December came to an end and Jean wanted to go. His leg was quite strong now and the doctor declared he could go and fight. It was a great sorrow for Henriette, but she tried to hide it. Since the disastrous battle of Champigny no news from Paris had reached them. They only knew that Maurice’s regiment had been exposed to withering fire and lost many men. Then the unbroken silence, no letter and never the slightest line for them when they knew that families in Raucourt and Sedan had received notes by roundabout routes. Perhaps the pigeon bearing the news they so desperately longed for had run into some voracious hawk, or had been brought down on the edge of some forest by a Prussian bullet. What haunted them most of all was fear that Maurice was dead. The silence of that great city, gagged by the siege, had become for them, in the agony of waiting, the silence of the tomb. They had given up hope of finding out anything, and when Jean said that he was determined to go Henriette could only say in a doleful tone:
‘Oh God, so it’s all over, and I’m going to stay here alone!’
Jean meant to go and join up with the army of the north which General Faidherbe had reconstituted. Now that General Manteuffel’s corps had reached Dieppe this army was defending three departments separated from the rest of France, the Nord, the Pas-de-Calais and the Somme, and Jean’s plan, which was quite easy to carry out, was simply to get to Bouillon and then work round through Belgium. He knew that the 23rd corps was being completed with all the veterans of Sedan and Metz they could muster. He had heard that General Faidherbe was going over to the offensive, and he definitely arranged to leave on the following Sunday when he heard about the battle of Pont-Noyelle, an indecisive battle which the French had almost won.
And again it was Dr Dalichamp who offered to take him to Bouillon in his trap. His courage and kindness were inexhaustible. In Raucourt, which was ravaged by typhus brought by the Bavarians, he had patients in all the houses in addition to the two hospitals he visited, the Raucourt one itself and the one at Remilly. His burning patriotism and urge to protest against pointless violence had caused him to be arrested twice and then released by the Prussians. And so he was in a carefree laughing mood on the morning when he came for Jean with his trap, glad to be helping another Sedan victim to escape, one of these poor brave people, as he called those whom he looked after and helped out of his own pocket. Jean, who was embarrassed about money and knew how poor Henriette was, had accepted the fifty francs the doctor gave him for his journey.
Old Fouchard did things well for the send-off. He sent Silvine to get two bottles of wine and invited everybody to drink a glass to the extermination of the Germans. He was now quite the gentleman and had his money well hidden somewhere and, no longer worried about the guerrillas of the Dieulet woods, who had been hounded out like wild beasts, his one desire was to enjoy the coming peace when it was concluded. He had even, in a burst of generosity, paid Prosper some wages so as to tie him to the farm, not that the fellow had any wish to leave. He drank with Prosper, he insisted on drinking with Silvine, whom for one moment he had thought of marrying because she was so regular and good at her job. But why bother? He sensed that she would not uproot herself any more, but would still be there when Charlot grew up and went off in his turn to be a soldier. And when he had clinked glasses with the doctor, Henriette and Jean, he exclaimed:
‘Here’s a health to everybody, and may everybody prosper and be as well as I am!’
Henriette had insisted on going with Jean as far as Sedan. He was dressed like an ordinary civilian, in an overcoat and round felt hat lent by the doctor. On that day the sun was dazzling on the snow and it was bitterly cold. They were intending to go straight through the town without stopping, but when Jean realized that his colonel was still with the Delaherches he was filled with a great desire to go and see him and at the same time he could thank Monsieur Delaherche for his many kindnesses. This was to be his crowning distress in this town of disaster and grief. As they reached the mill in the rue Maqua they found the place turned upside down by a tragic end. Gilberte was in a flurry of dismay. Madame Delaherche said nothing but was weeping bitter tears, and her son had come up from the workshops, where work was coming back to normal, and was uttering exclamations of astonishment. The colonel had just been found on the floor of his room, where he had collapsed and died. The eternal lamp was burning alone in the closed room. A doctor summoned in haste had not understood why, for he could discover no likely cause such as an aneurism or stroke. He had been struck down as it were by a thunderbolt, but nobody knew whence it had fallen, and it was only the next day that they picked up a piece of an old newspaper that had been used to cover a book, and in it was a report on the fall of Metz.
‘My dear,’ Gilberte told Henriette, ‘Monsieur von Gartlauben, when he went down the stairs just now, raised his hat as he passed the door of the room in which my uncle’s body rests… Edmond saw him. He really is a very well-bred person, isn’t he?’
Until then Jean had never embraced Henriette. Before climbing into the trap with the doctor he wanted to thank her for her care and kindness, for having looked after him and loved him like a brother. But the words would not come, so he opened his arms and embraced her, in tears. She was almost distraught and returned his kiss. When the horse started off he turned and they waved to one another and managed to say:
‘Good-bye, good-bye.’
That night Henriette was back in Remilly and on duty at the hospital. During her long vigil she was suddenly seized with a terrible fit of crying, and she cried and cried, on and on, trying to stifle her grief between her clasped hands.
7
THE very day after Sedan the two German armies resumed the movement of their floods of men towards Paris, the army of the Meuse coming round to the north from the valley of the Marne and the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia crossing the Seine at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges and making for Versailles round the south of the city. On that warm September morning when General Ducrot, who had been put in command of the 14th corps, which had only just been formed, decided to attack the Crown Prince’s army while it was executing its flanking march, Maurice, in camp in the woods to the left of Meudon with his new regiment, the 115th, only received marching orders when disaster was already certain. Just one or two shells had been enough, and a frightful panic had broken out in a battalion of Zouaves made up of recruits, and the rest of the troops had been swept along in such disarray that the stampede never stopped until they were inside the Paris fortifications, where the alarm was intense. All forward positions ahead of the forts to the south were lost, and that same evening the last thread linking the city to France, the telegraph line of the Western Railway, was cut. Paris was separated from the rest of the world.
It was an evening of terrible distress for Maurice. If the Germans had dared, they could have camped that night in the Place du Carrousel. But they were strictly prudent people, resolved to have a
siege according to the rules, and they had already plotted the exact points of investment, with the cordon of the army of the Meuse to the north from Croissy to the Marne, passing through Epinay, and the other cordon of the third army to the south from Chennevières to Châtillon and Bougival, while the Prussian General Headquarters, with King William, Bismarck and von Moltke, controlled everything from Versailles. This gigantic blockade, believed to be impossible, was an accomplished fact. This city, with its bastioned wall eight and a half leagues in circumference, with its fifteen forts and six detached redoubts, was about to find itself so to speak in prison. The defending army consisted only of the 13th corps, rescued and brought back by General Vinoy, and the 14th, still being formed under General Ducrot, making between them a strength of eighty thousand soldiers, to which should be added the fourteen thousand marines, fifteen thousand volunteers, a hundred and fifteen thousand militia, apart from the three hundred thousand National Guards spread over the nine sectors of the ramparts. There might well be a whole people under arms, but there was a lack of
seasoned and discipl
ined soldiers. Men were being equipped and drilled, and Paris was one huge armed camp. Preparations for defence grew more feverish hour by hour, roads were closed, houses in the military zone demolished, the two hundred heavy-calibre guns and the two thousand smaller ones all in use, with others being cast, a whole arsenal was rising out of the ground thanks to the great patriotic inspiration of the minister, Dorian. After the breaking off of negotiations at Ferrières when Jules Favre had made known the demands of Bismarck – cession of Alsace, internment of the garrison at Strasbourg, indemnity of three milliards – a howl of rage went up and the continuation of the war and resistance were acclaimed as indispensable conditions of the survival of France. Even with no hope of victory Paris had to defend herself so that the homeland might live.
One Sunday in late September Maurice was sent on fatigue duty right across the city, and the streets he went along and the open spaces he crossed filled him with new hope. Since the rout at Châtillon he felt that courage had risen to face the great task. Yes, the Paris he had known, so mad on pleasure and so near to giving itself up to the foulest vices, was now, he found, simple again, brave and cheerful, accepting any sacrifice. You saw nothing but uniforms, and even the least involved wore the képi of the National Guard. As a huge clock stops when the spring breaks, so social life had suddenly come to an end, and with it industry, commerce, business, leaving only one passion, to win through, and it was the only subject of conversation that inflamed all hearts and heads in public gatherings, during the watches in the guardroom and among the crowds continually blocking the pavements. Shared in common, illusions carried people’s souls away and excitement flung them into the dangers of impetuous heroics. Already a crisis of unhealthy excitability was approaching a sort of epidemic fever, magnifying fear just as much as confidence and letting loose the human herd to rush off unbridled at the slightest stimulus. In the rue des Martyrs Maurice witnessed a scene which worked him up into a frenzy – a mass assault, a furious mob hurling itself upon a house where, at one of the upper windows, a brilliant lamp had been seen burning all night, obviously a signal flashed above Paris to the Prussians at Bellevue. Citizens felt compelled to live on their roofs so as to keep an eye on the surrounding country. On the previous day they had tried to drown in the round pond in the Tuileries some wretched person who was looking at a town plan he had unfolded on a seat. Maurice, who had formerly been so fair-minded, also caught this disease of suspicion, with the uprooting of everything he had so far believed in. No longer did he despair, as he had on that evening of the Châtillon panic, wondering whether the French army would ever regain its manhood and fight; the sortie of 30 September to Hay and Chevilly, that of 13 October when the militia had taken Bagneux, and finally that of 21 October, during which his regiment had momentarily occupied the park of La Malmaison, had restored all his faith, this flame of hope which a mere spark sufficed to kindle and which consumed him. The Prussians may have stopped it at all points, but all the same the army had fought bravely and still might win. What however depressed Maurice so much was the great city of Paris, leaping from the heights of self-deception to the depths of discouragement, hag-ridden by the fear of treason in its need for victory. After the Emperor and Marshal MacMahon, were General Trochu and General Ducrot also going to be second-rate commanders and unconscious workers for defeat? The same impulse which had overthrown the Empire was now bidding fair to overthrow the Government of National Defence – the impatience of the violent militants to seize power and save France. Already Jules Favre and other members of the government were more unpopular than the ousted former ministers of Napoleon III. If they didn’t want to beat the Prussians, well, they could make way for somebody else, for the revolutionaries who were sure of winning by decreeing a mass rising or by encouraging inventors who wanted to mine all the suburbs or annihilate the enemy under some novel hail of fireworks.
On the day before 31 October Maurice was attacked by this malady of mistrust and daydreaming and was now accepting sheer figments of the imagination that would formerly have made him smile. Why not? Was there any limit to stupidity and crime? Were not miracles becoming possible amid all the catastrophes upsetting the world? Inside him rancour had been slowly building up ever since the day, outside Mulhouse, when he heard about Froeschwiller. Sedan was making him bleed like a still tender wound that the smallest reverse was enough to reopen, and the shock of each of these defeats had unhinged him, for his bodily resistance had been lowered and his mind weakened by such a long succession of days
without food and nights without sleep, dropped as he was into this terrifying nightmare existence, hardly even knowing if he were still alive. And the thought that so much suffering might end in a new and irremediable catastrophe drove him out of his mind and transformed this cultured man into a creature of instinct, reverting to childhood, always carried away by the emotion of the moment. Anything, destruction, even extermination, rather than yield up one sou of the wealth or one inch of the territory of France! This was the final stage of the evolution in him which ever since the first battle lost had been destroying the Napoleonic legend and the sentimental Bonapartism he derived from the epic narratives of his grandfather. He had even already left behind theoretical moderate republicanism and was tending towards revolutionary violence, believing in the necessity of terror to sweep away the incompetent and the traitors who were busy murdering the fatherland. And so by the 31st his heart was with the rioters when fresh disasters befell one after another: the loss of Le Bourget, so valiantly taken by the volunteers of La Presse during the night of the 27th to 28th; the arrival of M. Thiers at Versailles after his tour of the European capitals when he returned, it was said, to negotiate in the name of
Napoleon III; and finally the surrender of Metz, the absolute confirmation of which he brought back with him, after the vague rumours that had already been running round. This was the knockout blow, another Sedan and even more shameful. But next day, when he heard about the events at the Hôtel de Ville – how the insurgents were momentarily winning, with the members of the Government of National Defence held prisoner until four in the morning and then saved only by a change of mind on the part of the populace, who had begun by being exasperated with them but later become worried by the thought of a victorious insurrection – he was sorry that it had come to nothing. For this Commune might have brought salvation – a call to arms, the homeland in danger, all the classic memories of a free people refusing to die. M. Thiers did not even dare come into Paris, and after the breakdown of negotiations they were on the point of lighting up the illuminations. The month of November went by in an atmosphere of feverish impatience. There were odd skirmishes in which Maurice was not involved. He was now bivouacked near Saint-Ouen, but got away whenever there was a chance, for he was devoured by a continual thirst for news. Like him, Paris was waiting anxiously.
The mayoral elections seemed to have relieved political tensions, but almost all the people elected belonged to extremist parties, which was a frightening outlook for the future. What Paris was waiting for during this lull was the grand sortie people had been demanding for so long – victory and deliverance. Once again there was no doubt about this, they would knock out the Prussians and walk over their bodies. Preparations had been made in the peninsula of Gennevilliers, which was the spot considered most favourable for a break-through. Then one morning came the delirious joy of the news of Coulmiers, Orleans recaptured, the army of the Loire on the march and already in camp at Etampes, it was said. All was changed, and the only thing left to do was go and join up with them on the other side of the Marne. The military forces had been reorganized and formed into three armies, one made up of battalions of the National Guard under the command of General Clément Thomas, another of the 13th and 14th corps strengthened with the best elements from more or less everywhere, which General Ducrot was to lead for the main attack, and the other, the third, the reserve
army, consisting entirely of militia and entrusted to General Vi
noy. Maurice was uplifted by an absolute faith on 28 November when he came to spend the night in the Bois de Vincennes with the 115th. The three corps of the second army were there, and it was being said that the link-up with the army of the Loire was fixed for the following day at Fontainebleau. And then, at once, came the mishaps, the usual blunders – a sudden rise in the river which prevented pontoon bridges from being thrown across, tiresome orders that slowed down troop movements. On the following night the 115th was one of the first to cross the river, and by ten, under a withering fire, Maurice reached the village of Champigny. He was half crazy, his rifle burned his hands in spite of the intense cold. His one desire since he had been advancing was to go straight ahead like this, without stopping, until the link-up had been made with their comrades from the country over there. But outside Champigny and Bry the army had come up against the walls of the estates of Coeuilly and Villiers, walls half a kilometre long, which the Prussians had turned into impregnable fortresses. That was the breaker on which all courage dashed itself to pieces. From that moment there was nothing left but hesitation and withdrawal; the third corps had been held up, the first and second, already immobilized, defended Champigny for two days but had to abandon it during the night of 2 December after their fruitless victory. That night the whole army came back and camped under the trees of the Bois de Vincennes, which were white with frost, and there Maurice, his feet dead with cold, and his face pressed to the frozen ground, wept.
What dreary, melancholy days after the fiasco of that immense effort! The grand sortie that had been in preparation for so long, the irresistible thrust that was to deliver Paris, had petered out, and three days later a letter from General von Moltke brought the news that the army of the Loire had been defeated and had once again abandoned Orleans. The ring was tightening still more and could not now be broken. But Paris, in a fever of despair, seemed to find new strength to resist. Threats of famine were beginning. Meat had been rationed since mid-October. By December there was not one animal left out of the huge herds of cattle and flocks of sheep that had been turned loose in the Bois de Boulogne and had galloped round in a continual cloud of dust, and they had begun slaughtering horses. Stocks of flour and corn, and subsequent requisitions, were to supply bread for four months. When flour had run out mills had had to be fitted up in the railway stations. Fuel also was running low, and was being reserved for milling grain, baking bread or making weapons. Paris, with no gas, lit by a few oil-lamps, Paris shivering under its covering of ice, Paris, with its rationed black bread and horsemeat, still went on hoping and talked of Faidherbe in the north, Chanzy on the Loire, Bourbaki in the east, as though some miracle were going to bring them victorious beneath her walls. The long queues waiting in the snow in front of bakers’ and butchers’ shops still sometimes cracked jokes at the news of imaginary great victories. After the consternation of each defeat illusion was born again, tenacious, burning ever brighter in this mob drugged with suffering and hunger. On the Place du Château d’Eau a soldier who had spoken of surrender had almost been lynched by passers-by. While the army, totally discouraged and seeing the end coming, was suing for peace, the civilians were demanding another mass sortie, a sortie like a flood, with the whole population, women and children, hurling themselves at the Prussians like a river in spate, carrying all before it. Maurice cut himself off from his comrades and developed a growing hatred for his job as a soldier which kept him in the shelter of the Mont-Valérien, idle and useless. And so he found pretexts and escaped as soon as he could to get into Paris, where his heart was. He only felt at peace in the heart of the crowd, wanting to force himself to hope, like them. He often went to watch the balloons go up every other day from the Gare du Nord, taking carrier pigeons and dispatches. The balloons rose and disappeared into the dull wintry sky, and hearts ached with distress when the wind blew them towards Germany. Many must have come to grief. He himself had written twice to his sister Henriette without knowing whether she had his letters. The memory of his sister and of Jean was so remote, away in that great world from which nothing now came, that he seldom thought of them, as of affections he had left behind in some other existence. His whole being was too full of the continual storms of dejection and elation in which he was living. And then in the first days of January something else roused him to anger, the bombardment of the districts south of the Seine. He had come to ascribe the Prussian delays to reasons of humanity, whereas they were simply due to technical difficulties. Now that a shell had killed two little girls at the Val de Grâce he was full of furious contempt for these barbarians who murdered children and were threatening to burn down museums and libraries. But after the first days of shock Paris under fire went back to its life of heroic defiance.