The Downfall. Emile Zola

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СКАЧАТЬ a drunkenness that vented itself in obscene songs, varied by shrieks and yells. The heavy train rolled slowly onward; pipes were alight and men could no longer see one another through the dense clouds of smoke; the heat and odor that emanated from that mass of perspiring human flesh were unendurable, while from the jolting, dingy van came volleys of shouts and laughter that drowned the monotonous rattle of the wheels and were lost amid the silence of the deserted fields. And it was not until they reached Langres that the troops learned that they were being carried back to Paris.

      “Ah, nom de Dieu!” exclaimed Chouteau, who already, by virtue of his oratorical ability, was the acknowledged sovereign of his corner, “they will station us at Charentonneau, sure, to keep old Bismarck out of the Tuileries.”

      The others laughed loud and long, considering the joke a very good one, though no one could say why. The most trivial incidents of the journey, however, served to elicit a storm of yells, cat-calls, and laughter: a group of peasants standing beside the roadway, or the anxious faces of the people who hung about the way-stations in the hope of picking up some bits of news from the passing trains, epitomizing on a small scale the breathless, shuddering alarm that pervaded all France in the presence of invasion. And so it happened that as the train thundered by, a fleeting vision of pandemonium, all that the good burghers obtained in the way of intelligence was the salutations of that cargo of food for powder as it hurried onward to its destination, fast as steam could carry it. At a station where they stopped, however, three well-dressed ladies, wealthy bourgeoises of the town, who distributed cups of bouillon among the men, were received with great respect. Some of the soldiers shed tears, and kissed their hands as they thanked them.

      But as soon as they were under way again the filthy songs and the wild shouts began afresh, and so it went on until, a little while after leaving Chaumont, they met another train that was conveying some batteries of artillery to Metz. The locomotives slowed down and the soldiers in the two trains fraternized with a frightful uproar. The artillerymen were also apparently very drunk; they stood up in their seats, and thrusting hands and arms out of the car-windows, gave this cry with a vehemence that silenced every other sound:

      “To the slaughter! to the slaughter! to the slaughter!”

      It was as if a cold wind, a blast from the charnel-house, had swept through the car. Amid the sudden silence that descended on them Loubet’s irreverent voice was heard, shouting:

      “Not very cheerful companions, those fellows!”

      “But they are right,” rejoined Chouteau, as if addressing some pot-house assemblage; “it is a beastly thing to send a lot of brave boys to have their brains blown out for a dirty little quarrel about which they don’t know the first word.”

      And much more in the same strain. He was the type of the Belleville agitator, a lazy, dissipated mechanic, perverting his fellow workmen, constantly spouting the ill-digested odds and ends of political harangues that he had heard, belching forth in the same breath the loftiest sentiments and the most asinine revolutionary clap-trap. He knew it all, and tried to inoculate his comrades with his ideas, especially Lapoulle, of whom he had promised to make a lad of spirit.

      “Don’t you see, old man, it’s all perfectly simple. If Badinguet and Bismarck have a quarrel, let ‘em go to work with their fists and fight it out and not involve in their row some hundreds of thousands of men who don’t even know one another by sight and have not the slightest desire to fight.”

      The whole car laughed and applauded, and Lapoulle, who did not know who Badinguet[*] was, and could not have told whether it was a king or an emperor in whose cause he was fighting, repeated like the gigantic baby that he was:

      [*] Napoleon III.

      “Of course, let ‘em fight it out, and take a drink together afterward.”

      But Chouteau had turned to Pache, whom he now proceeded to take in hand.

      “You are in the same boat, you, who pretend to believe in the good God. He has forbidden men to fight, your good God has. Why, then, are you here, you great simpleton?”

      “Dame!” Pache doubtfully replied, “it is not for any pleasure of mine that I am here – but the gendarmes – ”

      “Oh, indeed, the gendarmes! let the gendarmes go milk the ducks! – say, do you know what we would do, all of us, if we had the least bit of spirit? I’ll tell you; just the minute that they land us from the cars we’d skip; yes, we’d go straight home, and leave that pig of a Badinguet and his gang of two-for-a-penny generals to settle accounts with their beastly Prussians as best they may!”

      There was a storm of bravos; the leaven of perversion was doing its work and it was Chouteau’s hour of triumph, airing his muddled theories and ringing the changes on the Republic, the Rights of Man, the rottenness of the Empire, which must be destroyed, and the treason of their commanders, who, as it had been proved, had sold themselves to the enemy at the rate of a million a piece. He was a revolutionist, he boldly declared; the others could not even say that they were republicans, did not know what their opinions were, in fact, except Loubet, the concocter of stews and hashes, and he had an opinion, for he had been for soup, first, last, and always; but they all, carried away by his eloquence, shouted none the less lustily against the Emperor, their officers, the whole d – d shop, which they would leave the first chance they got, see if they wouldn’t! And Chouteau, while fanning the flame of their discontent, kept an eye on Maurice, the fine gentleman, who appeared interested and whom he was proud to have for a companion; so that, by way of inflaming his passions also, it occurred to him to make an attack on Jean, who had thus far been tranquilly watching the proceedings out of his half-closed eyes, unmoved among the general uproar. If there was any remnant of resentment in the bosom of the volunteer since the time when the corporal had inflicted such a bitter humiliation on him by forcing him to resume his abandoned musket, now was a fine chance to set the two men by the ears.

      “I know some folks who talk of shooting us,” Chouteau continued, with an ugly look at Jean; “dirty, miserable skunks, who treat us worse than beasts, and, when a man’s back is broken with the weight of his knapsack and Brownbess, aie! aie! object to his planting them in the fields to see if a new crop will grow from them. What do you suppose they would say, comrades, hein! now that we are masters, if we should pitch them all out upon the track, and teach them better manners? That’s the way to do, hein! We’ll show ‘em that we won’t be bothered any longer with their mangy wars. Down with Badinguet’s bed-bugs! Death to the curs who want to make us fight!”

      Jean’s face was aflame with the crimson tide that never failed to rush to his cheeks in his infrequent fits of anger. He rose, wedged in though as he was between his neighbors as firmly as in a vise, and his blazing eyes and doubled fists had such a look of business about them that the other quailed.

      “Tonnerre de Dieu! will you be silent, pig! For hours I have sat here without saying anything, because we have no longer any leaders, and I could not even send you to the guard-house. Yes, there’s no doubt of it, it would be a good thing to shoot such men as you and rid the regiment of the vermin. But see here, as there’s no longer any discipline, I will attend to your case myself. There’s no corporal here now, but a hard-fisted fellow who is tired of listening to your jaw, and he’ll see if he can’t make you keep your potato-trap shut. Ah! you d – d coward! You won’t fight yourself and you want to keep others from fighting! Repeat your words once and I’ll knock your head off!”

      By this time the whole car, won over by Jean’s manly attitude, had deserted Chouteau, who cowered back in his seat as if not anxious to face his opponent’s big fists.

      “And I care no more for Badinguet than I do for you, do you understand? I despise politics, whether they are republican or imperial, and СКАЧАТЬ