Weiss rushed back. Almost incoherent, he could only stammer out swear words:
‘Bloody hell! Bloody hell!’
No doubt about her being dead. He stooped and felt her hands. and as he straightened up he saw the flushed face of the child Auguste who had raised his head to look at his mother. He did not speak, he did not cry, but only stared at this horrible, unrecognizable body with his eyes monstrously magnified by fever.
‘Oh God,’ Weiss at last managed to say, ‘they’re killing women now!’
He was now standing up again and shaking his fist at the Bavarians whose helmets were beginning to reappear by the church. The sight of the roof of his house half stove-in by the falling chimney put the finishing touch to his mad fury.
‘Filthy sods! You kill women and destroy my home! No, no, it’s not possible, I can’t go away like this. I’m staying here!’
He dashed off and came back in a single bound with the rifle and cartridges of the dead soldier. For special occasions, when he wanted to see clearly, he always had on him a pair of spectacles which he did not usually wear, out of a touching sense of embarrassment and vanity in front of his young wife. Now he quickly took off his folding glasses and replaced them with the spectacles, and this heavily-built bourgeois in his overcoat, with his round, jolly face transfigured by rage, looking almost comically and sublimely heroic, began firing into the mass of Bavarians at the end of the street. It was in his blood, as he always used to say, this urge to pick a few of them off, ever since the tales of 1814 he had been told in his childhood away in Alsace.
‘Oh, the filthy sods! The filthy sods!’
He fired non-stop and so fast that the barrel of his gun began to burn his fingers.
Clearly the attack was going to be terrible. The fusillade from the meadows had died down. The Bavarians were masters of the little stream fringed with poplars and willows, and were now preparing for an assault on the houses defending the church square, and so their snipers had prudently drawn back. The sun shone in golden splendour on the great stretch of grassland, dotted with a few black patches, the bodies of killed soldiers. So the lieutenant had moved out of the yard of the dyeworks, leaving a sentry there, realizing that the danger was now going to be on the street side. He quickly disposed his men along the pavement, with orders that in the event of the enemy’s capturing the square they should barricade themselves in the first floor of the building and resist there to the last bullet. Lying on the ground, sheltering behind stones or taking advantage of the slightest projections, the men were firing all out, and along this wide, sunlit and empty street there was a hurricane of lead with streaks of smoke, like a hailstorm blown by a high wind. A young girl was seen running across the road in terror, but she was not hit. But then an old man, a yokel in a smock, was insisting on getting his horse into a stable, and he was struck in the forehead by a bullet with such force that it knocked him into the middle of the road. The roof of the church was blown in by a shell. Two other shells had set fire to houses, which blazed up in the bright light with cracklings of timber. And poor Françoise’s body, smashed beside her sick child, the old peasant with a bullet through his skull, the destruction and the fires goaded to exasperation inhabitants who had preferred to die there rather than run away into Belgium. Bourgeois, workmen, people in overcoats or overalls, all of them were firing frenziedly through the windows.
‘Oh, the swine!’ shouted Weiss. ‘They’ve gone right round… I saw them quite clearly going along the railway line… Listen, can’t you hear them over there to the left?’
And indeed rifle fire had broken out behind the park of Montvillers, the trees of which bordered the road. If the enemy occupied that park Bazeilles was lost. But the very violence of the firing proved that the commander of the 12th corps had foreseen this manoeuvre and that the park was being defended.
‘Mind what you’re doing, clumsy!’ shouted the lieutenant, forcing Weiss to flatten himself out against the wall. ‘You’ll get cut in half!’
This stout man in his spectacles, so courageous, had ended by rousing his interest, though he had to smile; and as he heard a shell coming he had pushed him aside in a brotherly way. The projectile fell some ten metres away and burst, covering them both with shrapnel. The civilian was still standing, but the lieutenant had both legs broken.
‘This is it,’ he murmured. ‘I’ve got my packet.’
Knocked down on the pavement, he had himself put in a sitting posture against the doorway, near the dead woman lying across the step. And his young face kept its keen, steadfast expression.
‘Never mind that, boys, just listen to me… Fire away and take your time. I’ll tell you when to go for them with bayonets!’
He continued in command, head up, keeping an eye on the distant enemy. Another house opposite was on fire. The crackling of bullets and explosions of shells rent the air which was filled with dust and smoke. Soldiers fell at every street corner and the dead, isolated or in heaps, made dark, bloodstained patches. Over the village, swelling in an immense clamour, was the threat of thousands of men bearing down upon a few hundred brave men resolved to die.
Delaherche, who had never stopped calling to Weiss, asked for the last time:
‘Aren’t you coming? Oh well, don’t then! I’ll leave you, good-bye!’
It was now about seven, and he had hung about too long. As long as the houses lasted he took advantage of doorways and bits of wall, squeezing into the tiniest corners at each burst of firing. He would never have believed he was so young and agile as he glided along as lithe as a snake. But at the end of Bazeilles, when he had to negotiate nearly three hundred metres of empty, open road, raked by the batteries at Le Liry, he felt himself shivering although he was soaked in sweat. For one moment he was able to get along bent double in a ditch, but then he had to run for it, madly, straight ahead, his ears full of explosions like peals of thunder. His eyes smarted as though he were walking through fire. It seemed to go on for an eternity. Suddenly he saw a little house on the left, and he leaped for it and shelter, and a huge weight was lifted from him. There were people all round him, men and horses. At first he had not recognized anyone. Then what he saw amazed him.
Surely it was the Emperor with all his staff? For all the personal knowledge he had been boasting about since he nearly spoke to him at Baybel, he hesitated, and then stood gaping. It was indeed Napoleon III, who looked taller now that he was on horseback, and his moustache was so waxed and his cheeks were so rouged that he at once thought he looked much younger, and made up like an actor. Surely he must have had himself made up so as not to go round displaying to the army the horror of his colourless face all twisted with pain, his fleshless nose and muddy eyes. Having been warned at five in the morning that there was fighting at Bazeilles, he had come like a silent, gloomy ghost with its flesh all brightened up with vermilion.
There was a brickworks there, affording some protection. On the other side the walls were being pitted with bullets, and every second a shell came down on the road. The whole escort had stopped.
‘Your Majesty,’ a voice ventured, ‘it really is dangerous…’
But the Emperor turned and made a sign to his staff to go and stand in the narrow lane that ran along the side of the brickworks. There men and horses would be completely hidden.
‘Really, sir, it’s madness… Sir, we beg of you…’
But all he did was repeat his gesture, as though to indicate that the sudden appearance of a group of uniforms on the open road would certainly attract the attention of the batteries on the other side of the river. And he advanced all alone amid the bullets and shells, unhurriedly, with his usual gloomy, indifferent bearing, going to meet his destiny. Perhaps he could hear behind him that implacable voice hounding him on, the voice screaming from Paris: ‘March on! March on! Die like a hero on the piled-up corpses of your people, fill the whole world with admiration and awe so that your son may reign!’ So he went on, urging his horse at a gentle trot. For a hundred
metres he went on. Then he stopped and waited for the end he had come to find. Bullets whistled by like a hurricane, and a bursting shell had bespattered him with earth. Still he waited. His horse’s mane stood on end and its skin was twitching as it recoiled instinctively in the face of death which passed by at every moment but had no use for either man or beast. Then after this seemingly endless wait the Emperor, with his fatalistic resignation, understood that his hour was not yet, and slowly returned as though all he had wanted to do was reconnoitre the exact position of the German batteries.
‘Sir, what courage!… For pity’s sake don’t expose yourself any more…’
But with another gesture he invited his staff to follow him, without sparing them this time any more than he spared himself, and he rode up towards La Moncelle over the fields and the open ground of La Rapaille. One captain was killed and two horses were brought down. He passed in front of the regiments of the 12th corps, who watched him come and go like a ghost, with no salute, no acclaim.
Delaherche had witnessed all this. It made him shudder, especially when he reflected that as soon as he left the brickworks he also would be right in the path of the firing. He waited about and listened to some dismounted officers who had stayed there.
‘But I tell you he was killed instantly, a shell cut him in two!’
‘No he wasn’t. I saw him carried off… Just a straightforward wound, a splinter in the buttock…’
‘What time?’
‘About six-thirty, an hour ago… Up there near La Moncelle, in a sunken road…’
‘So he’s gone back to Sedan?’
‘Yes, of course, he’s in Sedan.’
Who were they talking about? Delaherche suddenly realized that it was Marshal MacMahon, wounded while inspecting the outposts. The marshal wounded! Just our luck, as the lieutenant of the marines had put it. He was thinking about the consequences of the accident when a dispatch-rider tore past, shouting to a friend he recognized:
‘General Ducrot is commander-in-chief! The whole army is to be concentrated at Illy to withdraw towards Mézières.’
He was already galloping away into Bazeilles under renewed fire, and Delaherche, appalled by all these extraordinary bits of news, one after another, and in danger of finding himself caught in the retreating army, made up his mind and ran all the way to Balan, whence he regained Sedan at last without too much trouble.
In Bazeilles the dispatch-rider went on galloping, looking for officers to give orders to. And the news galloped too – Marshal MacMahon wounded, General Ducrot appointed commander-in-Chief, the whole army falling back on Illy.
‘What? What are they saying?’ asked Weiss, his face blackened with powder. ‘Retreat to Mézières now! But it’s madness, they’ll never get through!’
He was full of despair and remorse at having advised this course the day before, and to General Ducrot of all people, who was now in supreme command. Of course it was all right the day before, and there was then no other line to take: retreat, immediate retreat through the Saint-Albert gap. But by now that route must be cut, the whole black swarm of Prussians had gone that way into the plain of Donchery. And, to weigh one act of folly against another, there was now only one left, and that was a desperate and courageous one, to throw the Bavarians back into the Meuse and pass over them and go back along the Carignan road.
Weiss, pushing up his glasses every second, explained the position to the lieutenant who was still propped against the door, with both legs gone, white and bleeding to death.
‘Sir, I assure you I am right… Tell your men to hold on… You can see we’re winning. One more effort and we’ll chuck them into the Meuse!’
And indeed the second Bavarian attack had been repulsed. Once again the machine guns had raked the church square, and piles of corpses blocked the roadway in the bright sunlight, and from all the little alleys the enemy was being thrust back with the bayonet into the fields in headlong flight riverwards, which would certainly have become a rout if fresh troops had reinforced the exhausted and thinned ranks of the marines. Moreover, in the Montvillers park the fusillade was not making very much progress, which showed that on that side also a few reinforcements would have cleared the wood of the enemy.
‘Tell your men that, sir… with bayonets, with bayonets!’
White as wax, and in an expiring voice the lieutenant still found the strength to murmur:
‘You hear, boys, with the bayonet!’
That was his last breath, and he expired, head up and steadfast, eyes open, still watching the battle. Already the flies were hovering and settling on the smashed face of Françoise, and the child Auguste from his bed in a feverish delirium, kept calling and asking for a drink in a low, imploring voice.
‘Mummy, wake up, get up… I’m thirsty, I’m ever so thirsty.’
But the command was clear, officers had to order a retreat, however upset they were at not being able to take advantage of the success they had had. Obviously General Ducrot, haunted by fear of being encircled by the enemy, was sacrificing everything to the crazy attempt to get out of their clutches. The church square was evacuated, the troops fell back from alley to alley and soon the street was empty. Women were heard crying and wailing, men were swearing and brandishing their fists in anger at seeing themselves abandoned in this way. Many shut themselves in their houses, resolved to defend themselves and die.
‘Well I’m not clearing out!’ shouted Weiss, beside himself with rage. ‘No, I’d rather leave my dead body here. Just let them come and break up my furniture and drink my wine!’
Nothing else now existed but his rage, the inextinguishable fury of the conflict when he thought that the foreigner might enter his home, sit on his chair, drink out of his glass. It made his whole being turn over, took away his ordinary existence, his wife, his business and his reasonable, middle-class prudence. He shut and barricaded himself in his house, and there he roamed round and round like a caged beast, going from room to room making sure that all openings were blocked. He counted his ammunition, he had about forty rounds left. Then, as he was going to have a last look towards the Meuse to make sure that there was no attack to fear from the meadows, his eye was caught once again by the range of hills on the left bank. Puffs of smoke clearly indicated the positions of the Prussian batteries. Once again he saw, dominating the formidable batteries of Frénois, at the angle of the little wood on La Marfée, the group of uniforms, this time more of them and looking so brilliant in the bright sunshine that by putting his folding glasses over his spectacles he could see the gold of epaulettes and helmets.
‘Filthy buggers! Filthy buggers!’ he repeated, shaking his fist.
Up there on La Marfée it was King William and his general staff. He had come there at seven from La Vendresse, where he had slept the night, and he was up there, away from all danger, with the valley of the Meuse, the battlefield, stretching out before him on all sides. The immense relief map went from one end of the sky to the other, and he, standing on the hill, looked on as though from a throne reserved for him in this gigantic box at a gala performance.
In the middle, against the dark background of the forest of the Ardennes, draped across the horizon like a curtain of antique verdure, Sedan stood out with the geometrical lines of its fortifications, lapped by the flooded meadows and river on the south and west. In Bazeilles houses were already on fire and the village was half obscured with the dust of battle. Then eastwards, from La Moncelle to Givonne, all that could be seen was a few regiments of the 12th corps and the 1st, crawling like lines of insects across the stubble and sometimes disappearing in the narrow valley where the hamlets were hidden; and on the opposite side the other rising ground could be seen, light-coloured fields with the green patch of the Chevalier wood. But what could be most clearly seen was the 7th corps, to the north, filling with its moving black dots the plateau of Floing, a broad band of reddish earth stretching from the little Garenne wood down to the grassland by the river. Beyond that there was still
Floing, Saint-Menges, Fleigneux, Illy, villages huddled away in the ups and downs of the land in a rugged piece of country broken up by escarpments. To the left also was the loop of the Meuse, with its slow waters, pale silver in the bright sun, enclosing the peninsula of Iges in its vast meandering detour, cutting off all routes to Mézières and only leaving between its further bank and the impassable forests the one outlet of the Saint-Albert gap.
The hundred thousand men and five hundred cannon of the French army were there packed together and hounded into this triangle. And when the King of Prussia turned westwards he saw another plain, that of Donchery, empty fields extending to Brian-court, Marancourt and Vrigne-aux-Bois, a waste of grey earth, powdery-looking under the blue sky, and when he turned to the east there was yet again, opposite the huddled French lines, an immense vista, a crowd of villages, Douzy and Carignan first, then as you go up, Rubécourt, Pouru-aux-Bois, Francheval, Villers-Cernay, right on to La Chapelle, near the frontier. In all directions the land belonged to him, he could move at will the two hundred and fifty thousand men and the eight hundred guns of his armies, he could take in with one sweeping look their invading march. Already on one side the XIth corps was advancing on Saint-Menges, while the Vth corps was at Vrigne-aux-Bois and the Wurttemberg division was waiting near Donchery; on the other side, even though trees and hills were in the way, he could guess what moves were being made, for he had just seen the XIIth corps penetrating the Chevalier wood and knew that the Guards must have reached Villers-Cernay. These were the jaws of the vice, the Crown Prince of Prussia’s army on the left and that of the Crown Prince of Saxony on the right, and they were opening and irresistibly closing round while the two Bavarian corps were hammering away at Bazeilles.