The Downfall Part 46

The prospect for finding his regiment looked bad; night was coming down, and, leg-weary and disheartened, he seated himself for a moment on a stone by the wayside.

As he sat there, abandoning himself to the sensation of loneliness and despair that crept over him, he beheld before him, across the Meuse, the accursed fields where he had fought the day but one before. Bitter memories rose to his mind, in the fading light of that day of gloom and rain, as he surveyed the saturated, miry expanse of country that rose from the river's bank and was lost on the horizon. The defile of Saint-Albert, the narrow road by which the Prussians had gained their rear, ran along the bend of the stream as far as the white cliffs of the quarries of Montimont. The summits of the trees in the wood of la Falizette rose in rounded, fleecy ma.s.ses over the rising ground of Seugnon. Directly before his eyes, a little to the left, was Saint-Menges, the road from which descended by a gentle slope and ended at the ferry; there, too, were the mamelon of Hattoy in the center, and Illy, in the far distance, in the background, and Fleigneux, almost hidden in its shallow vale, and Floing, less remote, on the right. He recognized the plateau where he had spent interminable hours among the cabbages, and the eminences that the reserve artillery had struggled so gallantly to hold, where he had seen Honore meet his death on his dismounted gun. And it was as if the baleful scene were again before him with all its abominations, steeping his mind in horror and disgust, until he was sick at heart.

The reflection that soon it would be quite dark and it would not do to loiter there, however, caused him to resume his researches. He said to himself that perhaps the regiment was encamped somewhere beyond the village on the low ground, but the only ones he encountered there were some prowlers, and he decided to make the circuit of the peninsula, following the bend of the stream. As he was pa.s.sing through a field of potatoes he was sufficiently thoughtful to dig a few of the tubers and put them in his pockets; they were not ripe, but he had nothing better, for Jean, as luck would have it, had insisted on carrying both the two loaves of bread that Delaherche had given them when they left his house.

He was somewhat surprised at the number of horses he met with, roaming about the uncultivated lands, that fell off in an easy descent from the central elevation to the Meuse, in the direction of Donchery. Why should they have brought all those animals with them? how were they to be fed?

And now it was night in earnest, and quite dark, when he came to a small piece of woods on the water's brink, in which he was surprised to find the cent-gardes of the Emperor's escort, providing for their creature comforts and drying themselves before roaring fires. These gentlemen, who had a separate encampment to themselves, had comfortable tents; their kettles were boiling merrily, there was a milch cow tied to a tree. It did not take Maurice long to see that he was not regarded with favor in that quarter, poor devil of an infantryman that he was, with his ragged, mud-stained uniform. They graciously accorded him permission to roast his potatoes in the ashes of their fires, however, and he withdrew to the shelter of a tree, some hundred yards away, to eat them.

It was no longer raining; the sky was clear, the stars were shining brilliantly in the dark blue vault. He saw that he should have to spend the night in the open air and defer his researches until the morrow.

He was so utterly used up that he could go no further; the trees would afford him some protection in case it came on to rain again.

The strangeness of his situation, however, and the thought of his vast prison house, open to the winds of heaven, would not let him sleep. It had been an extremely clever move on the part of the Prussians to select that place of confinement for the eighty thousand men who const.i.tuted the remnant of the army of Chalons. The peninsula was approximately three miles long by one wide, affording abundant s.p.a.ce for the broken fragments of the vanquished host, and Maurice could not fail to observe that it was surrounded on every side by water, the bend of the Meuse encircling it on the north, east and west, while on the south, at the base, connecting the two arms of the loop at the point where they drew together most closely, was the ca.n.a.l. Here alone was an outlet, the bridge, that was defended by two guns; wherefore it may be seen that the guarding of the camp was a comparatively easy task, notwithstanding its great extent. He had already taken note of the chain of sentries on the farther bank, a soldier being stationed by the waterside at every fifty paces, with orders to fire on any man who should attempt to escape by swimming. In the rear the different posts were connected by patrols of uhlans, while further in the distance, scattered over the broad fields, were the dark lines of the Prussian regiments; a threefold living, moving wall, immuring the captive army.

Maurice, in his sleeplessness, lay gazing with wide-open eyes into the blackness of the night, illuminated here and there by the smoldering watch-fires; the motionless forms of the sentinels were dimly visible beyond the pale ribbon of the Meuse. Erect they stood, duskier spots against the dusky shadows, beneath the faint light of the twinkling stars, and at regular intervals their guttural call came to his ears, a menacing watch-cry that was drowned in the hoa.r.s.e murmur of the river in the distance. At sound of those unmelodious phrases in a foreign tongue, rising on the still air of a starlit night in the sunny land of France, the vision of the past again rose before him: all that he had beheld in memory an hour before, the plateau of Illy c.u.mbered still with dead, the accursed country round about Sedan that had been the scene of such dire disaster; and resting on the ground in that cool, damp corner of a wood, his head pillowed on a root, he again yielded to the feeling of despair that had overwhelmed him the day before while lying on Delaherche's sofa. And that which, intensifying the suffering of his wounded pride, now hara.s.sed and tortured him, was the question of the morrow, the feverish longing to know how deep had been their fall, how great the wreck and ruin sustained by their world of yesterday. The Emperor had surrendered his sword to King William; was not, therefore, the abominable war ended? But he recalled the remark he had heard made by two of the Bavarians of the guard who had escorted the prisoners to Iges: "We're all in France, we're all bound for Paris!" In his semi-somnolent, dreamy state the vision of what was to be suddenly rose before his eyes: the empire overturned and swept away amid a howl of universal execration, the republic proclaimed with an outburst of patriotic fervor, while the legend of '92 would incite men to emulate the glorious past, and, flocking to the standards, drive from the country's soil the hated foreigner with armies of brave volunteers. He reflected confusedly upon all the aspects of the case, and speculations followed one another in swift succession through his poor wearied brain: the harsh terms imposed by the victors, the bitterness of defeat, the determination of the vanquished to resist even to the last drop of blood, the fate of those eighty thousand men, his companions, who were to be captives for weeks, months, years, perhaps, first on the peninsula and afterward in German fortresses. The foundations were giving way, and everything was going down, down to the bottomless depths of perdition.

The call of the sentinels, now loud, now low, seemed to sound more faintly in his ears and to be receding in the distance, when suddenly, as he turned on his hard couch, a shot rent the deep silence. A hollow groan rose on the calm air of night, there was a splashing in the water, the brief struggle of one who sinks to rise no more. It was some poor wretch who had attempted to escape by swimming the Meuse and had received a bullet in his brain.

The next morning Maurice was up and stirring with the sun. The sky was cloudless; he was desirous to rejoin Jean and his other comrades of the company with the least possible delay. For a moment he had an idea of going to see what there was in the interior of the peninsula, then resolved he would first complete its circuit. And on reaching the ca.n.a.l his eyes were greeted with the sight of the 106th--or rather what was left of it--a thousand men, encamped along the river bank among some waste lands, with no protection save a row of slender poplars. If he had only turned to the left the night before instead of pursuing a straight course he could have been with his regiment at once. And he noticed that almost all the line regiments were collected along that part of the bank that extends from the Tour a Glaire to the Chateau of Villette--another bourgeois country place, situated more in the direction of Donchery and surrounded by a few hovels--all of them having selected their bivouac near the bridge, sole issue from their prison, as sheep will instinctively huddle together close to the door of their fold, knowing that sooner or later it will be opened for them.

Jean uttered a cry of pleasure. "Ah, so it's you, at last! I had begun to think you were in the river."

He was there with what remained of the squad, Pache and Lapoulle, Loubet and Chouteau. The last named had slept under doorways in Sedan until the attention of the Prussian provost guard had finally restored them to their regiment. The corporal, moreover, was the only surviving officer of the company, death having taken away Sergeant Sapin, Lieutenant Rochas and Captain Beaudoin, and although the victors had abolished distinction of rank among the prisoners, deciding that obedience was due to the German officers alone, the four men had, nevertheless, rallied to him, knowing him to be a leader of prudence and experience, upon whom they could rely in circ.u.mstances of difficulty. Thus it was that peace and harmony reigned among them that morning, notwithstanding the stupidity of some and the evil designs of others. In the first place, the night before he had found them a place to sleep in that was comparatively dry, where they had stretched themselves on the ground, the only thing they had left in the way of protection from the weather being the half of a shelter-tent. After that he had managed to secure some wood and a kettle, in which Loubet made coffee for them, the comforting warmth of which had fortified their stomachs. The rain had ceased, the day gave promise of being bright and warm, they had a small supply of biscuit and bacon left, and then, as Chouteau said, it was a comfort to have no orders to obey, to have their fill of loafing. They were prisoners, it was true, but there was plenty of room to move about.

Moreover, they would be away from there in two or three days. Under these circ.u.mstances the day, which was Sunday, the 4th, pa.s.sed pleasantly enough.

Maurice, whose courage had returned to him now that he was with the comrades once more, found nothing to annoy him except the Prussian bands, which played all the afternoon beyond the ca.n.a.l. Toward evening there was vocal music, and the men sang in chorus. They could be seen outside the chain of sentries, walking to and fro in little groups and singing solemn melodies in a loud, ringing voice in honor of the Sabbath.

"Confound those bands!" Maurice at last impatiently exclaimed. "They will drive me wild!"

Jean, whose nerves were less susceptible, shrugged his shoulders.

"_Dame_! they have reason to feel good; and then perhaps they think it affords us pleasure. It hasn't been such a bad day; don't let's find fault."

As night approached, however, the rain began to fall again. Some of the men had taken possession of what few unoccupied houses there were on the peninsula, others were provided with tents that they erected, but by far the greater number, without shelter of any sort, dest.i.tute of blankets even, were compelled to pa.s.s the night in the open air, exposed to the pouring rain.

About one o'clock Maurice, who had been sleeping soundly as a result of his fatigue, awoke and found himself in the middle of a miniature lake. The trenches, swollen by the heavy downpour, had overflowed and inundated the ground where he lay. Chouteau's and Loubet's wrath vented itself in a volley of maledictions, while Pache shook Lapoulle, who, unmindful of his ducking, slept through it all as if he was never to wake again. Then Jean, remembering the row of poplars on the bank of the ca.n.a.l, collected his little band and ran thither for shelter; and there they pa.s.sed the remainder of that wretched night, crouching with their backs to the trees, their legs doubled under them, so as to expose as little of their persons as might be to the big drops.

The next day, and the day succeeding it, the weather was truly detestable, what with the continual showers, that came down so copiously and at such frequent intervals that the men's clothing had not time to dry on their backs. They were threatened with famine, too; there was not a biscuit left in camp, and the coffee and bacon were exhausted. During those two days, Monday and Tuesday, they existed on potatoes that they dug in the adjacent fields, and even those vegetables had become so scarce toward the end of the second day that those soldiers who had money paid as high as five sous apiece for them. It was true that the bugles sounded the call for "distribution"; the corporal had nearly run his legs off trying to be the first to reach a great shed near the Tour a Glaire, where it was reported that rations of bread were to be issued, but on the occasion of a first visit he had waited there three hours and gone away empty-handed, and on a second had become involved in a quarrel with a Bavarian. It was well known that the French officers were themselves in deep distress and powerless to a.s.sist their men; had the German staff driven the vanquished army out there in the mud and rain with the intention of letting them starve to death? Not the first step seemed to have been taken, not an effort had been made, to provide for the subsistence of those eighty thousand men in that h.e.l.l on earth that the soldiers subsequently christened Camp Misery, a name that the bravest of them could never hear mentioned in later days without a shudder.

On his return from his wearisome and fruitless expedition to the shed, Jean forgot his usual placidity and gave way to anger.

"What do they mean by calling us up when there's nothing for us? I'll be hanged if I'll put myself out for them another time!"

And yet, whenever there was a call, he hurried off again. It was inhuman to sound the bugles thus, merely because regulations prescribed certain calls at certain hours, and it had another effect that was near breaking Maurice's heart. Every time that the trumpets sounded the French horses, that were running free on the other side of the ca.n.a.l, came rushing up and dashed into the water to rejoin their squadron, as excited at the well-known sound as they would be at the touch of the spur; but in their exhausted condition they were swept away by the current and few attained the sh.o.r.e. It was a cruel sight to see their struggles; they were drowned in great numbers, and their bodies, decomposing and swelling in the hot sunshine, drifted on the bosom of the ca.n.a.l. As for those of them that got to land, they seemed as if stricken with sudden madness, galloping wildly off and hiding among the waste places of the peninsula.

"More bones for the crows to pick!" sorrowfully said Maurice, remembering the great droves of horses that he had encountered on a previous occasion. "If we remain here a few days we shall all be devouring one another. Poor brutes!"

The night between Tuesday and Wednesday was most terrible of all, and Jean, who was beginning to feel seriously alarmed for Maurice's feverish state, made him wrap himself in an old blanket that they had purchased from a zouave for ten francs, while he, with no protection save his water-soaked capote, cheerfully took the drenching of the deluge which that night pelted down without cessation. Their position under the poplars had become untenable; it was a streaming river of mud, the water rested in deep puddles on the surface of the saturated ground. What was worst of all was that they had to suffer on an empty stomach, the evening meal of the six men having consisted of two beets which they had been compelled to eat raw, having no dry wood to make a fire with, and the sweet taste and refreshing coolness of the vegetables had quickly been succeeded by an intolerable burning sensation. Some cases of dysentery had appeared among the men, caused by fatigue, improper food and the persistent humidity of the atmosphere. More than ten times that night did Jean stretch forth his hand to see that Maurice had not uncovered himself in the movements of his slumber, and thus he kept watch and ward over his friend--his back supported by the same tree-trunk, his legs in a pool of water--with tenderness unspeakable.

Since the day that on the plateau of Illy his comrade had carried him off in his arms and saved him from the Prussians he had repaid the debt a hundred-fold. He stopped not to reason on it; it was the free gift of all his being, the total forgetfulness of self for love of the other, the finest, most delicate, grandest exhibition of friendship possible, and that, too, in a peasant, whose lot had always been the lowly one of a tiller of the soil and who had never risen far above the earth, who could not find words to express what he felt, acting purely from instinct, in all simplicity of soul. Many a time already he had taken the food from his mouth, as the men of the squad were wont to say; now he would have divested himself of his skin if with it he might have covered the other, to protect his shoulders, to warm his feet. And in the midst of the savage egoism that surrounded them, among that aggregation of suffering humanity whose worst appet.i.tes were inflamed and intensified by hunger, he perhaps owed it to his complete abnegation of self that he had preserved thus far his tranquillity of mind and his vigorous health, for he among them all, his great strength unimpaired, alone maintained his composure and something like a level head.

After that distressful night Jean determined to carry into execution a plan that he had been reflecting over since the day previous.

"See here, little one, we can get nothing to eat, and everyone seems to have forgotten us here in this beastly hole; now unless we want to die the death of dogs, it behooves us to stir about a bit. How are your legs?"

The sun had come out again, fortunately, and Maurice was warmed and comforted.

"Oh, my legs are all right!"

"Then we'll start off on an exploring expedition. We've money in our pockets, and the deuce is in it if we can't find something to buy. And we won't bother our heads about the others; they don't deserve it. Let them take care of themselves."

The truth was that Loubet and Chouteau had disgusted him by their trickiness and low selfishness, stealing whatever they could lay hands on and never dividing with their comrades, while no good was to be got out of Lapoulle, the brute, and Pache, the sniveling devotee.

The pair, therefore, Maurice and Jean, started out by the road along the Meuse which the former had traversed once before, on the night of his arrival. At the Tour a Glaire the park and dwelling-house presented a sorrowful spectacle of pillage and devastation, the trim lawns cut up and destroyed, the trees felled, the mansion dismantled. A ragged, dirty crew of soldiers, with hollow cheeks and eyes preternaturally bright from fever, had taken possession of the place and were living like beasts in the filthy chambers, not daring to leave their quarters for a moment lest someone else might come along and occupy them. A little further on they pa.s.sed the cavalry and artillery, encamped on the hillsides, once so conspicuous by reason of the neatness and jauntiness of their appearance, now run to seed like all the rest, their organization gone, demoralized by that terrible, torturing hunger that drove the horses wild and sent the men straggling through the fields in plundering bands. Below them, to the right, they beheld an apparently interminable line of artillerymen and cha.s.seurs d'Afrique defiling slowly before the mill; the miller was selling them flour, measuring out two handfuls into their handkerchiefs for a franc. The prospect of the long wait that lay before them, should they take their place at the end of the line, determined them to pa.s.s on, in the hope that some better opportunity would present itself at the village of Iges; but great was their consternation when they reached it to find the little place as bare and empty as an Algerian village through which has pa.s.sed a swarm of locusts; not a crumb, not a fragment of anything eatable, neither bread, nor meat, nor vegetables, the wretched inhabitants utterly dest.i.tute. General Lebrun was said to be there, closeted with the mayor.

He had been endeavoring, ineffectually, to arrange for an issue of bonds, redeemable at the close of the war, in order to facilitate the victualing of the troops. Money had ceased to have any value when there was nothing that it could purchase. The day before two francs had been paid for a biscuit, seven francs for a bottle of wine, a small gla.s.s of brandy was twenty sous, a pipeful of tobacco ten sous. And now officers, sword in hand, had to stand guard before the general's house and the neighboring hovels, for bands of marauders were constantly pa.s.sing, breaking down doors and stealing even the oil from the lamps and drinking it.

Three zouaves invited Maurice and Jean to join them. Five would do the work more effectually than three.

"Come along. There are horses dying in plenty, and if we can but get some dry wood--"

Then they fell to work on the miserable cabin of a poor peasant, smashing the closet doors, tearing the thatch from the roof. Some officers, who came up on a run, threatened them with their revolvers and put them to flight.

Jean, who saw that the few villagers who had remained at Iges were no better off than the soldiers, perceived he had made a mistake in pa.s.sing the mill without buying some flour.

"There may be some left; we had best go back."

But Maurice was so reduced from inanition and was beginning to suffer so from fatigue that he left him behind in a sheltered nook among the quarries, seated on a fragment of rock, his face turned upon the wide horizon of Sedan. He, after waiting in line for two long hours, finally returned with some flour wrapped in a piece of rag. And they ate it uncooked, dipping it up in their hands, unable to devise any other way.

It was not so very bad; It had no particular flavor, only the insipid taste of dough. Their breakfast, such as it was, did them some good, however. They were even so fortunate as to discover a little pool of rain-water, comparatively pure, in a hollow of a rock, at which they quenched their thirst with great satisfaction.

But when Jean proposed that they should spend the remainder of the afternoon there, Maurice negatived the motion with a great display of violence.

"No, no; not here! I should be ill if I were to have that scene before my eyes for any length of time--" With a hand that trembled he pointed to the remote horizon, the hill of Hattoy, the plateaux of Floing and Illy, the wood of la Garenne, those abhorred, detested fields of slaughter and defeat. "While you were away just now I was obliged to turn my back on it, else I should have broken out and howled with rage. Yes, I should have howled like a dog tormented by boys--you can't imagine how it hurts me; it drives me crazy!"

Jean looked at him in surprise; he could not understand that pride, sensitive as a raw sore, that made defeat so bitter to him; he was alarmed to behold in his eyes that wandering, flighty look that he had seen there before. He affected to treat the matter lightly.

"Good! we'll seek another country; that's easy enough to do."

Then they wandered as long as daylight lasted, wherever the paths they took conducted them. They visited the level portion of the peninsula in the hope of finding more potatoes there, but the artillerymen had obtained a plow and turned up the ground, and not a single potato had escaped their sharp eyes. They retraced their steps, and again they pa.s.sed through throngs of listless, gla.s.sy-eyed, starving soldiers, strewing the ground with their debilitated forms, falling by hundreds in the bright sunshine from sheer exhaustion. They were themselves many times overcome by fatigue and forced to sit down and rest; then their deep-seated sensation of suffering would bring them to their feet again and they would recommence their wandering, like animals impelled by instinct to move on perpetually in quest of pasturage. It seemed to them to last for years, and yet the moments sped by rapidly. In the more inland region, over Donchery way, they received a fright from the horses and sought the protection of a wall, where they remained a long time, too exhausted to rise, watching with vague, lack-l.u.s.ter eyes the wild course of the crazed beasts as they raced athwart the red western sky where the sun was sinking.

As Maurice had foreseen, the thousands of horses that shared the captivity of the army, and for which it was impossible to provide forage, const.i.tuted a peril that grew greater day by day. At first they had nibbled the vegetation and gnawed the bark off trees, then had attacked the fences and whatever wooden structures they came across, and now they seemed ready to devour one another. It was a frequent occurrence to see one of them throw himself upon another and tear out great tufts from his mane or tail, which he would grind between his teeth, slavering meanwhile at the mouth profusely. But it was at night that they became most terrible, as if they were visited by visions of terror in the darkness. They collected in droves, and, attracted by the straw, made furious rushes upon what few tents there were, overturning and demolishing them. It was to no purpose that the men built great fires to keep them away; the device only served to madden them the more.

Their shrill cries were so full of anguish, so dreadful to the ear, that they might have been mistaken for the howls of wild beasts. Were they driven away, they returned, more numerous and fiercer than before.

Scarce a moment pa.s.sed but out in the darkness could be heard the shriek of anguish of some unfortunate soldier whom the crazed beasts had crushed in their wild stampede.

The sun was still above the horizon when Jean and Maurice, on their way back to the camp, were astonished by meeting with the four men of the squad, lurking in a ditch, apparently for no good purpose. Loubet hailed them at once, and Chouteau const.i.tuted himself spokesman:

"We are considering ways and means for dining this evening. We shall die if we go on this way; it is thirty-six hours since we have had anything to put in our stomach--so, as there are horses plenty, and horse-meat isn't such bad eating--"

"You'll join us, won't you, corporal?" said Loubet, interrupting, "for, with such a big, strong animal to handle, the more of us there are the better it will be. See, there is one, off yonder, that we've been keeping an eye on for the last hour; that big bay that is in such a bad way. He'll be all the easier to finish."

And he pointed to a horse that was dying of starvation, on the edge of what had once been a field of beets. He had fallen on his flank, and every now and then would raise his head and look about him pleadingly, with a deep inhalation that sounded like a sigh.

"Ah, how long we have to wait!" grumbled Lapoulle, who was suffering torment from his fierce appet.i.te. "I'll go and kill him--shall I?"