But he was hailed by a voice from the road:
‘I say, Weiss, can you hear that?’
Downstairs he found Delaherche, who also had wanted to sleep at his dyeworks, a large brick building adjoining. In any case all the employees had fled through the woods and reached Belgium, and the only person left guarding the premises was the caretaker, a stonemason’s widow named Françoise Quittard. And she was all of a tremble and very upset, and would have gone with the others if she had not had her boy, young Auguste, a lad of ten, so ill with typhoid that he could not be moved.
‘I say,’ Delaherche said again, ‘can you hear that, it’s really starting… It would be wise to get straight back to Sedan.’
Weiss had solemnly promised his wife to leave Bazeilles at the first real sign of danger, and at that time he was quite determined to keep his promise. But so far there was only an artillery duel going on at long range and a bit haphazard in the mists of dawn.
‘For goodness sake let’s wait a bit longer,’ he said, ‘there’s no hurry.’
It should be said that Delaherche’s curiosity was so lively and so busy that it gave him courage. He had not had a wink of sleep because he was so interested in the preparations for the defence. General Lebrun, in command of the 12th corps, had been warned that he would be attacked at dawn and had spent the night taking up position in Bazeilles, for he had orders to prevent at all costs its being occupied. Barricades blocked the main street and all side streets, and every house had its garrison of two or three men, every alleyway and garden was turned into a fortress. By three o’clock, in the inky darkness, the troops had been silently awakened and were manning their combat posts, with rifles freshly greased and pouches filled with the regulation ninety rounds of ammunition. Therefore the first round of enemy gunfire had taken nobody by surprise, and the French batteries, in the rear between Balan and Bazeilles, had immediately begun to reply just to show they were there, for in the mist they were only firing by guesswork.
‘You know,’ Delaherche went on, ‘the dyeworks will be strongly defended… I have a whole section. Come and look.’
And indeed forty or more marines had been posted there, under the command of a lieutenant, a tall, fair man, very young, who looked energetic and determined. His men had already taken over the building, some were making loopholes through the first-floor shutters facing the road, and others constructing battlements in the low wall of the yard overlooking the fields at the back.
It was in the middle of this yard that Delaherche and Weiss found the lieutenant on the look-out, trying to see into the distance through the morning mist.
‘This damn fog!’ he muttered. ‘We aren’t going to be able to fight by feel.’
Then, after a pause and with no apparent transition:
‘What day is it today?’
‘Thursday,’ said Weiss.
‘Thursday, quite right, so it is. Well I’m damned! We don’t know quite what we are doing, as though the world didn’t exist.’
But just then there leaped out from the ceaseless background of gunfire a rapid fusillade at the end of the fields themselves, five or six hundred metres away. It was like a stage effect: the sun was rising, the mists of the Meuse dispersed in shreds of fine muslin, the blue sky appeared, cleared itself and was cloudless. It was the flawless morning of a lovely summer day.
‘Oh,’ exclaimed Delaherche, ‘they’re crossing the railway bridge. Can you see them going along the line, trying to reach… But how idiotic not to have blown up the bridge!’
The lieutenant made a gesture of silent rage. The blast holes were charged, he explained; only, after fighting the day before for four hours to recapture the bridge, somebody had forgotten to light the fuse!
‘Just our luck,’ he snapped.
Weiss looked on, trying to take it all in. The French occupied a very strong position in Bazeilles. Built along both sides of the Douzy road, the village dominated the plain, and the only way to get to it was by this route, turning to the left in front of the castle, while another road to the right leading to the railway turned off at the Place de l’Eglise. So the Germans had to cross the meadows and ploughed fields, wide open spaces alongside the Meuse and the railway line. Their habitual prudence being well known, it seemed unlikely that the main attack would come from this direction. And yet dense masses of them were still coming over the bridge, in spite of the massacre from mitrailleuses set up at the entrance to Bazeilles, and those who did get through at once took shelter among the few willows, and columns re-formed and advanced. That was where the ever-growing fusillade was coming from.
‘Well fancy!’ said Weiss. ‘They are Bavarians, I can see the tufts on their helmets quite clearly!’
But he thought he could make out other columns, half hidden behind the railway line, that were making for their right, trying to reach the trees some way off so as to swing back on Bazeilles in an oblique movement. If they succeeded by this means in gaining cover in the park of Montvillers the village could be taken. That was a quick and vague impression, but as the frontal attack grew in intensity it faded from his mind.
He suddenly looked round at the heights of Floing which could be seen to the north rising above the town of Sedan. A battery up there had opened fire and puffs of smoke rose in the bright sunshine, then the detonations followed very clear. It might be about five o’clock.
‘Here we go,’ he murmured, ‘this will open the ball.’
The lieutenant was watching too, and he made a gesture of absolute certainty as he said:
‘Oh, Bazeilles is the key point. It’s here that the outcome of the battle will be decided.’
‘Do you think so?’ asked Weiss.
‘No doubt about it. It’s obvious that that was in the marshal’s mind when he came last night to tell us to let ourselves be killed to the last man rather than allow the village to be occupied.’
Weiss nodded, cast his eye round the horizon, then ventured hesitantly, as though talking to himself:
‘Oh no, oh no, that isn’t it… I’m afraid of something else, yes, and I daren’t put it into words.’
He fell silent. All he did was open his arms very wide, like the jaws of a vice, and turning to the north he brought his hands together as if the two jaws were suddenly closed.
That was what he had been afraid of since the day before, with his local knowledge and in view of the movements of the two armies. Even now, when the great valley lay spread out in the radiant sunshine, his eyes went over to the hills on the left bank where, all through a day and a night, such a black swarm of German troops had been marching by. A battery was firing from above Remilly. Shells were beginning to come over from another that had taken up its position at Pont-Maugis on the river bank. He folded his eyeglasses, putting one lens over the other so as to examine the wooded slopes more carefully, but all he could see was the little puffs of smoke from the guns surmounting more of the heights every minute: then, that river of men that had been flowing over there – where was it massing at the present time? Above Noyers and Frénois, on La Marfée, he did eventually make out, at the corner of a clump of pines, a group of uniforms and horses, probably officers, some headquarters staff. And the loop of the Meuse was further away, barring the west, and in that direction there was no way of retreat towards Mézières except one narrow road through the Saint-Albert gap between the river and the forest of the Ardennes. That was why the day before he had ventured to mention this sole line of retreat to a general he had chanced to meet in a cutting in the valley of the Givonne and who, he found out later, was General Ducrot, commander of the 1st corps. If the army did not withdraw at once by that route, but waited to be cut off by the Prussians as they crossed the Meuse at Donchery, it would certainly be immobilized with its back to the frontier. It was already too late by that evening, for it was reported that the bridge was occupied by Uhlans – yet another bridge that had not been blown up, this time because nobody had thought to bring any gunpowder. In despair Weiss tol
d himself that the flood of men, the black swarm, must be in the plain of Donchery and making for the Saint-Albert gap, throwing its advance guard to Saint-Menges and Floing, where he had taken Jean and Maurice the evening before. In the brilliant sunshine the church tower of Floing could be seen a long way off, like a fine white needle.
Then eastwards there was the other jaw of the vice. Although he could see to the north, from the plateau of Illy to that of Floing, the whole battle-line of the 7th corps, supported in a feeble way by the 5th, which had been stationed in reserve beneath the ramparts, he could not know what was going on further east along the valley of the Givonne, where the 1st corps was stretched from the Garenne woods to the village of Daigny. But guns were roaring in that direction as well, and the battle must be joined in the Chevalier wood at this end of the village. His disquiet came from the fact that some country folk had said the day before that the Prussians had reached Francheval, so that the movement going on in the west via Donchery was also happening in the east via Francheval, and the jaws of the vice would succeed in meeting over in the north at the Calvary of Illy if the double pincer movement was not halted. He knew nothing about military science, had nothing but his own common sense, and he shuddered as he contemplated this immense triangle, one side of which was the Meuse and the two others were made up by the 7th corps on the north and the 1st on the east, while the 12th occupied the extreme point on the south, and all three had their backs to the others, waiting, God knew how or why, for an enemy coming from all directions. In the middle, at the bottom of a pit, was the town of Sedan, armed with obsolete cannon, with neither munitions nor provisions.
‘Now look,’ he said, repeating his gesture with arms out wide and hands coming together, ‘that’s what it’s going to be like if your generals don’t watch it… They’re just keeping you amused at Bazeilles.’
But he put it badly and in a muddled way, and the lieutenant, who did not know the district, could not follow. So he shrugged his shoulders impatiently, full of scorn for this bourgeois with his overcoat and glasses who thought he knew more about it than the marshal. Annoyed at hearing him say again that the attack on Bazeilles was probably only intended as a diversion to conceal the real plan, he cut it short by saying:
‘Oh shut up!… We’ll chuck those Bavarians of yours into the Meuse and then they’ll see whether we’re being kept amused!’
In the last few minutes the enemy snipers seemed to have got nearer, for bullets were hitting the brick wall of the dyeworks with a thud, and now the soldiers protected by the low wall of the yard were replying. Every second was marked by the sharp crack of rifle fire.
‘Chuck them into the Meuse, yes, no doubt,’ murmured Weiss, ‘and walk over their bodies to get back on to the Carignan road, very nice too!’
Then, to Delaherche who had ducked behind the pump to avoid the bullets:
‘I don’t care what they say, the real plan should have been to get away last night to Mézières, and if I were them I’d rather be there than here… Anyway, they’ll have to fight because now any retreat is impossible.’
‘Are you coming?’ asked Delaherche, who for all his burning curiosity was beginning to wilt. ‘If we hang about any longer we shan’t be able to get back to Sedan.’
‘Yes, just a minute and I’ll follow you.’
In spite of the danger he stood on tiptoe, determined to see for himself. On the right, the meadows had been flooded by order of the governor, and the vast lake stretching from Torcy to Balan protected the town, a sheet of water, pale blue in the morning sun. But the water stopped at the beginning of Bazeilles, and the Bavarians had in fact advanced through the grass, taking advantage of every hollow or tree. They might be about five hundred metres away, and what struck him was the deliberateness of their movements, the patience with which they gained ground, exposing themselves as little as possible. Moreover they were supported by powerful artillery, and the fresh, pure air was full of the screaming of shells. He looked up and saw that the battery at Pont-Maugis was not the only one firing at Bazeilles: two others, halfway up Le Liry, had opened fire, shelling the village and even raking with fire the open ground of La Moncelle where the reserves of the 12th corps were, as far as the wooded slopes of Daigny, occupied by a division of the 1st corps. Moreover all the hilltops along the left bank seemed to be bursting into fire. Guns seemed to be springing up out of the ground, it was like a ring steadily extending: a battery at Noyers firing on Balan, a battery at Wadelincourt firing on Sedan, a battery at Frénois, under La Marfée, a formidable battery whose shells passed over the town to burst among the troops of the 7th corps on the plateau of Floing. These beloved hills, this line of crests he had always thought of as there for the beauty of the view, enclosing the valley with such lovely greenery, Weiss was now looking at with anguish and terror, for they had suddenly turned into a frightful, gigantic fortress busily smashing the useless fortifications of Sedan.
A little fall of plaster made him look up. It was a bullet that had chipped a bit off his house, one side of which he could see over the party wall. This annoyed him very much, and he fumed:
‘Are those bastards going to demolish it for me?’
Then he was startled by another little thud behind him. He looked round and saw a soldier, who had been shot through the heart, falling on his back. The legs made a few convulsive movements, the face stayed young and calm, suddenly still. This was the first man killed, and Weiss was particularly upset by the crash of his rifle as it fell on the cobbles of the yard.
‘Oh no, I’m off!’ stammered Delaherche. ‘If you’re not coming, I’m going on my own.’
The lieutenant who was sick to death of them, chimed in:
‘Certainly, gentlemen, you would be well advised to go… We may be attacked at any minute.’
Then, after another glance at the meadows where the Bavarians were gaining ground, Weiss made up his mind to follow Delaherche. But first he wanted to double-lock his house on the other side, the road side. He was finally joining his friend when a new sight rooted them both to the spot.
At the end of the street, about three hundred metres away, the Place de l’Eglise was being attacked by a strong force of Bavarians coming from the Douzy road. The regiment of marines responsible for defending the square appeared to slacken fire for a moment as if to let them advance. Then suddenly, when they were massed right in front of them, there was an extraordinary and unforeseen manoeuvre: the French soldiers threw themselves to one side or the other of the road and many lay flat on the ground, and, through the space thus suddenly opened, the machine guns, concentrated in a battery at the other end, suddenly belched forth a hail of bullets, sweeping the enemy force away. The soldiers leaped up again with one bound and charged with bayonets on the scattered Bavarians, which pushed and toppled them right back. Twice the process was repeated with the same success. At the corner of a narrow lane three women were still in a little house and there, in one of the windows, they were calmly laughing and applauding, apparently delighted to see the show.
‘Oh damn,’ Weiss suddenly said, ‘I forgot to shut the cellar door and take the key… Wait for me, I shan’t be a minute.’
The first attack seemed to have been repulsed, and Delaherche, giving in to his curiosity again, was in less of a hurry. He was standing in front of the dyeworks talking to the caretaker, who had come for a moment out of the door of the room she occupied on the ground floor.
‘Poor Françoise, you should come with us. It’s terrible, a woman on her own in the middle of all these horrors.’
She raised her trembling arms.
‘Oh sir, of course I should have gone but for my little Auguste’s illness… Come in, sir, and you’ll see.’
He did not go in, but craned his neck and shook his head on seeing the lad in a spotlessly clean bed, his face flushed with fever, staring at his mother with burning eyes.
‘Well, yes, but why don’t you carry him away? I will fix you up in Sedan… Wrap him up in
a warm blanket and come with us.’
‘Oh no, sir, it isn’t possible. The doctor said I would kill him… If only his poor father were still alive! But there are only the two of us now and we must save ourselves for each other… And besides, those Prussians surely won’t do any harm to a woman on her own and a sick child!’
Weiss reappeared at that moment, satisfied that he had barricaded everything in his house.
‘There! If they want to get in they’ll have to smash up the whole show… Now let’s be off, and it’s not going to be all that easy either. Let’s slip along near the houses so as not to be hit by something.’
And indeed the enemy must have been working up for a fresh attack, for the fusillade redoubled its intensity and the screaming of shells never let up. Two had already come down on the road a hundred metres away and another had buried itself in the soft earth of the garden without exploding.
‘Oh Françoise, I want to give your little Auguste a kiss,’ Weiss went on. ‘But he’s not as bad as all that, another couple of days and he’ll be out of danger… Cheer up, and now hurry indoors and don’t show your nose outside.’
At last the two men were setting off.
‘Be seeing you, Françoise.’
‘Be seeing you, gentlemen.’
At that very second there was an appalling crash. A shell had demolished a chimney of Weiss’s house and fallen on to the pavement, where it went off with such an explosion that all the windows nearby were broken. A thick dust and heavy smoke at first hid everything from sight. Then the front of the dyeworks could be seen gaping wide, and Françoise had been flung across the doorstep, dead, with her back broken, her head smashed in, a lump of human flesh, red and horrible.