We climb two by two into the baskets. Francis and I were lifted onto
the same mule, only, as the painter was very fat and I very lean, the
arrangement see-sawed; I go up in the air while he descends under the
belly of the mule, who, dragged by the head, and pushed from behind,
dances and flings about furiously. We trot along in a whirlwind of dust,
blinded, bewildered, jolted, we cling to the bar of the cacolet, shut
our eyes, laugh and groan. We arrive at Chalons more dead than alive;
we fall to the gravel like jaded cattle, then they pack us into the cars
and we leave Chalons to go--where? No one knows.
It is night; we fly over the rails. The sick are taken from the cars and
walked up and down the platforms. The engine whistles, slows down and
stops in a railway station--that of Reims, I suppose, but I can not be
sure. We are dying of hunger, the commissary forgot but one thing: to
give us bread for the journey. I get out. I see an open buffet, I run
for it, but others are there before me. They are fighting as I come
up. Some were seizing bottles, others meat, some bread, some cigars.
Half-dazed but furious, the restaurant-keeper defends his shop at the
point of a spit. Crowded by their comrades, who come up in gangs, the
front row of militia throw themselves onto the counter, which gives
way, carrying in its wake the owner of the buffet and his waiters. Then
followed a regular pillage; everything went, from matches to toothpicks.
Meanwhile the bell rings and the train starts. Not one of us disturbs
himself, and while sitting on the walk, I explain to the painter how
the tubes work, the mechanism of the bell. The train backs down over the
rails to take us aboard. We ascend into our compartments again and we
pass in review the booty we had seized. To tell the truth, there
was little variety of food. Pork-butcher’s meat and nothing but
pork-butcher’s meat! We had six strings of Bologna sausages flavored
with garlic, a scarlet tongue, two sausages, a superb slice of Italian
sausage, a slice in silver stripe, the meat all of an angry red, mottled
white; four liters of wine, a half-bottle of cognac, and a few candle
ends. We stick the candle ends into the neck of our flasks, which swing,
hung by strings to the sides of the wagon. There was, thus, when the
train jolted over a switch, a rain of hot grease which congealed almost
instantly into great platters, but our coats had seen many another.
We began our repast at once, interrupted by the going and coming of
those of the militia who kept running along the footboards the whole
length of the train, and knocked at our window-panes and demanded
something to drink. We sang at the top of our voices, we drank, we
clinked glasses. Never did sick men make so much noise or romp so on a
train in motion!
One would have said that it was a rolling Court of Miracles; the
cripples jumped with jointed legs, those whose intestines were burning
soaked them in bumpers of cognac, the one-eyed opened their eyes, the
fevered capered about, the sick throats bellowed and tippled; it was
unheard of!
This disturbance ends in calming itself. I profit by the lull to put my
nose out of the window. There was not a star there, not even a tip of
the moon; heaven and earth seem to make but one, and in that intensity
of inky blackness, the lanterns winked like eyes of different colors
attached to the metal of the disks. The engineer discharged his whistle,
the engine puffed and vomited its sparks without rest. I reclose the
window and look at my companions. Some were snoring, others disturbed by
the jolting of the box, gurgled and swore in their sleep, turning over
incessantly, searching for room to stretch their legs, to brace their
heads that nodded at every jolt.
By dint of looking at them, I was beginning to get sleepy when the
train stopped short and woke me up. We were at a station; and the
station-master’s office flamed like a forge fire in the darkness of the
night. I had one leg numbed, I was shivering from cold, I descend to
warm up a bit. I walk up and down the platform, I go to look at the
engine, which they uncouple, and which they replace by another, and
walking by the office I hear the bills and the tic-tac of the telegraph.
The employee, with back turned to me, was stooping a little to the right
in such a way that from where I was placed, I could see but the back of
his head and the tip of his nose, which shone red and beaded with sweat,
while the rest of his figure disappeared in the shadow thrown by the
screen of a gas-jet.
They invite me to get back into the carriage, and I find my comrades
again, just as I had left them. That time I went to sleep for good. For
how long did my sleep last? I don’t know--when a great cry woke me up:
“Paris! Paris!” I made a dash for the doorway. At a distance, against a
band of pale gold, stood out in black the smokestacks of factories and
workshops. We were at Saint-Denis; the news ran from car to car. Every
one was on his feet. The engine quickened its pace. The Gare du Nord
looms up in the distance. We arrive there, we get down, we throw
ourselves at the gates. One part of us succeeds in escaping, the others
are stopped by the employees of the railroad and by the troops; by force
they make us remount into a train that is getting up steam, and here we
are again, off for God knows where!
We roll onward again all day long. I am weary of looking at the rows
of houses and trees that spin by before my eyes; then, too, I have the
colic continually and I suffer. About four o’clock of the afternoon, the
engine slackens its speed, and stops at a landing-stage where awaits
us there an old general, around whom sports a flock of young men, with
headgear of red képis, breached in red and shod with boots with yellow
spurs. The general passes us in review and divides us into two squads;
the one for the seminary, the other is directed toward the hospital. We
are, it seems, at Arras. Francis and we form part of the first squad.
They tumble us into carts stuffed with straw, and we arrive in front
of a great building that settles and seems about to collapse into the
street. We mount to the second story to a room that contains some thirty
beds; each one of us unbuckles his knapsack, combs himself, and sits
down. A doctor arrives.
“What is the trouble with you?” he asks of the first.
“A carbuncle.”
“Ah! and you?”
“Dysentery.”
“Ah! and you?”
“A bubo.”
“But in that case you have not been wounded during the war?”
“Not the least in the world.”
“Very well! You can take up your knapsacks again. The archbishop gives
up the beds of his seminarists only to the wounded.”
I pack into my knapsack again all the knick-knacks that I had taken out,
and we are off again, willy-nilly, for the city hospital. There was no
more room there. In vain the sisters contrive to squeeze the iron beds
together, the wards are full. Worn out by all these delays, I seize one
mattress, Francis takes another, and we go and stretch ourselves in the
garden on a great glass-plot.
The next day I have a talk with the director, an affable and charming
man. I ask permission for the painter and for me to go out into the
town. He consents; the door opens; we are free! We are going to dine at
last! To eat real meat, to drink real wine! Ah, we do not hesitate; we
make straight for the best hotel in town. They serve us there with
a wholesome meal. There are flowers there on the table, magnificent
bouquets of roses and fuchias that spread themselves out of the glass
vases. The waiter brings in a roast that drains into a lake of butter;
the sun himself comes to the feast, makes the covers sparkle and the
blades of the knives, sifts his golden dust through the carafes, and
playing with the pomard that gently rocks in the glasses, spots with a
ruby star the damask cloth.
Oh, sacred joy of the guzzlers! My mouth is full and Francis is drunk!
The fumes of the roast mingle with the perfume of the flowers; the
purple of the wine vies in gorgeousness with the red of the roses.
The waiter who serves us has the air of folly and we have the air of
gluttons, it is all the same to us! We stuff down roast after roast, we
pour down bordeaux upon burgundy, chartreuse upon cognac. To the devil
with your weak wines and your thirty-sixes, {7} which we have been
drinking since our departure from Paris! To the devil with those
whimsicalities without name, those mysterious pot-house poisons with
which we have been so crammed to leanness for nearly a month! We are
unrecognizable; our once peaked faces redden like a drunkard’s, we get
noisy, with noise in the air we cut loose. We run all over the town that
way.