The Plebiscite Part 20

"Very well," I replied. For although this requisition appeared to me to be rather heavy, I would not betray my indignation before our enemies; they would have been too much delighted. "Very well, I will drive my hay and my straw to Droulingen."

"You will drive it yourself," said the vaguemestre, brutally. "All the horses and carts in the village have been put into requisition; you have too often forgotten your own."

"I can prove that my horses and my carts have been worked oftener than any one's," I replied, with rising wrath. "There are your receipts; I hope you won't deny them!"

"Well, it doesn't matter," said he. "The horses, the carts, the hay and straw are demanded; that is plain."

"Quite plain," said Cousin George. "The strongest may always command."

"Exactly so," said the vaguemestre.

He went out with his men, and George, without anger, said, "This is war! Let us be calm. Perhaps our turn will come now that the _honest man_ is no longer in command of our armies. In the meantime the best thing we can do, if we do not want to lose our horses and our carts besides, will be to load to-night, and to start very early in the morning. We shall return before seven o'clock to supper; and then they won't be able to take any more of our hay and straw, because we shall have none left."

For my part, I was near bursting with rage; but, as he set the example, by stripping off his coat and putting on his blouse, I went to wake up old Father Offran to help me to load.

My wife and Gredel were expecting me: for the vaguemestre and his men had called at the mill, before coming to George's house, and they were trembling with apprehension. I told them to be calm; that it was only taking some hay and straw to Droulingen, where I should get a receipt for future payment.

Whether they believed it or not, they went in again.

I lighted the lantern, Offran mounted up into the loft and threw me down the trusses, which I caught upon a fork. About two in the morning, the two carts being loaded, I fed the horses and rested a few minutes.

At five o'clock, George, outside, was already calling "Christian, I am here!"

I got up, put on my hat and my blouse, opened the stable from the inside, put the horses in, and we started in the fresh and early morning, supposing we should return at night.

In all the villages that we pa.s.sed through, troops of Landwehr were sitting before their huts, ragged, with patched knees and filthy beards, like the description of the Cossacks of former days, smoking their pipes; and the cavalry and infantry were coming and going.

Those who remained in garrison in the villages were obliged by their orders to give up their good walking-boots to the others, and to wear their old shoes.

Mounted officers, with their low, flat caps pulled down upon their noses, were skimming along the paths by the road-side like the wind.

In the old wayside inns, in the corners of the yards the dung-hills were heaped up with entrails and skins of beasts: hides, stuffed with straw, were hanging also from the banisters of the old galleries, where we used to see washed linen hanging out to dry. Misery, unspeakable misery, and gnawing anxiety were marked upon the countenances of the people. The Germans alone looked fat and sleek in their broken boots; they had good white bread, good red wine, good meat, and smoked good tobacco or cigars: they were living like fighting-c.o.c.ks.

At a certain former time, these people had complained bitterly of our invasion of their country, without remembering that they had begun by invading ourselves. And yet they were right. At the close of the First Empire, the French were only fighting for one man; but the Germans had since had their revenge twice, in 1814 and 1815, and for fifty years they had always been coming to us as friends, and were received like brothers: we bore no malice against them, and they seemed to bear none against us; peace had softened us. We only wished for their prosperity, as well as for our own; for nations are really happy only when their neighbors are prospering: then business and industry all move hand in hand together. That was our position! We said nothing more of our victories; we talked of our defeats, so as to do full justice to their courage and their patriotism; we acknowledged our faults; they pretended to acknowledge theirs, and talked of fraternity.

We believed in their uprightness, in their candor and frankness: we were really fond of them.

Now hatred has arisen between us.

Whose the fault?

First, our stupidity, our ignorance. We all believed that the Plebiscite was for peace; the Ministers, the prefets, the sous-prefets, the magistrates, the commissioners of police, everybody in authority confirmed this. A villain has used it to declare war! But the Germans were glad of the war; they were full of hatred, and malice, and envy, without betraying it: they had long watched us and studied us; they endured everlasting drill and perpetual fatigue to become the strongest, and sought with pains for an opportunity to get war declared against themselves, and so set themselves right in the eyes of Europe.

The Spanish complication was but a trap laid by Bismarck for Bonaparte.

The Germans said to one another: "We have twelve hundred thousand men under arms; we are four to one. Let us seize the opportunity! If the French Government take it into their heads to organize and discipline the Garde Mobile, all might be lost.... Quick, quick!"

This is the uprightness, frankness, and fraternity of the Germans!

Our idiot fell into the trap. The Germans overwhelmed us with their mult.i.tudes. They are our masters; they hold our country; we are paying them milliards! and now they are coming back, just as before, into our towns and cities in troops, smiling upon us, extending the right hand: "Ha! ha! how are you now? Have you been pretty well all this long while? What! don't you know me? You look angry! Ah! but you really shouldn't. Such friends, such good old friends! Come, now! give me a small order, only a small one; and don't let us think of that unhappy war!"

Faugh! Let us look another way; it is too horrible.

To excuse them, I say (for one must always seek excuses for everything) man is not by nature so debased; there must be causes to explain, so great a want of natural pride; and I say to myself--that these are poor creatures trained to submission, and that these unfortunate beings do as the birds do that the birdcatcher holds captives in his net; they sing, they chirp, to decoy others.

"Ah! how jolly it is here! how delightful here in Old Germany, with an Emperor, kings, princes, German dukes, grand-dukes, counts, and barons!

What an honor to fight and die for the German Fatherland! The German is the foremost man in the world."

Yes. Yes. Poor devils! We know all about that. That is the song your masters taught you at school! For the King of Prussia and his n.o.bility you work, you spy, you have your bones broken on the battle-field! They pay you with hollow phrases about the n.o.ble German, the German Fatherland, the German sky, the German Rhine; and when you sing false, with rough German slaps upon your German faces.

No; no! it is of no use; the Alsacians and the Lorrainers will never whistle like you: they have learned another tune.

Well! all this did not save us from being nipped, George and me, and from being made aware that at the least resistance they would wring our necks like chickens. So we put a good face upon a bad game, observing the desolation of all this country, where the cattle plague had just broken out. At Lohre, at Ottviller, in a score of places, this terrible disease, the most ruinous for the peasantry, was already beginning its ravages; and the Prussians, who eat more than four times the quant.i.ty of meat that we do--when it belongs to other people--were afraid of coming short.

Their veterinary doctors knew but one remedy; when a beast fell ill, refused its fodder, and became low-spirited, they slaughtered it, and buried it with hide and horns, six feet under ground. This was not much cleverer than the bombardment of towns to force them to surrender, or the firing of villages to compel people to pay their requisitions.

But then it answered the purpose!

The Germans in this campaign have taught us their best inventions!

They had thought them over for years, whilst our school-masters and our gazettes were telling us that they were pa.s.sing away their time in dreaming of philosophy, and other things of so extraordinary a kind that the French could not understand the thing at all.

About eleven we were at Droulingen, where was a Silesian battalion ready to march to Metz. It seems that some cavalry were to follow us, and that the requisitions had exhausted the fodder in the country, for our hay and straw were immediately housed in a barn at the end of the village, and the major gave us a receipt. He was a gray-bearded Prussian, and he examined us with wrinkled eyes, just like an old gendarme who is about to take your description.

This business concluded, George and I thought we might return at once; when, looking through the window, we saw them loading our carts with the baggage of the battalion. Then I came out, exclaiming: "Hallo!

those carts are ours! We only came to make a delivery of hay and straw!"

The Silesian commander, a tall, stiff, and uncompromising-looking fellow, who was standing at the door, just turned his head, and, as the soldiers were stopping, quietly said: "Go on!"

"But, captain," said I, "here is my receipt from the major!"

"Nothing to me," said he, walking into the mess-room, where the table was laid for the officers.

We stood outside in a state of indignation, as you may believe. The soldiers were enjoying the joke. I was very near giving them a rap with my whip-handle; but a couple of sentinels marching up and down with arms shouldered, would certainly have pa.s.sed their bayonets through me. I turned pale, and went into Finck's public-house, where George had turned in before me. The small parlor was full of soldiers, who were eating and drinking as none but Prussians can eat and drink; almost putting it into their noses.

The sight and the smell drove us out, and George, standing at the door, said to me: "Our wives will be anxious; had we not better find somebody to tell them what has happened to us?"

But it was no use wishing or looking; there was n.o.body.

The officers' horses along the wall, their bridles loose, were quietly munching their feed, and ours, which were already tired, got nothing.

"Hey!" said I to the _feld-weibel_, who was overlooking the loading of the carts; "I hope you will not think of starting without giving a handful to our horses?"

"If you have got any money, you clown," said he, grinning, "you can give them hay, and even oats, as much as you like. There, look at the sign-board before you: 'Hay and oats sold here.'"

That moment I heaped up more hatred against the Prussians than I shall be able to satiate in all my life.

"Come on," cried George, pulling me by the arm; for he saw my indignation.

And we went into the "Bay Horse," which was as full of people as the other, but larger and higher. We fed our horses; then, sitting alone in a corner we ate a crust of bread and took a gla.s.s of wine, watching the movements of the troops outside. I went out to give my horses a couple of buckets of water, for I knew that the Germans would never take that trouble.

George called to him the little pedler Friedel, who was pa.s.sing by with his pack, to tell him to inform our wives that we should not be home till to-morrow morning, being obliged to go on to Sarreguemines.

Friedel promised, and went on his way.

Almost immediately, the word of command and the rattle of arms warned us that the battalion was about to march. We only had the time to pay and to lay hold of the horses' bridles.