The Downfall Part 3

"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 subst.i.tute: "I don't care what people say, but fifteen hundred 'b.a.l.l.s'

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 ma.s.s; 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 prost.i.tuting 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 p.r.o.ne 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 Honore. 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 st.u.r.dy 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 const.i.tuted 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 Honore, astounded to behold him among that unarmed rabble, cast on the stragglers, distressed him terribly. And now the tail end of the regiment was pa.s.sing, the _materiel_ 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 Mulhausen, 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 pa.s.sed 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 cortege. 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 pa.s.sage 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-l.u.s.ter eyes the pa.s.sing 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:

"Sc.u.m! 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.