The Attack on the Mill, and Other Sketches of War

by Émile Zola

I saw Julien very often. He did not boast to me of having foreseen the defeat. He only seemed to think what had happened was natural and in the order of things. Many Parisians shrugged their shoulders when they heard talk of a siege of Paris. Could there be a siege of Paris? And others would demonstrate mathematically that Paris could not be invested. Julien, by a sort of foreknowledge, which struck me later, declared that we should be surrounded on September 15th. He was still the schoolboy to whom physical exercises were strangely repulsive. All this war, upsetting all his customary ways, put him beside himself. Why, in the name of God, did people want to fight? And he would lift up his hands with a gesture of supreme protestation. Yet he read the telegrams greedily.

“If Louis were not out there,” he would repeat, “I might make verses while we are waiting for the end of the commotion.”

At long intervals letters came to him from Louis. The news was terrible, the army was getting discouraged. On the day when we heard of the battle of Borny I met Julien at the corner of the Rue Drouot. Paris had a gleam of hope that day. There was talk of a success. He, on the other hand, seemed to me gloomier than usual. He had read, somewhere, that his brother’s regiment had done heroically, and that its losses had been severe.

Three days later a common friend came to tell me the terrible news. A letter had brought word to Julien the night before of his brother’s death. He had been killed at Borny by the bursting of a shell. I immediately hurried to go to the poor fellow, but I found no one at his lodging. The next morning, while I was still in bed, a young man came in dressed as a franc-tireur. It was Julien. At first I hardly knew him. Then I folded him in my arms and embraced him heartily, while my eyes were full of tears. He did not weep. He sat down for a moment and made a sign to stop my condolences.

“There,” said he, quietly, “I wanted to say ‘good-bye’ to you. Now that I am alone I could not endure to do nothing.... So as I found that a company of franc-tireurs was going, I joined yesterday. That will give me something to do.”

“When do you leave Paris?” I asked him.

“Why, in a couple of hours. Good-bye.”

He embraced me in his turn. I did not dare to ask him any more questions. He went, and the thought of him was always with me.

After the catastrophe of Sedan, some days before the surrounding of Paris, I had news of him. One of his comrades came to tell me that this young fellow, so pale and slender, fought like a wolf. He kept up a savage warfare against the Prussians, watching them from behind a hedge, using a knife rather than his gun. Whole nights long he would be on the hunt, watching for men as for his prey, and cutting the throat of anyone who came within his reach. I was stupefied. I could not think that this was Julien; I asked myself whether it was possible that the nervous poet could have become a butcher.

Then Paris was isolated from the rest of the world, and the siege began with all its fits of sleepiness and of fever. I could not go out without remembering Aix on a winter evening. The streets were dark and empty, the houses were shut up early. There were, indeed, distant sounds of cannon and of shots, but the sounds seemed to get lost in the dull silence of the vast town. Some days, breaths of hope would come over, and then the whole population would awake, forgetful of the long standing at the baker’s door, the rations, the cold chimneys, the shells showering upon some districts of the left side of the river. Then the crowd would be struck dumb by some disaster, and the silence began again—the silence of a capital in the death agony. Yet, in the course of this long siege, I saw little glimpses of quiet happiness; people who had a little to live on, who kept up their daily “constitutional” in the pale wintry sunshine, lovers smiling at each other in some out of the way nook and never hearing the cannonade. We lived from day to day. All our illusions had fallen; we counted on some miracle, help from the provincial armies, or a sortie of the whole populace, or some prodigious intervention to arise in its due time.