They crossed Paris helter-skelter by the flashes of lightning
that whipped the storming clouds into white zigzags. The heat was
overpowering, the knapsack was heavy; they drank at every corner of the
street; they arrived at last at the railway station of Aubervilliers.
There was a moment of silence broken by the sound of sobbing, dominated
again by a burst of the Marseillaise, then they stalled us like cattle
in the cars. “Good night, Jules! may we meet soon again! Be good!
Above all write to me!” They squeezed hands for a last time, the train
whistled, we had left the station. We were a regular shovelful of fifty
men in that box that rolled away with us. Some were weeping freely,
jeered at by the others who, completely lost in drink, were sticking
lighted candles into their provisions and bawling at the top of their
voices: “Down with Badinguet! and long live Rochefort!” {2}
2 “Badinguet, nickname given to Napoleon III; Henri
Rochefort, anti-Napoleon journalist and agitator.
Others, in a corner by themselves, stared silently and sullenly at the
broad floor that kept vibrating in the dust. All at once the convoy
makes a halt--I got out. Complete darkness--twenty-five minutes after
midnight.
On all sides stretch the fields, and in the distance lighted up by sharp
flashes of lightning, a cottage, a tree sketch their silhouette against
a sky swollen by the tempest. Only the grinding and rumbling of the
engine is heard, whose clusters of sparks flying from the smokestack
scatter like a bouquet of fireworks the whole length of the train. Every
one gets out, goes forward as far as the engine, which looms up in the
night and becomes huge. The stop lasted quite two hours. The signal
disks flamed red, the engineer was waiting for them to reverse. They
turn; again we get back into the wagons, but a man who comes up on the
run and swinging a lantern, speaks a few words to the conductor, who
immediately backs the train into a siding where we remain motionless.
Not one of us knows where we are. I descend again from the carriage, and
sitting on an embankment, I nibble at a bit of bread and drink a drop or
two, when the whirl of a hurricane whistles in the distance, approaches,
roaring and vomiting fire, and an interminable train of artillery passed
at full speed, carrying along horses, men, and cannon whose bronze necks
sparkle in a confusion of light. Five minutes after we take up our slow
advance, again interrupted by halts that grow longer and longer. The
journey ends with daybreak, and leaning from the car window, worn out by
the long watch of the night, I look out upon the country that surrounds
us: a succession of chalky plains, closing in the horizon, a band of
pale green like the color of a sick turquoise, a flat country, gloomy,
meagre, the beggarly Champagne Pouilleuse!
Little by little the sun brightens, we, rumbling on the while, end,
however, by getting there! Leaving at eight o’clock in the evening, we
were delivered at three o’clock of the afternoon of the next day. Two of
the militia had dropped by the way, one who had taken a header from the
top of the car into the river, the other who had broken his head on the
ledge of a bridge. The rest, after having pillaged the hovels and the
gardens, met along the route wherever the train stopped, either yawned,
their lips puffed out with wine, and their eyes swollen, or amused
themselves by throwing from one side of the carriage to the other
branches of shrubs and hencoops which they had stolen.
The disembarking was managed after the same fashion as the departure.
Nothing was ready; neither canteen, nor straw, nor coats, nor arms,
nothing, absolutely nothing. Only tents full of manure and of insects,
just left by the troops off for the frontier. For three days we live at
the mercy of Mourmelon.{3} Eating a sausage one day and drinking a
bowl of café-au-lait the next, exploited to the utmost by the natives,
sleeping, no matter how, without straw and without covering. Truly such
a life was not calculated to give us a taste for the calling they had
inflicted on us.