About eight o’clock the sun dispersed the heavy clouds, and the broad,
fertile plain about Mülhausen lay basking in the warm, bright light of
a perfect August Sunday. From the camp, now awake and bustling with
life, could be heard the bells of the neighboring parishes, pealing
merrily in the limpid air. The cheerful Sunday following so close on
ruin and defeat had its own gayety, its sky was as serene as on a
holiday.
Gaude suddenly took his bugle and gave the call that announced the
distribution of rations, whereat Loubet appeared astonished. What was
it? What did it mean? Were they going to give out chickens, as he had
promised Lapoulle the night before? He had been born in the Halles, in
the Rue de la Cossonerie, was the unacknowledged son of a small
huckster, had enlisted “for the money there was in it,” as he said,
after having been a sort of Jack-of-all-trades, and was now the
gourmand, the epicure of the company, continually nosing after
something good to eat. But he went off to see what was going on, while
Chouteau, the company artist, house-painter by trade at Belleville,
something of a dandy and a revolutionary republican, exasperated
against the government for having called him back to the colors after
he had served his time, was cruelly chaffing Pache, whom he had
discovered on his knees, behind the tent, preparing to say his prayers.
There was a pious man for you! Couldn’t he oblige him, Chouteau, by
interceding with God to give him a hundred thousand francs or some such
small trifle? But Pache, an insignificant little fellow with a head
running up to a point, who had come to them from some hamlet in the
wilds of Picardy, received the other’s raillery with the uncomplaining
gentleness of a martyr. He was the butt of the squad, he and Lapoulle,
the colossal brute who had got his growth in the marshes of the
Sologne, so utterly ignorant of everything that on the day of his
joining the regiment he had asked his comrades to show him the King.
And although the terrible tidings of the disaster at Froeschwiller had
been known throughout the camp since early morning, the four men
laughed, joked, and went about their usual tasks with the indifference
of so many machines.
But there arose a murmur of pleased surprise. It was occasioned by
Jean, the corporal, coming back from the commissary’s, accompanied by
Maurice, with a load of firewood. So, they were giving out wood at
last, the lack of which the night before had deprived the men of their
soup! Twelve hours behind time, only!
“Hurrah for the commissary!” shouted Chouteau.
“Never mind, so long as it is here,” said Loubet. “Ah! won’t I make you
a bully _pot-au-feu_!”
He was usually quite willing to take charge of the mess arrangements,
and no one was inclined to say him nay, for he cooked like an angel. On
those occasions, however, Lapoulle would be given the most
extraordinary commissions to execute.
“Go and look after the champagne—Go out and buy some truffles—”
On that morning a queer conceit flashed across his mind, such a conceit
as only a Parisian _gamin_ contemplating the mystification of a
greenhorn is capable of entertaining:
“Look alive there, will you! Come, hand me the chicken.”
“The chicken! what chicken, where?”
“Why, there on the ground at your feet, stupid; the chicken that I
promised you last night, and that the corporal has just brought in.”
He pointed to a large, white, round stone, and Lapoulle, speechless
with wonder, finally picked it up and turned it about between his
fingers.
“A thousand thunders! Will you wash the chicken! More yet; wash its
claws, wash its neck! Don’t be afraid of the water, lazybones!”
And for no reason at all except the joke of it, because the prospect of
the soup made him gay and sportive, he tossed the stone along with the
meat into the kettle filled with water.
“That’s what will give the bouillon a flavor! Ah, you didn’t know that,
_sacrée andouille_! You shall have the pope’s nose; you’ll see how
tender it is.”
The squad roared with laughter at sight of Lapoulle’s face, who
swallowed everything and was licking his chops in anticipation of the
feast. That funny dog, Loubet, he was the man to cure one of the dumps
if anybody could! And when the fire began to crackle in the sunlight,
and the kettle commenced to hum and bubble, they ranged themselves
reverently about it in a circle with an expression of cheerful
satisfaction on their faces, watching the meat as it danced up and down
and sniffing the appetizing odor that it exhaled. They were as hungry
as a pack of wolves, and the prospect of a square meal made them
forgetful of all beside. They had had to take a thrashing, but that was
no reason why a man should not fill his stomach. Fires were blazing and
pots were boiling from one end of the camp to the other, and amid the
silvery peals of the bells that floated from Mülhausen steeples mirth
and jollity reigned supreme.
But just as the clocks were on the point of striking nine a commotion
arose and spread among the men; officers came running up, and
Lieutenant Rochas, to whom Captain Beaudoin had come and communicated
an order, passed along in front of the tents of his platoon and gave
the command:
“Pack everything! Get yourselves ready to march!”
“But the soup?”
“You will have to wait for your soup until some other day; we are to
march at once.”
Gaude’s bugle rang out in imperious accents. Then everywhere was
consternation; dumb, deep rage was depicted on every countenance. What,
march on an empty stomach! Could they not wait a little hour until the
soup was ready! The squad resolved that their bouillon should not go to
waste, but it was only so much hot water, and the uncooked meat was
like leather to their teeth. Chouteau growled and grumbled, almost
mutinously. Jean had to exert all his authority to make the men hasten
their preparations. What was the great urgency that made it necessary
for them to hurry off like that? What good was there in hazing people
about in that style, without giving them time to regain their strength?
And Maurice shrugged his shoulders incredulously when someone said in
his hearing that they were about to march against the Prussians and
settle old scores with them. In less than fifteen minutes the tents
were struck, folded, and strapped upon the knapsacks, the stacks were
broken, and all that remained of the camp was the dying embers of the
fires on the bare ground.
There were reasons, of importance that had induced General Douay’s
determination to retreat immediately. The despatch from the
_sous-préfet_ at Schelestadt, now three days old, was confirmed; there
were telegrams that the fires of the Prussians, threatening
Markolsheim, had again been seen, and again, another telegram informed
them that one of the enemy’s army corps was crossing the Rhine at
Huningue: the intelligence was definite and abundant; cavalry and
artillery had been sighted in force, infantry had been seen, hastening
from every direction to their point of concentration. Should they wait
an hour the enemy would surely be in their rear and retreat on Belfort
would be impossible. And now, in the shock consequent on defeat, after
Wissembourg and Froeschwiller, the general, feeling himself unsupported
in his exposed position at the front, had nothing left to do but fall
back in haste, and the more so that what news he had received that
morning made the situation look even worse than it had appeared the
night before.
The staff had gone on ahead at a sharp trot, spurring their horses in
the fear lest the Prussians might get into Altkirch before them.
General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, aware that he had a hard day’s work
before him, had prudently taken Mülhausen in his way, where he
fortified himself with a copious breakfast, denouncing in language more
forcible than elegant such hurried movements. And Mülhausen watched
with sorrowful eyes the officers trooping through her streets; as the
news of the retreat spread the citizens streamed out of their houses,
deploring the sudden departure of the army for whose coming they had
prayed so earnestly: they were to be abandoned, then, and all the
costly merchandise that was stacked up in the railway station was to
become the spoil of the enemy; within a few hours their pretty city was
to be in the hands of foreigners? The inhabitants of the villages, too,
and of isolated houses, as the staff clattered along the country roads,
planted themselves before their doors with wonder and consternation
depicted on their faces. What! that army, that a short while before
they had seen marching forth to battle, was now retiring without having
fired a shot? The leaders were gloomy, urged their chargers forward and
refused to answer questions, as if ruin and disaster were galloping at
their heels. It was true, then, that the Prussians had annihilated the
army and were streaming into France from every direction, like the
angry waves of a stream that had burst its barriers? And already to the
frightened peasants the air seemed filled with the muttering of distant
invasion, rising louder and more threatening at every instant, and
already they were beginning to forsake their little homes and huddle
their poor belongings into farm-carts; entire families might be seen
fleeing in single file along the roads that were choked with the
retreating cavalry.
In the hurry and confusion of the movement the 106th was brought to a
halt at the very first kilometer of their march, near the bridge over
the canal of the Rhone and Rhine. The order of march had been badly
planned and still more badly executed, so that the entire 2d division
was collected there in a huddle, and the way was so narrow, barely more
than sixteen feet in width, that the passage of the troops was
obstructed.
Two hours elapsed, and still the 106th stood there watching the
seemingly endless column that streamed along before their eyes. In the
end the men, standing at rest with ordered arms, began to become
impatient. Jean’s squad, whose position happened to be opposite a break
in the line of poplars where the sun had a fair chance at them, felt
themselves particularly aggrieved.
“Guess we must be the rear-guard,” Loubet observed with good-natured
raillery.
But Chouteau scolded: “They don’t value us at a brass farthing, and
that’s why they let us wait this way. We were here first; why didn’t we
take the road while it was empty?”
And as they began to discern more clearly beyond the canal, across the
wide fertile plain, along the level roads lined with hop-poles and
fields of ripening grain, the movement of the troops retiring along the
same way by which they had advanced but yesterday, gibes and jeers rose
on the air in a storm of angry ridicule.
“Ah, we are taking the back track,” Chouteau continued. “I wonder if
that is the advance against the enemy that they have been dinning in
our ears of late! Strikes me as rather queer! No sooner do we get into
camp than we turn tail and make off, never even stopping to taste our
soup.”
The derisive laughter became louder, and Maurice, who was next to
Chouteau in the ranks, took sides with him. Why could they not have
been allowed to cook their soup and eat it in peace, since they had
done nothing for the last two hours but stand there in the road like so
many sticks? Their hunger was making itself felt again; they had a
resentful recollection of the savory contents of the kettle dumped out
prematurely upon the ground, and they could see no necessity for this
headlong retrograde movement, which appeared to them idiotic and
cowardly. What chicken-livers they must be, those generals!
But Lieutenant Rochas came along and blew up Sergeant Sapin for not
keeping his men in better order, and Captain Beaudoin, very prim and
starchy, attracted by the disturbance, appeared upon the scene.
“Silence in the ranks!”
Jean, an old soldier of the army of Italy who knew what discipline was,
looked in silent amazement at Maurice, who appeared to be amused by
Chouteau’s angry sneers; and he wondered how it was that a _monsieur_,
a young man of his acquirements, could listen approvingly to
things—they might be true, all the same—but that should not be blurted
out in public. The army would never accomplish much, that was certain,
if the privates were to take to criticizing the generals and giving
their opinions.
At last, after another hour’s waiting, the order was given for the
106th to advance, but the bridge was still so encumbered by the rear of
the division that the greatest confusion prevailed. Several regiments
became inextricably mingled, and whole companies were swept away and
compelled to cross whether they would or no, while others, crowded off
to the side of the road, had to stand there and mark time; and by way
of putting the finishing touch to the muddle; a squadron of cavalry
insisted on passing, pressing back into the adjoining fields the
stragglers that the infantry had scattered along the roadside. At the
end of an hour’s march the column had entirely lost its formation and
was dragging its slow length along, a mere disorderly rabble.
Thus it happened that Jean found himself away at the rear, lost in a
sunken road, together with his squad, whom he had been unwilling to
abandon. The 106th had disappeared, nor was there a man or an officer
of their company in sight. About them were soldiers, singly or in
little groups, from all the regiments, a weary, foot-sore crew, knocked
up at the beginning of the retreat, each man straggling on at his own
sweet will whithersoever the path that he was on might chance to lead
him. The sun beat down fiercely, the heat was stifling, and the
knapsack, loaded as it was with the tent and implements of every
description, made a terrible burden on the shoulders of the exhausted
men. To many of them the experience was an entirely new one, and the
heavy great-coats they wore seemed to them like vestments of lead. The
first to set an example for the others was a little pale faced soldier
with watery eyes; he drew beside the road and let his knapsack slide
off into the ditch, heaving a deep sigh as he did so, the long drawn
breath of a dying man who feels himself coming back to life.
“There’s a man who knows what he is about,” muttered Chouteau.
He still continued to plod along, however, his back bending beneath its
weary burden, but when he saw two others relieve themselves as the
first had done he could stand it no longer. “Ah! _zut_!” he exclaimed,
and with a quick upward jerk of the shoulder sent his kit rolling down
an embankment. Fifty pounds at the end of his backbone, he had had
enough of it, thank you! He was no beast of burden to lug that load
about.
Almost at the same moment Loubet followed his lead and incited Lapoulle
to do the same. Pache, who had made the sign of the cross at every
stone crucifix they came to, unbuckled the straps and carefully
deposited his load at the foot of a low wall, as if fully intending to
come back for it at some future time. And when Jean turned his head for
a look at his men he saw that every one of them had dropped his burden
except Maurice.
“Take up your knapsacks unless you want to have me put under arrest!”
But the men, although they did not mutiny as yet, were silent and
looked ugly; they kept advancing along the narrow road, pushing the
corporal before them.
“Will you take up your knapsacks! if you don’t I will report you.”
It was as if Maurice had been lashed with a whip across the face.
Report them! that brute of a peasant would report those poor devils for
easing their aching shoulders! And looking Jean defiantly in the face,
he, too, in an impulse of blind rage, slipped the buckles and let his
knapsack fall to the road.
“Very well,” said the other in his quiet way, knowing that resistance
would be of no avail, “we will settle accounts to-night.”
Maurice’s feet hurt him abominably; the big, stiff shoes, to which he
was not accustomed, had chafed the flesh until the blood came. He was
not strong; his spinal column felt as if it were one long raw sore,
although the knapsack that had caused the suffering was no longer
there, and the weight of his piece, which he kept shifting from one
shoulder to the other, seemed as if it would drive all the breath from
his body. Great as his physical distress was, however, his moral agony
was greater still, for he was in the depths of one of those fits of
despair to which he was subject. At Paris the sum of his wrongdoing had
been merely the foolish outbreaks of “the other man,” as he put it, of
his weak, boyish nature, capable of more serious delinquency should he
be subjected to temptation, but now, in this retreat that was so like a
rout, in which he was dragging himself along with weary steps beneath a
blazing sun, he felt all hope and courage vanishing from his heart, he
was but a beast in that belated, straggling herd that filled the roads
and fields. It was the reaction after the terrible disasters at
Wissembourg and Froeschwiller, the echo of the thunder-clap that had
burst in the remote distance, leagues and leagues away, rattling at the
heels of those panic-stricken men who were flying before they had ever
seen an enemy. What was there to hope for now? Was it not all ended?
They were beaten; all that was left them was to lie down and die.
“It makes no difference,” shouted Loubet, with the _blague_ of a child
of the Halles, “but this is not the Berlin road we are traveling, all
the same.”
To Berlin! To Berlin! The cry rang in Maurice’s ears, the yell of the
swarming mob that filled the boulevards on that midsummer night of
frenzied madness when he had determined to enlist. The gentle breeze
had become a devastating hurricane; there had been a terrific
explosion, and all the sanguine temper of his nation had manifested
itself in his absolute, enthusiastic confidence, which had vanished
utterly at the very first reverse, before the unreasoning impulse of
despair that was sweeping him away among those vagrant soldiers,
vanquished and dispersed before they had struck a stroke.
“This confounded blunderbuss must weigh a ton, I think,” Loubet went
on. “This is fine music to march by!” And alluding to the sum he
received as substitute: “I don’t care what people say, but fifteen
hundred ‘balls’ for a job like this is downright robbery. Just think of
the pipes he’ll smoke, sitting by his warm fire, the stingy old miser
in whose place I’m going to get my brains knocked out!”
“As for me,” growled Chouteau, “I had finished my time. I was going to
cut the service, and they keep me for their beastly war. Ah! true as I
stand here, I must have been born to bad luck to have got myself into
such a mess. And now the officers are going to let the Prussians knock
us about as they please, and we’re dished and done for.” He had been
swinging his piece to and fro in his hand; in his discouragement he
gave it a toss and landed it on the other side of the hedge. “Eh! get
you gone for a dirty bit of old iron!”
The musket made two revolutions in the air and fell into a furrow,
where it lay, long and motionless, reminding one somehow of a corpse.
Others soon flew to join it, and presently the field was filled with
abandoned arms, lying in long winrows, a sorrowful spectacle beneath
the blazing sky. It was an epidemic of madness, caused by the hunger
that was gnawing at their stomach, the shoes that galled their feet,
their weary march, the unexpected defeat that had brought the enemy
galloping at their heels. There was nothing more to be accomplished;
their leaders were looking out for themselves, the commissariat did not
even feed them; nothing but weariness and worriment; better to leave
the whole business at once, before it was begun. And what then? why,
the musket might go and keep the knapsack company; in view of the work
that was before them they might at least as well keep their arms free.
And all down the long line of stragglers that stretched almost far as
the eye could reach in the smooth and fertile country the muskets flew
through the air to the accompaniment of jeers and laughter such as
would have befitted the inmates of a lunatic asylum out for a holiday.
Loubet, before parting with his, gave it a twirl as a drum-major does
his cane. Lapoulle, observing what all his comrades were doing, must
have supposed the performance to be some recent innovation in the
manual, and followed suit, while Pache, in the confused idea of duty
that he owed to his religious education, refused to do as the rest were
doing and was loaded with obloquy by Chouteau, who called him a
priest’s whelp.
“Look at the sniveling papist! And all because his old peasant of a
mother used to make him swallow the holy wafer every Sunday in the
village church down there! Be off with you and go serve mass; a man who
won’t stick with his comrades when they are right is a poor-spirited
cur.”
Maurice toiled along dejectedly in silence, bowing his head beneath the
blazing sun. At every step he took he seemed to be advancing deeper
into a horrid, phantom-haunted nightmare; it was as if he saw a
yawning, gaping gulf before him toward which he was inevitably tending;
it meant that he was suffering himself to be degraded to the level of
the miserable beings by whom he was surrounded, that he was
prostituting his talents and his position as a man of education.
“Hold!” he said abruptly to Chouteau, “what you say is right; there is
truth in it.”
And already he had deposited his musket upon a pile of stones, when
Jean, who had tried without success to check the shameful proceedings
of his men, saw what he was doing and hurried toward him.
“Take up your musket, at once! Do you hear me? take it up at once!”
Jean’s face had flushed with sudden anger. Meekest and most pacific of
men, always prone to measures of conciliation, his eyes were now
blazing with wrath, his voice spoke with the thunders of authority. His
men had never before seen him in such a state, and they looked at one
another in astonishment.
“Take up your musket at once, or you will have me to deal with!”
Maurice was quivering with anger; he let fall one single word, into
which he infused all the insult that he had at command:
“Peasant!”
“Yes, that’s just it; I am a peasant, while you, you, are a gentleman!
And it is for that reason that you are a pig! Yes! a dirty pig! I make
no bones of telling you of it.”
Yells and cat-calls arose all around him, but the corporal continued
with extraordinary force and dignity:
“When a man has learning he shows it by his actions. If we are brutes
and peasants, you owe us the benefit of your example, since you know
more than we do. Take up your musket, or _Nom de Dieu!_ I will have you
shot the first halt we make.”
Maurice was daunted; he stooped and raised the weapon in his hand.
Tears of rage stood in his eyes. He reeled like a drunken man as he
labored onward, surrounded by his comrades, who now were jeering at him
for having yielded. Ah, that Jean! he felt that he should never cease
to hate him, cut to the quick as he had been by that bitter lesson,
which he could not but acknowledge he had deserved. And when Chouteau,
marching at his side, growled: “When corporals are that way, we just
wait for a battle and blow a hole in ’em,” the landscape seemed red
before his eyes, and he had a distinct vision of himself blowing Jean’s
brains out from behind a wall.
But an incident occurred to divert their thoughts; Loubet noticed that
while the dispute was going on Pache had also abandoned his musket,
laying it down tenderly at the foot of an embankment. Why? What were
the reasons that had made him resist the example of his comrades in the
first place, and what were the reasons that influenced him now? He
probably could not have told himself, nor did he trouble his head about
the matter, chuckling inwardly with silent enjoyment, like a schoolboy
who, having long been held up as a model for his mates, commits his
first offense. He strode along with a self-contented, rakish air,
swinging his arms; and still along the dusty, sunlit roads, between the
golden grain and the fields of hops that succeeded one another with
tiresome monotony, the human tide kept pouring onward; the stragglers,
without arms or knapsacks, were now but a shuffling, vagrant mob, a
disorderly array of vagabonds and beggars, at whose approach the
frightened villagers barred their doors.
Something that happened just then capped the climax of Maurice’s
misery. A deep, rumbling noise had for some time been audible in the
distance; it was the artillery, that had been the last to leave the
camp and whose leading guns now wheeled into sight around a bend in the
road, barely giving the footsore infantrymen time to seek safety in the
fields. It was an entire regiment of six batteries, and came up in
column, in splendid order, at a sharp trot, the colonel riding on the
flank at the center of the line, every officer at his post. The guns
went rattling, bounding by, accurately maintaining their prescribed
distances, each accompanied by its caisson, men and horses, beautiful
in the perfect symmetry of its arrangement; and in the 5th battery
Maurice recognized his cousin Honoré. A very smart and soldierly
appearance the quartermaster-sergeant presented on horseback in his
position on the left hand of the forward driver, a good-looking
light-haired man, Adolphe by name, whose mount was a sturdy chestnut,
admirably matched with the mate that trotted at his side, while in his
proper place among the six men who were seated on the chests of the gun
and its caisson was the gunner, Louis, a small, dark man, Adolphe’s
comrade; they constituted a team, as it is called, in accordance with
the rule of the service that couples a mounted and an unmounted man
together. They all appeared bigger and taller to Maurice, somehow, than
when he first made their acquaintance at the camp, and the gun, to
which four horses were attached, followed by the caisson drawn by six,
seemed to him as bright and refulgent as a sun, tended and cherished as
it was by its attendants, men and animals, who closed around it
protectingly as if it had been a living sentient relative; and then,
besides, the contemptuous look that Honoré, astounded to behold him
among that unarmed rabble, cast on the stragglers, distressed him
terribly. And now the tail end of the regiment was passing, the
_matériel_ of the batteries, prolonges, forges, forage-wagons,
succeeded by the rag-tag, the spare men and horses, and then all
vanished in a cloud of dust at another turn in the road amid the
gradually decreasing clatter of hoofs and wheels.
“_Pardi_!” exclaimed Loubet, “it’s not such a difficult matter to cut a
dash when one travels with a coach and four!”
The staff had found Altkirch free from the enemy; not a Prussian had
shown his face there yet. It had been the general’s wish, not knowing
at what moment they might fall upon his rear, that the retreat should
be continued to Dannemarie, and it was not until five o’clock that the
heads of columns reached that place. Tents were hardly pitched and
fires lighted at eight, when night closed in, so great was the
confusion of the regiments, depleted by the absence of the stragglers.
The men were completely used up, were ready to drop with fatigue and
hunger. Up to eight o’clock soldiers, singly and in squads, came
trailing in, hunting for their commands; all that long train of the
halt, the lame, and the disaffected that we have seen scattered along
the roads.
As soon as Jean discovered where his regiment lay he went in quest of
Lieutenant Rochas to make his report. He found him, together with
Captain Beaudoin, in earnest consultation with the colonel at the door
of a small inn, all of them anxiously waiting to see what tidings
roll-call would give them as to the whereabouts of their missing men.
The moment the corporal opened his mouth to address the lieutenant,
Colonel Vineuil, who heard what the subject was, called him up and
compelled him to tell the whole story. On his long, yellow face, where
the intensely black eyes looked blacker still contrasted with the thick
snow-white hair and the long, drooping mustache, there was an
expression of patient, silent sorrow, and as the narrative proceeded,
how the miserable wretches deserted their colors, threw away arms and
knapsacks, and wandered off like vagabonds, grief and shame traced two
new furrows on his blanched cheeks.
“Colonel,” exclaimed Captain Beaudoin, in his incisive voice, not
waiting for his superior to give an opinion, “it will best to shoot
half a dozen of those wretches.”
And the lieutenant nodded his head approvingly. But the colonel’s
despondent look expressed his powerlessness.
“There are too many of them. Nearly seven hundred! how are we to go to
work, whom are we to select? And then you don’t know it, but the
general is opposed. He wants to be a father to his men, says he never
punished a soldier all the time he was in Africa. No, no; we shall have
to overlook it. I can do nothing. It is dreadful.”
The captain echoed: “Yes, it is dreadful. It means destruction for us
all.”
Jean was walking off, having said all he had to say, when he heard
Major Bouroche, whom he had not seen where he was standing in the
doorway of the inn, growl in a smothered voice: “No more punishment, an
end to discipline, the army gone to the dogs! Before a week is over the
scoundrels will be ripe for kicking their officers out of camp, while
if a few of them had been made an example of on the spot it might have
brought the remainder to their senses.”
No one was punished. Some officers of the rear-guard that was
protecting the trains had been thoughtful enough to collect the muskets
and knapsacks scattered along the road. They were almost all recovered,
and by daybreak the men were equipped again, the operation being
conducted very quietly, as if to hush the matter up as much as
possible. Orders were given to break camp at five o’clock, but reveille
sounded at four and the retreat to Belfort was hurriedly continued, for
everyone was certain that the Prussians were only two or three leagues
away. Again there was nothing to eat but dry biscuit, and as a
consequence of their brief, disturbed rest and the lack of something to
warm their stomachs the men were weak as cats. Any attempt to enforce
discipline on the march that morning was again rendered nugatory by the
manner of their departure.
The day was worse than its predecessor, inexpressibly gloomy and
disheartening. The aspect of the landscape had changed, they were now
in a rolling country where the roads they were always alternately
climbing and descending were bordered with woods of pine and hemlock,
while the narrow gorges were golden with tangled thickets of broom. But
panic and terror lay heavy on the fair land that slumbered there
beneath the bright sun of August, and had been hourly gathering
strength since the preceeding day. A fresh dispatch, bidding the mayors
of communes warn the people that they would do well to hide their
valuables, had excited universal consternation. The enemy was at hand,
then! Would time be given them to make their escape? And to all it
seemed that the roar of invasion was ringing in their ears, coming
nearer and nearer, the roar of the rushing torrent that, starting from
Mülhausen, had grown louder and more ominous as it advanced, and to
which every village that it encountered in its course contributed its
own alarm amid the sound of wailing and lamentation.
Maurice stumbled along as best he might, like a man walking in a dream;
his feet were bleeding, his shoulders sore with the weight of gun and
knapsack. He had ceased to think, he advanced automatically into the
vision of horrors that lay before his eyes; he had ceased to be
conscious even of the shuffling tramp of the comrades around him, and
the only thing that was not dim and unreal to his sense was Jean,
marching at his side and enduring the same fatigue and horrible
distress. It was lamentable to behold the villages they passed through,
a sight to make a man’s heart bleed with anguish. No sooner did the
inhabitants catch sight of the troops retreating in disorderly array,
with haggard faces and bloodshot eyes, than they bestirred themselves
to hasten their flight. They who had been so confident only a short
half month ago, those men and women of Alsace, who smiled when war was
mentioned, certain that it would be fought out in Germany! And now
France was invaded, and it was among them, above their abodes, in their
fields, that the tempest was to burst, like one of those dread
cataclysms that lay waste a province in an hour when the lightnings
flash and the gates of heaven are opened! Carts were backed up against
doors and men tumbled their furniture into them in wild confusion,
careless of what they broke. From the upper windows the women threw out
a last mattress, or handed down the child’s cradle, that they had been
near forgetting, whereon baby would be tucked in securely and hoisted
to the top of the load, where he reposed serenely among a grove of legs
of chairs and upturned tables. At the back of another cart was the
decrepit old grandfather tied with cords to a wardrobe, and he was
hauled away for all the world as if he had been one of the family
chattels. Then there were those who did not own a vehicle, so they
piled their household goods haphazard on a wheelbarrow, while others
carried an armful of clothing, and others still had thought only of
saving the clock, which they went off pressing to their bosom as if it
had been a darling child. They found they could not remove everything,
and there were chairs and tables, and bundles of linen too heavy to
carry, lying abandoned in the gutter, Some before leaving had carefully
locked their dwellings, and the houses had a deathlike appearance, with
their barred doors and windows, but the greater number, in their haste
to get away and with the sorrowful conviction that nothing would escape
destruction, had left their poor abodes open, and the yawning apertures
displayed the nakedness of the dismantled rooms; and those were the
saddest to behold, with the horrible sadness of a city upon which some
great dread has fallen, depopulating it, those poor houses opened to
the winds of heaven, whence the very cats had fled as if forewarned of
the impending doom. At every village the pitiful spectacle became more
heartrending, the number of the fugitives was greater, as they clove
their way through the ever thickening press, with hands upraised, amid
oaths and tears.
But in the open country as they drew near Belfort, Maurice’s heart was
still more sorely wrung, for there the homeless fugitives were in
greater numbers and lined the borders of the road in an unbroken
cortége. Ah! the unhappy ones, who had believed that they were to find
safety under the walls of the fortifications! The father lashed the
poor old nag, the mother followed after, leading her crying children by
the hand, and in this way entire families, sinking beneath the weight
of their burdens, were strung along the white, blinding road in the
fierce sunlight, where the tired little legs of the smaller children
were unable to keep up with the headlong flight. Many had taken off
their shoes and were going barefoot so as to get over the ground more
rapidly, and half-dressed mothers gave the breast to their crying
babies as they strode along. Affrighted faces turned for a look
backward, trembling hands were raised as if to shut out the horizon
from their sight, while the gale of panic tumbled their unkempt locks
and sported with their ill-adjusted garments. Others there were,
farmers and their men, who pushed straight across the fields, driving
before them their flocks and herds, cows, oxen, sheep, horses, that
they had driven with sticks and cudgels from their stables; these were
seeking the shelter of the inaccessible forests, of the deep valleys
and the lofty hill-tops, their course marked by clouds of dust, as in
the great migrations of other days, when invaded nations made way
before their barbarian conquerors. They were going to live in tents, in
some lonely nook among the mountains, where the enemy would never
venture to follow them; and the bleating and bellowing of the animals
and the trampling of their hoofs upon the rocks grew fainter in the
distance, and the golden nimbus that overhung them was lost to sight
among the thick pines, while down in the road beneath the tide of
vehicles and pedestrians was flowing still as strong as ever, blocking
the passage of the troops, and as they drew near Belfort the men had to
be brought to a halt again and again, so irresistible was the force of
that torrent of humanity.
It was during one of those short halts that Maurice witnessed a scene
that was destined to remain indelibly impressed upon his memory.
Standing by the road-side was a lonely house, the abode of some poor
peasant, whose lean acres extended up the mountainside in the rear. The
man had been unwilling to leave the little field that was his all and
had remained, for to go away would have been to him like parting with
life. He could be seen within the low-ceiled room, sitting stupidly on
a bench, watching with dull, lack-luster eyes the passing of the troops
whose retreat would give his ripe grain over to be the spoil of the
enemy. Standing beside him was his wife, still a young woman, holding
in her arms a child, while another was hanging by her skirts; all three
were weeping bitterly. Suddenly the door was thrown open with violence
and in its enframement appeared the grandmother, a very old woman, tall
and lean of form, with bare, sinewy arms like knotted cords that she
raised above her head and shook with frantic gestures. Her gray, scanty
locks had escaped from her cap and were floating about her skinny face,
and such was her fury that the words she shouted choked her utterance
and came from her lips almost unintelligible.
At first the soldiers had laughed. Wasn’t she a beauty, the old crazy
hag! Then words reached their ears; the old woman was screaming:
“Scum! Robbers! Cowards! Cowards!”
With a voice that rose shriller and more piercing still she kept
lashing them with her tongue, expectorating insult on them, and
taunting them for dastards with the full force of her lungs. And the
laughter ceased, it seemed as if a cold wind had blown over the ranks.
The men hung their heads, looked any way save that.
“Cowards! Cowards! Cowards!”
Then all at once her stature seemed to dilate; she drew herself up,
tragic in her leanness, in her poor old apology for a gown, and
sweeping the heavens with her long arm from west to east, with a
gesture so broad that it seemed to fill the dome:
“Cowards, the Rhine is not there! The Rhine lies yonder! Cowards,
cowards!”
They got under way again at last, and Maurice, whose look just then
encountered Jean’s, saw that the latter’s eyes were filled with tears,
and it did not alleviate his distress to think that those rough
soldiers, compelled to swallow an insult that they had done nothing to
deserve, were shamed by it. He was conscious of nothing save the
intolerable aching in his poor head, and in after days could never
remember how the march of that day ended, prostrated as he was by his
terrible suffering, mental and physical.
The 7th corps had spent the entire day in getting over the fourteen or
fifteen miles between Dannemarie and Belfort, and it was night again
before the troops got settled in their bivouacs under the walls of the
town, in the very same place whence they had started four days before
to march against the enemy. Notwithstanding the lateness of the hour
and their spent condition, the men insisted on lighting fires and
making soup; it was the first time since their departure that they had
had an opportunity to put warm food into their stomachs, and seated
about the cheerful blaze in the cool air of evening they were dipping
their noses in the porringers and grunting inarticulately in token of
satisfaction when news came in that burst upon the camp like a
thunderbolt, dumfoundering everyone. Two telegrams had just been
received: the Prussians had not crossed the Rhine at Markolsheim, and
there was not a single Prussian at Huningue. The passage of the Rhine
at Markolsheim and the bridge of boats constructed under the electric
light had existed merely in imagination, were an unexplained,
inexplicable nightmare of the préfet at Schelestadt; and as for the
army corps that had menaced Huningue, that famous corps of the Black
Forest, that had made so much talk, it was but an insignificant
detachment of Wurtemburgers, a couple of battalions of infantry and a
squadron of cavalry, which had maneuvered with such address, marching
and countermarching, appearing in one place and then suddenly popping
up in another at a distance, as to gain for themselves the reputation
of being thirty or forty thousand strong. And to think that that
morning they had been near blowing up the viaduct at Dannemarie! Twenty
leagues of fertile country had been depopulated by the most idiotic of
panics, and at the recollection of what they had seen during their
lamentable day’s march, the inhabitants flying in consternation to the
mountains, driving their cattle before them; the press of vehicles,
laden with household effects, streaming cityward and surrounded by
bands of weeping women and children, the soldiers waxed wroth and gave
way to bitter, sneering denunciation of their leaders.
“Ah! it is too ridiculous too talk about!” sputtered Loubet, not
stopping to empty his mouth, brandishing his spoon. “They take us out
to fight the enemy, and there’s not a soul to fight with! Twelve
leagues there and twelve leagues back, and not so much as a mouse in
front of us! All that for nothing, just for the fun of being scared to
death!”
Chouteau, who was noisily absorbing the last drops in his porringer,
bellowed his opinion of the generals, without mentioning names:
“The pigs! what miserable boobies they are, _hein_! A pretty pack of
dunghill-cocks the government has given us as commanders! Wonder what
they would do if they had an army actually before them, if they show
the white feather this way when there’s not a Prussian in sight,
_hein_!—Ah no, not any of it in mine, thank you; soldiers don’t obey
such pigeon-livered gentlemen.”
Someone had thrown another armful of wood on the fire for the
pleasurable sensation of comfort there was in the bright, dancing
flame, and Lapoulle, who was engaged in the luxurious occupation of
toasting his shins, suddenly went off into an imbecile fit of laughter
without in the least understanding what it was about, whereon Jean, who
had thus far turned a deaf ear to their talk, thought it time to
interfere, which he did by saying in a fatherly way:
“You had better hold your tongue, you fellows! It might be the worse
for you if anyone should hear you.”
He himself, in his untutored, common-sense way of viewing things, was
exasperated by the stupid incompetency of their commanders, but then
discipline must be maintained, and as Chouteau still kept up a low
muttering he cut him short:
“Be silent, I say! Here is the lieutenant: address yourself to him if
you have anything to say.”
Maurice had listened in silence to the conversation from his place a
little to one side. Ah, truly, the end was near! Scarcely had they made
a beginning, and all was over. That lack of discipline, that seditious
spirit among the men at the very first reverse, had already made the
army a demoralized, disintegrated rabble that would melt away at the
first indication of catastrophe. There they were, under the walls of
Belfort, without having sighted a Prussian, and they were whipped.
The succeeding days were a period of monotony, full of uncertainty and
anxious forebodings. To keep his troops occupied General Douay set them
to work on the defenses of the place, which were in a state of
incompleteness; there was great throwing up of earth and cutting
through rock. And not the first item of news! Where was MacMahon’s
army? What was going on at Metz? The wildest rumors were current, and
the Parisian journals, by their system of printing news only to
contradict it the next day, kept the country in an agony of suspense.
Twice, it was said, the general had written and asked for instructions,
and had not even received an answer. On the 12th of August, however,
the 7th corps was augmented by the 3d division, which landed from
Italy, but there were still only two divisions for duty, for the 1st
had participated in the defeat at Froeschwiller, had been swept away in
the general rout, and as yet no one had learned where it had been
stranded by the current. After a week of this abandonment, of this
entire separation from the rest of France, a telegram came bringing
them the order to march. The news was well received, for anything was
preferable to the prison life they were leading in Belfort. And while
they were getting themselves in readiness conjecture and surmise were
the order of the day, for no one as yet knew what their destination was
to be, some saying that they were to be sent to the defense of
Strasbourg, while others spoke with confidence of a bold dash into the
Black Forest that was to sever the Prussian line of communication.
Early the next morning the 106th was bundled into cattle-cars and
started off among the first. The car that contained Jean’s squad was
particularly crowded, so much so that Loubet declared there was not
even room in it to sneeze. It was a load of humanity, sent off to the
war just as a load of sacks would have been dispatched to the mill,
crowded in so as to get the greatest number into the smallest space,
and as rations had been given out in the usual hurried, slovenly manner
and the men had received in brandy what they should have received in
food, the consequence was that they were all roaring drunk, with a
drunkenness that vented itself in obscene songs, varied by shrieks and
yells. The heavy train rolled slowly onward; pipes were alight and men
could no longer see one another through the dense clouds of smoke; the
heat and odor that emanated from that mass of perspiring human flesh
were unendurable, while from the jolting, dingy van came volleys of
shouts and laughter that drowned the monotonous rattle of the wheels
and were lost amid the silence of the deserted fields. And it was not
until they reached Langres that the troops learned that they were being
carried back to Paris.
“Ah, _nom de Dieu!_” exclaimed Chouteau, who already, by virtue of his
oratorical ability, was the acknowledged sovereign of his corner, “they
will station us at Charentonneau, sure, to keep old Bismarck out of the
Tuileries.”
The others laughed loud and long, considering the joke a very good one,
though no one could say why. The most trivial incidents of the journey,
however, served to elicit a storm of yells, cat-calls, and laughter: a
group of peasants standing beside the roadway, or the anxious faces of
the people who hung about the way-stations in the hope of picking up
some bits of news from the passing trains, epitomizing on a small scale
the breathless, shuddering alarm that pervaded all France in the
presence of invasion. And so it happened that as the train thundered
by, a fleeting vision of pandemonium, all that the good burghers
obtained in the way of intelligence was the salutations of that cargo
of food for powder as it hurried onward to its destination, fast as
steam could carry it. At a station where they stopped, however, three
well-dressed ladies, wealthy bourgeoises of the town, who distributed
cups of bouillon among the men, were received with great respect. Some
of the soldiers shed tears, and kissed their hands as they thanked
them.
But as soon as they were under way again the filthy songs and the wild
shouts began afresh, and so it went on until, a little while after
leaving Chaumont, they met another train that was conveying some
batteries of artillery to Metz. The locomotives slowed down and the
soldiers in the two trains fraternized with a frightful uproar. The
artillerymen were also apparently very drunk; they stood up in their
seats, and thrusting hands and arms out of the car-windows, gave this
cry with a vehemence that silenced every other sound:
“To the slaughter! to the slaughter! to the slaughter!”
It was as if a cold wind, a blast from the charnel-house, had swept
through the car. Amid the sudden silence that descended on them
Loubet’s irreverent voice was heard, shouting:
“Not very cheerful companions, those fellows!”
“But they are right,” rejoined Chouteau, as if addressing some
pot-house assemblage; “it is a beastly thing to send a lot of brave
boys to have their brains blown out for a dirty little quarrel about
which they don’t know the first word.”
And much more in the same strain. He was the type of the Belleville
agitator, a lazy, dissipated mechanic, perverting his fellow workmen,
constantly spouting the ill-digested odds and ends of political
harangues that he had heard, belching forth in the same breath the
loftiest sentiments and the most asinine revolutionary clap-trap. He
knew it all, and tried to inoculate his comrades with his ideas,
especially Lapoulle, of whom he had promised to make a lad of spirit.
“Don’t you see, old man, it’s all perfectly simple. If Badinguet and
Bismarck have a quarrel, let ’em go to work with their fists and fight
it out and not involve in their row some hundreds of thousands of men
who don’t even know one another by sight and have not the slightest
desire to fight.”
The whole car laughed and applauded, and Lapoulle, who did not know who
Badinguet[1] was, and could not have told whether it was a king or an
emperor in whose cause he was fighting, repeated like the gigantic baby
that he was:
[1] Napoleon III.
“Of course, let ’em fight it out, and take a drink together afterward.”
But Chouteau had turned to Pache, whom he now proceeded to take in
hand.
“You are in the same boat, you, who pretend to believe in the good God.
He has forbidden men to fight, your good God has. Why, then, are you
here, you great simpleton?”
“_Dame_!” Pache doubtfully replied, “it is not for any pleasure of mine
that I am here—but the gendarmes—”
“Oh, indeed, the gendarmes! let the gendarmes go milk the ducks!—say,
do you know what we would do, all of us, if we had the least bit of
spirit? I’ll tell you; just the minute that they land us from the cars
we’d skip; yes, we’d go straight home, and leave that pig of a
Badinguet and his gang of two-for-a-penny generals to settle accounts
with their beastly Prussians as best they may!”
There was a storm of bravos; the leaven of perversion was doing its
work and it was Chouteau’s hour of triumph, airing his muddled theories
and ringing the changes on the Republic, the Rights of Man, the
rottenness of the Empire, which must be destroyed, and the treason of
their commanders, who, as it had been proved, had sold themselves to
the enemy at the rate of a million a piece. _He_ was a revolutionist,
he boldly declared; the others could not even say that they were
republicans, did not know what their opinions were, in fact, except
Loubet, the concocter of stews and hashes, and _he_ had an opinion, for
he had been for soup, first, last, and always; but they all, carried
away by his eloquence, shouted none the less lustily against the
Emperor, their officers, the whole d——d shop, which they would leave
the first chance they got, see if they wouldn’t! And Chouteau, while
fanning the flame of their discontent, kept an eye on Maurice, the fine
gentleman, who appeared interested and whom he was proud to have for a
companion; so that, by way of inflaming _his_ passions also, it
occurred to him to make an attack on Jean, who had thus far been
tranquilly watching the proceedings out of his half-closed eyes,
unmoved among the general uproar. If there was any remnant of
resentment in the bosom of the volunteer since the time when the
corporal had inflicted such a bitter humiliation on him by forcing him
to resume his abandoned musket, now was a fine chance to set the two
men by the ears.
“I know some folks who talk of shooting us,” Chouteau continued, with
an ugly look at Jean; “dirty, miserable skunks, who treat us worse than
beasts, and, when a man’s back is broken with the weight of his
knapsack and Brownbess, _aïe_! _aïe_! object to his planting them in
the fields to see if a new crop will grow from them. What do you
suppose they would say, comrades, _hein_! now that we are masters, if
we should pitch them all out upon the track, and teach them better
manners? That’s the way to do, _hein_! We’ll show ’em that we won’t be
bothered any longer with their mangy wars. Down with Badinguet’s
bed-bugs! Death to the curs who want to make us fight!”
Jean’s face was aflame with the crimson tide that never failed to rush
to his cheeks in his infrequent fits of anger. He rose, wedged in
though as he was between his neighbors as firmly as in a vise, and his
blazing eyes and doubled fists had such a look of business about them
that the other quailed.
“_Tonnerre de Dieu!_ will you be silent, pig! For hours I have sat here
without saying anything, because we have no longer any leaders, and I
could not even send you to the guard-house. Yes, there’s no doubt of
it, it would be a good thing to shoot such men as you and rid the
regiment of the vermin. But see here, as there’s no longer any
discipline, I will attend to your case myself. There’s no corporal here
now, but a hard-fisted fellow who is tired of listening to your jaw,
and he’ll see if he can’t make you keep your potato-trap shut. Ah! you
d——d coward! You won’t fight yourself and you want to keep others from
fighting! Repeat your words once and I’ll knock your head off!”
By this time the whole car, won over by Jean’s manly attitude, had
deserted Chouteau, who cowered back in his seat as if not anxious to
face his opponent’s big fists.
“And I care no more for Badinguet than I do for you, do you understand?
I despise politics, whether they are republican or imperial, and now,
as in the past, when I used to cultivate my little farm, there is but
one thing that I wish for, and that is the happiness of all, peace and
good-order, freedom for every man to attend to his affairs. No one
denies that war is a terrible business, but that is no reason why a man
should not be treated to the sight of a firing-party when he comes
trying to dishearten people who already have enough to do to keep their
courage up. Good Heavens, friends, how it makes a man’s pulses leap to
be told that the Prussians are in the land and that he is to go help
drive them out!”
Then, with the customary fickleness of a mob, the soldiers applauded
the corporal, who again announced his determination to thrash the first
man of his squad who should declare non-combatant principles. Bravo,
the corporal! they would soon settle old Bismarck’s hash! And, in the
midst of the wild ovation of which he was the object, Jean, who had
recovered his self-control, turned politely to Maurice and addressed
him as if he had not been one of his men:
“Monsieur, you cannot have anything in common with those poltroons.
Come, we haven’t had a chance at them yet; we are the boys who will
give them a good basting yet, those Prussians!”
It seemed to Maurice at that moment as if a ray of cheering sunshine
had penetrated his heart. He was humiliated, vexed with himself. What!
that man was nothing more than an uneducated rustic! And he remembered
the fierce hatred that had burned in his bosom the day he was compelled
to pick up the musket that he had thrown away in a moment of madness.
But he also remembered his emotion at seeing the two big tears that
stood in the corporal’s eyes when the old grandmother, her gray hairs
streaming in the wind, had so bitterly reproached them and pointed to
the Rhine that lay beneath the horizon in the distance. Was it the
brotherhood of fatigue and suffering endured in common that had served
thus to dissipate his wrathful feelings? He was Bonapartist by birth,
and had never thought of the Republic except in a speculative, dreamy
way; his feeling toward the Emperor, personally, too, inclined to
friendliness, and he was favorable to the war, the very condition of
national existence, the great regenerative school of nationalities.
Hope, all at once, with one of those fitful impulses of the
imagination, that were common in his temperament, revived in him, while
the enthusiastic ardor that had impelled him to enlist one night again
surged through his veins and swelled his heart with confidence of
victory.
“Why, of course, Corporal,” he gayly replied, “we shall give them a
basting!”
And still the car kept rolling onward with its load of human freight,
filled with reeking smoke of pipes and emanations of the crowded men,
belching its ribald songs and drunken shouts among the expectant
throngs of the stations through which it passed, among the rows of
white-faced peasants who lined the iron-way. On the 20th of August they
were at the Pantin Station in Paris, and that same evening boarded
another train which landed them next day at Rheims _en route_ for the
camp at Châlons.