The Downfall (La Débâcle): A Story of the Horrors of War

by Émile Zola

Maurice, however, was growing so weary, so exhausted by hunger, that Jean left him in a quarry hole, sitting on a rock in full view of the far-spreading horizon of Sedan. For his own part, after a wait of three-quarters of an hour he at last returned with a duster full of flour. They could devise no other plan than to eat it as it was by the handful. It wasn't nasty, in fact it had no smell and merely the insipid taste of dough. This breakfast, though a poor one, revived them somewhat. And they were even lucky enough to find on the rock a pool of rain water, fairly clean, with which they quenched their thirst.

However, on Jean proposing that they should stay and spend the afternoon there, Maurice made a violent gesture of refusal. 'No, no, not here! It would make me ill if I had that long before my eyes.' So saying, he pointed with his trembling hand to the immense horizon, the Hattoy hill, the plateaux of Floing and Illy, the wood of La Garenne, all those hateful fields of slaughter and defeat. 'Just now whilst I was waiting for you,' he added, 'I had to turn my back on it all, for I should have ended by howling with rage, yes, howling like an exasperated dog. You can't imagine the pain it gives me, it drives me mad!'

Jean gazed at him, astonished that his pride should bleed like that, anxious too on again espying in his eyes that wild, mad look which he had previously noticed in them. He thought it best to treat the matter lightly: 'Well, we can easily settle all that,' said he, 'we'll go to another part.'

Then they wandered about until evening, wheresoever the paths led them, visiting the low ground of the peninsula in the hope that they might still find some potatoes there. The artillerymen, however, had appropriated the ploughs and turned up the fields, reaping and gleaning and taking everything away. They thereupon retraced their steps, and again passed through idle, agonising flocks of captives, soldiers who were promenading their hunger, strewing the soil with their numbed bodies, falling from sheer exhaustion by hundreds in the broad sunlight. Not an hour went by but Jean and Maurice themselves were overcome and had to sit down. Then all at once exasperation set them on their feet again, and they once more began prowling round as though spurred on by the instinct of the animal that seeks its food. This agony seemed to have been lasting for months, yet the minutes were rapidly flying by. In the fields in the direction of Donchery, they were frightened by the wandering horses, and had to seek shelter behind a wall, where they remained for a long time in an exhausted state, gazing with dim eyes at those maddened animals tearing along against the red background of the sunset.

As Maurice had foreseen, the thousands of horses which had been led into captivity with the army, and could not be fed, proved a source of daily increasing danger. They had first eaten the bark of the trees, then they had attacked the trelliswork, the fences, all the planks they came upon, and now they were becoming cannibals. They could be seen throwing themselves upon one another and tearing off the hair of each other's tails, chewing it furiously with foaming jaws. But it was especially at night time that they became terrible, as though the darkness oppressed them with a nightmare. They gathered together in bands and rushed upon the few tents that had been pitched, attracted by the straw there. In vain had the men lighted large fires to keep them away; these fires only seemed to excite them the more. Their neighing was so dolorous, so frightful at times that it seemed like the roaring of wild beasts. Driven away, they returned yet more numerous and more ferocious. And at every moment there sped through the darkness the long cry of agony of some soldier gone astray whom they had knocked over and crushed in their wild gallop.

The sun was still above the horizon when Jean and Maurice, on their way back to the camping ground, were surprised to come upon the four men of their squad, crouching in a ditch as though plotting some evil stroke. Loubet at once called to them, and Chouteau proceeded to explain: 'It's about to-night's dinner,' said he. 'We shall all end by kicking the bucket, we haven't had anything to eat for six-and-thirty hours. But there are some horses, you know, and as horseflesh is by no means bad——'

'Eh, you'll join us, corporal, won't you?' broke in Loubet, 'for with such a big animal to handle, the more we are the better it will be. Look! there's one over yonder whom we've been watching for an hour or so—that big roan who seems ailing. It will be easier to finish him off.'

So saying, he pointed to a horse which had just fallen from hunger at the edge of a ravaged field of beets. Lying on its side, the animal from time to time raised its poor head, breathing loudly and mournfully, and gazing around with glassy eyes.

'Ah! what a time to wait!' growled Lapoulle, tortured by his voracious appetite: 'I'll go and settle him, shall I?'