The Downfall

[*] August. – TR.

As Henriette pursued her reading Jean momentarily interrupted her to say:

“Ah, well! and to think that we fellows, after leaving Rheims, were looking for Bazaine! They were always telling us he was coming; now I can see why he never came!”

The marshal’s despatch, dated the 19th, after the battle of Saint-Privat, in which he spoke of resuming his retrograde movement by way of Montmedy, that despatch which had for its effect the advance of the army of Chalons, would seem to have been nothing more than the report of a defeated general, desirous to present matters under their most favorable aspect, and it was not until a considerably later period, the 29th, when the tidings of the approach of this relieving army had reached him through the Prussian lines, that he attempted a final effort, on the right bank this time, at Noiseville, but in such a feeble, half-hearted way that on the 1st of September, the day when the army of Chalons was annihilated at Sedan, the army of Metz fell back to advance no more, and became as if dead to France. The marshal, whose conduct up to that time may fairly be characterized as that of a leader of only moderate ability, neglecting his opportunities and failing to move when the roads were open to him, after that blockaded by forces greatly superior to his own, was now about to be seduced by alluring visions of political greatness and become a conspirator and a traitor.

But in the papers that Doctor Dalichamp brought them Bazaine was still the great man and the gallant soldier, to whom France looked for her salvation.

And Jean wanted certain passages read to him again, in order that he might more clearly understand how it was that while the third German army, under the Crown Prince of Prussia, had been leading them such a dance, and the first and second were besieging Metz, the latter were so strong in men and guns that it had been possible to form from them a fourth army, which, under the Crown Prince of Saxony, had done so much to decide the fortune of the day at Sedan. Then, having obtained the information he desired, resting on that bed of suffering to which his wound condemned him, he forced himself to hope in spite of all.

“That’s how it is, you see; we were not so strong as they! No one can ever get at the rights of such matters while the fighting is going on. Never mind, though; you have read the figures as the newspapers give them: Bazaine has a hundred and fifty thousand men with him, he has three hundred thousand small arms and more than five hundred pieces of artillery; take my word for it, he is not going to let himself be caught in such a scrape as we were. The fellows all say he is a tough man to deal with; depend on it he’s fixing up a nasty dose for the enemy, and he’ll make ‘em swallow it.”

Henriette nodded her head and appeared to agree with him, in order to keep him in a cheerful frame of mind. She could not follow those complicated operations of the armies, but had a presentiment of coming, inevitable evil. Her voice was fresh and clear; she could have gone on reading thus for hours; only too glad to have it in her power to relieve the tedium of his long day, though at times, when she came to some narrative of slaughter, her eyes would fill with tears that made the words upon the printed page a blur. She was doubtless thinking of her husband’s fate, how he had been shot down at the foot of the wall and his body desecrated by the touch of the Bavarian officer’s boot.

“If it gives you such pain,” Jean said in surprise, “you need not read the battles; skip them.”

But, gentle and self-sacrificing as ever, she recovered herself immediately.

“No, no; don’t mind my weakness; I assure you it is a pleasure to me.”

One evening early in October, when the wind was blowing a small hurricane outside, she came in from the ambulance and entered the room with an excited air, saying:

“A letter from Maurice! the doctor just gave it me.”

With each succeeding morning the twain had been becoming more and more alarmed that the young man sent them no word, and now that for a whole week it had been rumored everywhere that the investment of Paris was complete, they were more disturbed in mind than ever, despairing of receiving tidings, asking themselves what could have happened him after he left Rouen. And now the reason of the long silence was made clear to them: the letter that he had addressed from Paris to Doctor Dalichamp on the 18th, the very day that ended railway communication with Havre, had gone astray and had only reached them at last by a miracle, after a long and circuitous journey.

“Ah, the dear boy!” said Jean, radiant with delight. “Read it to me, quick!”

The wind was howling and shrieking more dismally than ever, the window of the apartment strained and rattled as if someone were trying to force an entrance. Henriette went and got the little lamp, and placing it on the table beside the bed applied herself to the reading of the missive, so close to Jean that their faces almost touched. There was a sensation of warmth and comfort in the peaceful room amid the roaring of the storm that raged without.

It was a long letter of eight closely filled pages, in which Maurice first told how, soon after his arrival on the 16th, he had had the good fortune to get into a line regiment that was being recruited up to its full strength. Then, reverting to facts of history, he described in brief but vigorous terms the principal events of that month of terror: how Paris, recovering her sanity in a measure after the madness into which the disasters of Wissembourg and Froeschwiller had driven her, had comforted herself with hopes of future victories, had cheered herself with fresh illusions, such as lying stories of the army’s successes, the appointment of Bazaine to the chief command, the levee en masse, bogus dispatches, which the ministers themselves read from the tribune, telling of hecatombs of slaughtered Prussians. And then he went on to tell how, on the 3d of September, the thunderbolt had a second time burst over the unhappy capital: all hope gone, the misinformed, abused, confiding city dazed by that crushing blow of destiny, the cries: “Down with the Empire!” that resounded at night upon the boulevards, the brief and gloomy session of the Chamber at which Jules Favre read the draft of the bill that conceded the popular demand. Then on the next day, the ever-memorable 4th of September, was the upheaval of all things, the second Empire swept from existence in atonement for its mistakes and crimes, the entire population of the capital in the streets, a torrent of humanity a half a million strong filling the Place de la Concorde and streaming onward in the bright sunshine of that beautiful Sabbath day to the great gates of the Corps Legislatif, feebly guarded by a handful of troops, who up-ended their muskets in the air in token of sympathy with the populace – smashing in the doors, swarming into the assembly chambers, whence Jules Favre, Gambetta and other deputies of the Left were even then on the point of departing to proclaim the Republic at the Hotel de Ville; while on the Place Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois a little wicket of the Louvre opened timidly and gave exit to the Empress-regent, attired in black garments and accompanied by a single female friend, both the women trembling with affright and striving to conceal themselves in the depths of the public cab, which went jolting with its scared inmates from the Tuileries, through whose apartments the mob was at that moment streaming. On the same day Napoleon III. left the inn at Bouillon, where he had passed his first night of exile, bending his way toward Wilhelmshohe.

Here Jean, a thoughtful expression on his face, interrupted Henriette.

“Then we have a republic now? So much the better, if it is going to help us whip the Prussians!”

But he shook his head; he had always been taught to look distrustfully on republics when he was a peasant. And then, too, it did not seem to him a good thing that they should be of differing minds when the enemy was fronting them. After all, though, it was manifest there had to be a change of some kind, since everyone knew the Empire was rotten to the core and the people would have no more of it.

Henriette finished the letter, which concluded with a mention of the approach of the German armies. On the 13th, the day when a committee of the Government of National Defense had established its quarters at Tours, their advanced guards had been seen at Lagny, to the east of Paris. On the 14th and 15th they were at the very gates of the city, at Creteil and Joinville-le-Pont. On the 18th, however, the day when Maurice wrote, he seemed to have ceased to believe in the possibility of maintaining a strict blockade of Paris; he appeared to be under the influence of one of his hot fits of blind confidence, characterising the siege as a senseless and impudent enterprise that would come to an ignominious end before they were three weeks older, relying on the armies that the provinces would surely send to their relief, to say nothing of the army of Metz, that was already advancing by way of Verdun and Rheims. And the links of the iron chain that their enemies had forged for them had been riveted together; it encompassed Paris, and now Paris was a city shut off from all the world, whence no letter, no word of tidings longer came, the huge prison-house of two millions of living beings, who were to their neighbors as if they were not.

Henriette was oppressed by a sense of melancholy. “Ah, merciful heaven!” she murmured, “how long will all this last, and shall we ever see him more!”

A more furious blast bent the sturdy trees out-doors and made the timbers of the old farmhouse creak and groan. Think of the sufferings the poor fellows would have to endure should the winter be severe, fighting in the snow, without bread, without fire!

“Bah!” rejoined Jean, “that’s a very nice letter of his, and it’s a comfort to have heard from him. We must not despair.”

Thus, day by day, the month of October ran its course, with gray melancholy skies, and if ever the wind went down for a short space it was only to bring the clouds back in darker, heavier masses. Jean’s wound was healing very slowly; the outflow from the drain was not the “laudable pus” which would have permitted the doctor to remove the appliance, and the patient was in a very enfeebled state, refusing, however, to be operated on in his dread of being left a cripple. An atmosphere of expectant resignation, disturbed at times by transient misgivings for which there was no apparent cause, pervaded the slumberous little chamber, to which the tidings from abroad came in vague, indeterminate shape, like the distorted visions of an evil dream. The hateful war, with its butcheries and disasters, was still raging out there in the world, in some quarter unknown to them, without their ever being able to learn the real course of events, without their being conscious of aught save the wails and groans that seemed to fill the air from their mangled, bleeding country. And the dead leaves rustled in the paths as the wind swept them before it beneath the gloomy sky, and over the naked fields brooded a funereal silence, broken only by the cawing of the crows, presage of a bitter winter.

A principal subject of conversation between them at this time was the hospital, which Henriette never left except to come and cheer Jean with her company. When she came in at evening he would question her, making the acquaintance of each of her charges, desirous to know who would die and who recover; while she, whose heart and soul were in her occupation, never wearied, but related the occurrences of the day in their minutest details.

“Ah,” she would always say, “the poor boys, the poor boys!”

It was not the ambulance of the battlefield, where the blood from the wounded came in a fresh, bright stream, where the flesh the surgeon’s knife cut into was firm and healthy; it was the decay and rottenness of the hospital, where the odor of fever and gangrene hung in the air, damp with the exhalations of the lingering convalescents and those who were dying by inches. Doctor Dalichamp had had the greatest difficulty in procuring the necessary beds, sheets and pillows, and every day he had to accomplish miracles to keep his patients alive, to obtain for them bread, meat and desiccated vegetables, to say nothing of bandages, compresses and other appliances. As the Prussian officers in charge of the military hospital in Sedan had refused him everything, even chloroform, he was accustomed to send to Belgium for what he required. And yet he had made no discrimination between French and Germans; he was even then caring for a dozen Bavarian soldiers who had been brought in there from Bazeilles. Those bitter adversaries who but a short time before had been trying to cut each other’s throat now lay side by side, their passions calmed by suffering. And what abodes of distress and misery they were, those two long rooms in the old schoolhouse of Remilly, where, in the crude light that streamed through the tall windows, some thirty beds in each were arranged on either side of a narrow passage.

As late even as ten days after the battle wounded men had been discovered in obscure corners, where they had been overlooked, and brought in for treatment. There were four who had crawled into a vacant house at Balan and remained there, without attendance, kept from starving in some way, no one could tell how, probably by the charity of some kind-hearted neighbor, and their wounds were alive with maggots; they were as dead men, their system poisoned by the corruption that exuded from their wounds. There was a purulency, that nothing could check or overcome, that hovered over the rows of beds and emptied them. As soon as the door was passed one’s nostrils were assailed by the odor of mortifying flesh. From drains inserted in festering sores fetid matter trickled, drop by drop. Oftentimes it became necessary to reopen old wounds in order to extract a fragment of bone that had been overlooked. Then abscesses would form, to break out after an interval in some remote portion of the body. Their strength all gone, reduced to skeletons, with ashen, clayey faces, the miserable wretches suffered the torments of the damned. Some, so weakened they could scarcely draw their breath, lay all day long upon their back, with tight shut, darkened eyes, like corpses in which decomposition had already set in; while others, denied the boon of sleep, tossing in restless wakefulness, drenched with the cold sweat that streamed from every pore, raved like lunatics, as if their suffering had made them mad. And whether they were calm or violent, it mattered not; when the contagion of the fever reached them, then was the end at hand, the poison doing its work, flying from bed to bed, sweeping them all away in one mass of corruption.

But worst of all was the condemned cell, the room to which were assigned those who were attacked by dysentery, typhus or small-pox. There were many cases of black small-pox. The patients writhed and shrieked in unceasing delirium, or sat erect in bed with the look of specters. Others had pneumonia and were wasting beneath the stress of their frightful cough. There were others again who maintained a continuous howling and were comforted only when their burning, throbbing wound was sprayed with cold water. The great hour of the day, the one that was looked forward to with eager expectancy, was that of the doctor’s morning visit, when the beds were opened and aired and an opportunity was afforded their occupants to stretch their limbs, cramped by remaining long in one position. And it was the hour of dread and terror as well, for not a day passed that, as the doctor went his rounds, he was not pained to see on some poor devil’s skin the bluish spots that denoted the presence of gangrene. The operation would be appointed for the following day, when a few more inches of the leg or arm would be sliced away. Often the gangrene kept mounting higher and higher, and amputation had to be repeated until the entire limb was gone.

Every evening on her return Henriette answered Jean’s questions in the same tone of compassion:

“Ah, the poor boys, the poor boys!”

And her particulars never varied; they were the story of the daily recurring torments of that earthly hell. There had been an amputation at the shoulder-joint, a foot had been taken off, a humerus resected; but would gangrene or purulent contagion be clement and spare the patient? Or else they had been burying some one of their inmates, most frequently a Frenchman, now and then a German. Scarcely a day passed but a coarse coffin, hastily knocked together from four pine boards, left the hospital at the twilight hour, accompanied by a single one of the attendants, often by the young woman herself, that a fellow-creature might not be laid away in his grave like a dog. In the little cemetery at Remilly two trenches had been dug, and there they slumbered, side by side, French to the right, Germans to the left, their enmity forgotten in their narrow bed.

Jean, without ever having seen them, had come to feel an interest in certain among the patients. He would ask for tidings of them.

“And ‘Poor boy,’ how is he getting on to-day?”

This was a little soldier, a private in the 5th of the line, not yet twenty years old, who had doubtless enlisted as a volunteer. The by-name: “Poor boy” had been given him and had stuck because he always used the words in speaking of himself, and when one day he was asked the reason he replied that that was the name by which his mother had always called him. Poor boy he was, in truth, for he was dying of pleurisy brought on by a wound in his left side.

“Ah, poor fellow,” replied Henriette, who had conceived a special fondness for this one of her charges, “he is no better; he coughed all the afternoon. It pained my heart to hear him.”

“And your bear, Gutman, how about him?” pursued Jean, with a faint smile. “Is the doctor’s report more favorable?”

“Yes, he thinks he may be able to save his life. But the poor man suffers dreadfully.”

Although they both felt the deepest compassion for him, they never spoke of Gutman but a smile of gentle amusement came to their lips. Almost immediately upon entering on her duties at the hospital the young woman had been shocked to recognize in that Bavarian soldier the features: big blue eyes, red hair and beard and massive nose, of the man who had carried her away in his arms the day they shot her husband at Bazeilles. He recognized her as well, but could not speak; a musket ball, entering at the back of the neck, had carried away half his tongue. For two days she recoiled with horror, an involuntary shudder passed through her frame, each time she had to approach his bed, but presently her heart began to melt under the imploring, very gentle looks with which he followed her movements in the room. Was he not the blood-splashed monster, with eyes ablaze with furious rage, whose memory was ever present to her mind? It cost her an effort to recognize him now in that submissive, uncomplaining creature, who bore his terrible suffering with such cheerful resignation. The nature of his affliction, which is not of frequent occurrence, enlisted for him the sympathies of the entire hospital. It was not even certain that his name was Gutman; he was called so because the only sound he succeeded in articulating was a word of two syllables that resembled that more than it did anything else. As regarded all other particulars concerning him everyone was in the dark; it was generally believed, however, that he was married and had children. He seemed to understand a few words of French, for he would answer questions that were put to him with an emphatic motion of the head: “Married?” yes, yes! “Children?” yes, yes! The interest and excitement he displayed one day that he saw some flour induced them to believe he might have been a miller. And that was all. Where was the mill, whose wheel had ceased to turn? In what distant Bavarian village were the wife and children now weeping their lost husband and father? Was he to die, nameless, unknown, in that foreign country, and leave his dear ones forever ignorant of his fate?

“To-day,” Henriette told Jean one evening, “Gutman kissed his hand to me. I cannot give him a drink of water, or render him any other trifling service, but he manifests his gratitude by the most extravagant demonstrations. Don’t smile; it is too terrible to be buried thus alive before one’s time has come.”

Toward the end of October Jean’s condition began to improve. The doctor thought he might venture to remove the drain, although he still looked apprehensive whenever he examined the wound, which, nevertheless appeared to be healing as rapidly as could be expected. The convalescent was able to leave his bed, and spent hours at a time pacing his room or seated at the window, looking out on the cheerless, leaden sky. Then time began to hang heavy on his hands; he spoke of finding something to do, asked if he could not be of service on the farm. Among the secret cares that disturbed his mind was the question of money, for he did not suppose he could have lain there for six long weeks and not exhaust his little fortune of two hundred francs, and if Father Fouchard continued to afford him hospitality it must be that Henriette had been paying his board. The thought distressed him greatly; he did not know how to bring about an explanation with her, and it was with a feeling of deep satisfaction that he accepted the position of assistant at the farm, with the understanding that he was to help Silvine with the housework, while Prosper was to be continued in charge of the out-door labors.

Notwithstanding the hardness of the times Father Fouchard could well afford to take on another hand, for his affairs were prospering. While the whole country was in the throes of dissolution and bleeding at every limb, he had succeeded in so extending his butchering business that he was now slaughtering three and even four times as many animals as he had ever done before. It was said that since the 31st of August he had been carrying on a most lucrative business with the Prussians. He who on the 30th had stood at his door with his cocked gun in his hand and refused to sell a crust of bread to the starving soldiers of the 7th corps had on the following day, upon the first appearance of the enemy, opened up as dealer in all kinds of supplies, had disinterred from his cellar immense stocks of provisions, had brought back his flocks and herds from the fastnesses where he had concealed them; and since that day he had been one of the heaviest purveyors of meat to the German armies, exhibiting consummate address in bargaining with them and in getting his money promptly for his merchandise. Other dealers at times suffered great inconvenience from the insolent arbitrariness of the victors, whereas he never sold them a sack of flour, a cask of wine or a quarter of beef that he did not get his pay for it as soon as delivered in good hard cash. It made a good deal of talk in Remilly; people said it was scandalous on the part of a man whom the war had deprived of his only son, whose grave he never visited, but left to be cared for by Silvine; but nevertheless they all looked up to him with respect as a man who was making his fortune while others, even the shrewdest, were having a hard time of it to keep body and soul together. And he, with a sly leer out of his small red eyes, would shrug his shoulders and growl in his bull-headed way:

“Who talks of patriotism! I am more a patriot than any of them. Would you call it patriotism to fill those bloody Prussians’ mouths gratis? What they get from me they have to pay for. Folks will see how it is some of these days!”

On the second day of his employment Jean remained too long on foot, and the doctor’s secret fears proved not to be unfounded; the wound opened, the leg became greatly inflamed and swollen, he was compelled to take to his bed again. Dalichamp suspected that the mischief was due to a spicule of bone that the two consecutive days of violent exercise had served to liberate. He explored the wound and was so fortunate as to find the fragment, but there was a shock attending the operation, succeeded by a high fever, which exhausted all Jean’s strength. He had never in his life been reduced to a condition of such debility: his recovery promised to be a work of time, and faithful Henriette resumed her position as nurse and companion in the little chamber, where winter with icy breath now began to make its presence felt. It was early November, already the east wind had brought on its wings a smart flurry of snow, and between those four bare walls, on the uncarpeted floor where even the tall, gaunt old clothes-press seemed to shiver with discomfort, the cold was extreme. As there was no fireplace in the room they determined to set up a stove, of which the purring, droning murmur assisted to brighten their solitude a bit.