recognized the sharp, dry
voice of the seventy-fives and the hoarse bark of the German
seventy-sevens.
"Are you coming, Paul?" Bernard called from his room. "Coffee is served
downstairs."
The brothers-in-law had found two little bedrooms over a publican's
shop. While they both did credit to a substantial breakfast, Paul told
Bernard the particulars of the occupation of Corvigny and Ornequin which
he had gathered on the evening before:
"On Wednesday, the nineteenth of August, Corvigny, to the great
satisfaction of the inhabitants, still thought that it would be spared
the horrors of war. There was fighting in Alsace and outside Nancy,
there was fighting in Belgium; but it looked as if the German thrust
were neglecting the route of invasion offered by the valley of the
Liseron. The fact is that this road is a narrow one and apparently of
secondary importance. At Corvigny, a French brigade was busily pushing
forward the defense-works. The Grand Jonas and the Petit Jonas were
ready under their concrete cupolas. Our fellows were waiting."
"And at Ornequin?" asked Bernard.
"At Ornequin, we had a company of light infantry. The officers put up at
the house. This company, supported by a detachment of dragoons,
patrolled the frontier day and night. In case of alarm, the orders were
to inform the forts at once and to retreat fighting. The evening of
Wednesday was absolutely quiet. A dozen dragoons had galloped over the
frontier till they were in sight of the little German town of Èbrecourt.
There was not a movement of troops to be seen on that side, nor on the
railway-line that ends at Èbrecourt. The night also was peaceful. Not a
shot was fired. It is fully proved that at two o'clock in the morning
not a single German soldier had crossed the frontier. Well, at two
o'clock exactly, a violent explosion was heard, followed by four others
at close intervals. These explosions were due to the bursting of five
four-twenty shells which demolished straightway the three cupolas of the
Grand Jonas and the two cupolas of the Petit Jonas."
"What do you mean? Corvigny is fifteen miles from the frontier; and the
four-twenties don't carry as far as that!"
"That didn't prevent six more shells falling at Corvigny, all on the
church or in the square. And these six shells fell twenty minutes later,
that is to say, at the time when it was to be presumed that the alarm
would have been given and that the Corvigny garrison would have
assembled in the square. This was just what had happened; and you can
imagine the carnage that resulted."
"I agree; but, once more, the frontier was fifteen miles away. That
distance must have given our troops time to form up again and to prepare
for the attacks foretold by the bombardment. They had at least three or
four hours before them."
"They hadn't fifteen minutes. The bombardment was not over before the
assault began. Assault isn't the word: our troops, those at Corvigny as
well as those which hastened up from the two forts, were decimated and
routed, surrounded by the enemy, shot down or obliged to surrender,
before it was possible to organize any sort of resistance. It all
happened suddenly under the blinding glare of flash-lights erected no
one knew where or how. And the catastrophe was immediate. You may take
it that Corvigny was invested, attacked, captured and occupied by the
enemy, all in ten minutes."
"But where did he come from? Where did he spring from?"
"Nobody knows."
"But the night-patrols on the frontier? The sentries? The company on
duty at Ornequin?"
"Never heard of again. No one knows anything, not a word, not a rumor,
about those three hundred men whose business it was to keep watch and to
warn the others. You can reckon up the Corvigny garrison, with the
soldiers who escaped and the dead whom the inhabitants identified and
buried. But the three hundred light infantry of Ornequin disappeared
without leaving the shadow of a trace behind them, not a fugitive, not a
wounded man, not a corpse, nothing at all."
"It seems incredible. Whom did you talk to?"
"I saw ten people last night who, for a month, with no one to interfere
with them except a few soldiers of the Landsturm placed in charge of
Corvigny, have pursued a minute inquiry into all these problems, without
establishing so much as a plausible theory. One thing alone is certain:
the business was prepared long ago, down to the slightest detail. The
exact range had been taken of the forts, the cupolas, the church and the
square; and the siege-gun had been placed in position before and
accurately laid so that the eleven shells should strike the eleven
objects aimed at. That's all. The rest is mystery."
"And what about the château? And Élisabeth?"
Paul had risen from his seat. The bugles were sounding the morning
roll-call. The gun-fire was twice as intense as before. They both
started for the square; and Paul continued:
"Here, too, the mystery is bewildering and perhaps worse. One of the
cross-roads that run through the fields between Corvigny and Ornequin
has been made a boundary by the enemy which no one here had the right to
overstep under pain of death."
"Then Élisabeth . . . ?"
"I don't know, I know nothing more. And it's terrible, this shadow of
death lying over everything, over every incident. It appears--I have not
been able to find out where the rumor originated--that the village of
Ornequin, near the château, no longer exists. It has been entirely
destroyed, more than that, annihilated; and its four hundred inhabitants
have been sent away into captivity. And then . . ." Paul shuddered and,
lowering his voice, went on, "And then . . . what did they do at the
château? You can see the house, you can still see it at a distance, with
its walls and turrets standing. But what happened behind those walls?
What has become of Élisabeth? For nearly four weeks she has been living
in the midst of those brutes, poor thing, exposed to every outrage!
. . ."
The sun had hardly risen when they reached the square. Paul was sent for
by his colonel, who gave him the heartiest congratulations of the
general commanding the division and told him that his name had been
submitted for the military cross and for a commission as second
lieutenant and that he was to take command of his section from now.
"That's all," said the colonel, laughing. "Unless you have any further
request to make."
"I have two, sir."
"Go ahead."
"First, that my brother-in-law here, Bernard d'Andeville, may be at once
transferred to my section as corporal. He's deserved it."
"Very well. And next?"
"My second request is that presently, when we move towards the frontier,
my section may be sent to the Château d'Ornequin, which is on the direct
route."
"You mean that it is to take part in the attack on the château?"
"The attack?" echoed Paul, in alarm. "Why, the enemy is concentrated
along the frontier, four miles from the château!"
"So it was believed, yesterday. In reality, the concentration took place
at the Château d'Ornequin, an excellent defensive position where the
enemy is hanging desperately while waiting for his reinforcements to
come up. The best proof is that he's answering our fire. Look at that
shell bursting over there . . . and, farther off, that shrapnel . . .
two . . . three of them. Those are the guns which located the batteries
which we have set up on the surrounding hills and which are now
peppering them like mad. They must have twenty guns there."
"Then, in that case," stammered Paul, tortured by a horrible thought,
"in that case, that fire of our batteries is directed at . . ."
"At them, of course. Our seventy-fives have been bombarding the Château
d'Ornequin for the last hour."
Paul uttered an exclamation of horror:
"Do you mean to say, sir, that we're bombarding Ornequin? . . ."
And Bernard d'Andeville, standing beside him, repeated, in an
anguish-stricken voice:
"Bombarding Ornequin? Oh, how awful!"
The colonel asked, in surprise:
"Do you know the place? Perhaps it belongs to you? Is that so? And are
any of your people there?"
"Yes, sir, my wife."
Paul was very pale. Though he made an effort to stand stock-still, in
order to master his emotion, his hands trembled a little and his chin
quivered.
On the Grand Jonas, three pieces of heavy artillery began thundering,
three Rimailho guns, which had been hoisted into position by traction
engines. And this, added to the stubborn work of the seventy-fives,
assumed a terrible significance after Paul Delroze's words. The colonel
and the group of officers around him kept silence. The situation was one
of those in which the fatalities of war run riot in all their tragic
horror, stronger than the forces of nature themselves and, like them,
blind, unjust and implacable. There was nothing to be done. Not one of
those men would have dreamt of asking for the gun-fire to cease or to
slacken its activity. And Paul did not dream of it, either. He merely
said:
"It looks as if the enemy's fire was slowing down. Perhaps they are
retreating. . . ."
Three shells bursting at the far end of the town, behind the church,
belied this hope. The colonel shook his head:
"Retreating? Not yet. The place is too important to them; they are
waiting for reinforcements and they won't give way until our regiments
take part in the game . . . which won't be long now."
In fact, the order to advance was brought to the colonel a few moments
later. The regiment was to follow the road and deploy in the meadows on
the right.
"Come along, gentlemen," he said to his officers. "Sergeant Delroze's
section will march in front. His objective will be the Château
d'Ornequin. There are two little short cuts. Take both of them."
"Very well, sir."
All Paul's sorrow and rage were intensified in a boundless need for
action; when he marched off with his men, he felt an inexhaustible
strength, felt capable of conquering the enemy's position all by
himself. He moved from one to the other with the untiring hurry of a
sheep-dog hustling his flock. He never ceased advising and encouraging
his men:
"You're one of the plucky ones, old chap, I know, you're no shirker.
. . . Nor you either . . . Only you think too much about your skin, you
keep grumbling, when you ought to be cheerful. . . . Who's downhearted,
eh? There's a bit more collar-work to do and we're going to do it
without looking behind us, what?"
Overhead, the shells followed their march in the air, whistling and
moaning and exploding till they formed a sort of canopy of steel and
grape-shot.
"Duck your heads! Lie down flat!" cried Paul.
He himself remained standing, indifferent to the flight of the enemy's
shells. But with what terror he listened to our own, those coming from
behind, from all the hills hard by, whizzing ahead of them to carry
destruction and death. Where would this one fall? And that one, where
would its murderous rain of bullets and splinters descend?
He was obsessed with the vision of his wife, wounded, dying, and kept on
murmuring her name. For many days now, ever since the day when he learnt
that Élisabeth had refused to leave the Château d'Ornequin, he could not
think of her without a loving emotion that was never spoilt by any
impulse of revolt, any movement of anger. He no longer mingled the
detestable memories of the past with the charming reality of his love.
When he thought of the hated mother, the image of the daughter no longer
appeared before his mind. They were two creatures of a different race,
having no connection one with the other. Élisabeth, full of courage,
risking her life to obey a duty to which she attached a value greater
than her life, acquired in Paul's eyes a singular dignity. She was
indeed the woman whom he had loved and cherished, the woman whom he
loved still.
Paul stopped. He had ventured with his men into an open piece of ground,
probably marked down in advance, which the enemy was now peppering with
shrapnel. A number of men were hit.
"Halt!" he cried. "Flat on your stomachs, all of you!"
He caught hold of Bernard:
"Lie down, kid, can't you? Why expose yourself unnecessarily? . . . Stay
there. Don't move."
He held him to the ground with a friendly pressure, keeping his arm
round Bernard's neck and speaking to him with gentleness, as though he
were trying to display to the brother all the affection that rose to his
heart for his dear Élisabeth. He forgot the harsh words which he had
addressed to Bernard and uttered quite different words, throbbing with a
fondness which he had denied the evening before:
"Don't move, youngster. You see, I had no business to bring you with me
or to drag you into this hot place. I'm responsible for you and I'm not
going to have you hurt."
The fire diminished in intensity. By crawling over the ground, the men
reached a double row of poplars which led them, by a gentle ascent,
towards a ridge intersected by a hollow road. Paul, on climbing the
slope which overlooked the Ornequin plateau, saw the ruins of the
village in the distance, with its shattered church, and, farther to the
left, a wilderness of trees and stones whence rose the walls of a
building. This was the château. On every side around were blazing
farmhouses, haystacks and barns.
Behind the section, the French troops were scattering forward in all
directions. A battery had taken up its position in the shelter of a wood
close by and was firing incessantly. Paul could see the shells bursting
over the château and among the ruins.
Unable to bear the sight any longer, he resumed his march at the head of
his section. The enemy's guns had ceased thundering, had doubtless been
reduced to silence. But, when they were well within two miles of
Ornequin, the bullets whistled around them and Paul saw a detachment of
Germans falling back upon the village, firing as they went. And the
seventy-fives and Rimailhos kept on growling. The din was terrible.
Paul gripped Bernard by the arm and, in a quivering voice, said:
"If anything happens to me, tell Élisabeth that I beg her to forgive me.
Do you understand? I beg her to forgive me."
He was suddenly afraid that fate would not allow him to see his wife
again; and he realized that he had behaved to her with unpardonable
cruelty, deserting her as though she were guilty of a fault which she
had not committed and abandoning her to every form of distress and
torment. And he walked on briskly, followed at a distance by his men.
But, at the spot where the short cut joins the high road, in sight of
the Liseron, a cyclist rode up to him. The colonel had ordered that the
section should wait for the main body of the regiment in order to make
an attack in full force.
This was the cruelest test of all. Paul, a victim to ever-increasing
excitement, trembled with fever and rage.
"Come, Paul," said Bernard, "don't work yourself into such a state! We
shall get there in time."
"In time for what?" he retorted. "To find her dead or wounded? Or not to
find her at all? Oh, hang it, why can't our guns stop their damned row?
What are they shelling, now that the enemy's no longer replying? Dead
bodies and demolished houses! . . ."
"What about the rearguard covering the German retreat?"
"Well, aren't we here, the infantry? This is our job. All we have to do
is to send out our sharpshooters and follow up with a good
bayonet-charge. . . ."
At last the section set out again, reinforced by the remainder of the
ninth company and under the command of the captain. A detachment of
hussars galloped by, pricking towards the village to cut off the
fugitives. The company swerved towards the château.
Opposite them, all was silent as the grave. Was it a trap? Was there not
every reason to believe that enemy forces, strongly entrenched and
barricaded as these were, would prepare to offer a last resistance? And
yet there was nothing suspicious in the avenue of old oaks that led to
the front court, not a sign of life to be seen or heard.
Paul and Bernard, still keeping ahead, with their fingers on the
trigger of their rifles, searched the dim light of the underwood with a
keen glance. Columns of smoke rose above the wall, which was now quite
near, yawning with breach upon breach. As they approached, they heard
moans, followed by the heart-rending sound of a death-rattle. It was the
German wounded.
And suddenly the earth shook as though an inner upheaval had shattered
its crust and from the other side of the wall came a tremendous
explosion, or rather a series of explosions, like so many peals of
thunder. The air was darkened with a cloud of sand and dust which sent
forth all sorts of stones and rubbish. The enemy had blown up the
château.
"That was meant for us, I expect," said Bernard. "We were to have been
blown up at the same time. They were out in their calculations."
When they had passed the gate, the sight of the mined court-yard, of the
shattered turrets, of the demolished château, of the out-houses in
flames, of the dying in their last throes and the thickly stacked
corpses of the dead startled them into recoiling.
"Forward! Forward!" shouted the colonel, galloping up. "There are troops
that must have made off across the park."
Paul knew the road, which he had covered a few weeks earlier in such
tragic circumstances. He rushed across the lawns, among blocks of stone
and uprooted trees. But, as he passed in sight of a little lodge that
stood at the entrance to the wood, he stopped, nailed to the ground.
And Bernard and all the men stood stupefied, opening their mouths wide
with horror.
Against the lodge, two corpses rested on their feet, fastened to rings
in the wall by a single chain wound round their waists. Their bodies
were bent over the chains and their arms hung to the ground.
They were the corpses of a man and a woman. Paul recognized Jérôme and
Rosalie. They had been shot.
The chain continued beyond them. There was a third ring in the wall. The
plaster was stained with blood and there were visible traces of bullets.
There had been a third victim, without a doubt, and the body had been
removed.
As he approached, Paul noticed a splinter of bomb-shell embedded in the
plaster. Around the hole thus formed, between the plaster and the
splinter, was a handful of fair hair with golden lights in it, hair torn
from the head of Élisabeth.