Anna (22 page)

And the spirit of the people, as the armies of France continued their spectacular, unbroken process of collapse, began to express itself more dangerously. As Frenchmen, they refused to believe that their own countrymen were such miserable soldiers. It was the generals, they said, who were to blame. There was tradition behind them in this attitude. Every nation in peril for its life is ready to blame the generals—they are a race of men without any roots in the public affection except in the moment of victory. And it was not long before the wave of hatred that had washed up the generals broke over the heads of the politicians who had appointed them. The defeats in the field were too close to the gateways of the capital for there to be any more fine feeling about national unity in time of war. That persistent song, the “Marseillaise,” continued to arouse memories that could not be quietened.

One more defeat, everyone agreed, and there would be a rathunt among the Ministers. Even the fact that the Emperor was in the field again with MacMahon was interpreted in some quarters as being because the field was safer at the moment for a sensitive man than the streets of Paris.

As for Bazaine, the public had deserted him entirely. He was no longer the martyr whom MacMahon had sacrificed: he was a traitor, in the pay of the Germans. If he weren't a traitor, it was asked, why didn't he emerge from his safe refuge in Metz and do something? After all, he still had nearly 160,000 men with him, and he could hardly sit there and expect MacMahon to come like a nursemaid to collect him. MacMahon had more important matters on his hands. The public saw that now. On the eve of Sedan, it was MacMahon to whom everyone again looked to save France; and it was MacMahon who knew in his heart that he was incapable of saving even himself.

It was the second day of the retreat; and in fleeing the French had left everything behind them. Across the landscape there stretched a chain of litter—litter on the scale that only war produces —wagons, guns, kitchens, forage, food.

“You are marching into oblivion,” a voice inside MacMahon kept telling him. “Your Emperor is not strong enough to save you now.”

But every soldier knows these voices; it is part of the soldier's training to ignore them. And MacMahon, lifting up his chin to show his staff how confident he was, proceeded to turn and twist in an effort to avoid the new and bigger conflict that was being forced upon him.

When, at last, he was brought to a standstill, he was outside the walls of Sedan. In front of him, and closing in on his flanks, a hostile army of twice his strength was gathering.

“It is here and now,” the voice told him. “You can go no farther.”

He fell asleep that night having seen the village of Bazeilles, one of the principal of his bastions, half in enemy hands already. In the morning he awoke to a dense fog, and stood on the heights above La Moncelle to watch the battle that was about to break.

Below him, in the obscurity of the valley, the cherry-coloured glow of fires showed where Bazeilles was lying. And amid the glow were sudden white points of flame, small furious crucibles where
the German shells were bursting. MacMahon tried not to think about the brigade of Marines who, far out of their element, were quartered there.

“I should be happier in my mind,” MacMahon reflected, “if the Emperor were not in Sedan. He is too big a prize to be so near.”

The ground in front of him spurted, and he was suddenly enclosed in an envelope of noise and turmoil.

“They're getting our range, sir,” the youngest of his staff-officers remarked. He was a little white at the lips as he said it.

“On the contrary,” MacMahon corrected him. “They do not even know that we are here.”

There was a pause, and another shell burst uncomfortably near, sending pebbles and small fragments of white-hot metal singing past them. The horse which MacMahon's orderly was holding reared violently and bolted.

“If I might suggest, sir,” the Colonel of Staff interposed, “you would find a little more shelter over there under the trees. It may be getting very hot round here in a few minutes.”

He spoke in the calm, frank voice of a man whose rank is sufficiently high for him to be able to admit a certain element of alarm without jeopardising his whole military career.

But MacMahon only shook his head again.

“We will remain where we are, gentlemen,” he replied, “this is not the moment for shelter.”

Below them, in the distance, they could hear the battle mounting at every moment, fresh German guns were being brought to bear. The reports echoing along the valley were like broadsides. MacMahon stood a trifle in front of the rest of the group, thinking only of his doomed army, spread out in a huge horseshoe below him.

At that instant a shell fired from one of the opposing howitzers came dropping out of the sky. Its screech warned them. Even MacMahon flinched. And the Colonel of Staff threw himself flat on the ground. There was the elemental uproar of a great explosion, and a hurricane loaded with portions of the shell-case swept over them.

MacMahon swirled round on his feet and collapsed with his back to the enemy and his face, deathly pale and clammy with sweat, turned towards Paris.

When they reached him, his Marshal's uniform was already stained and sodden: his right epaulette had been torn from him and his coat sleeve was rent open.

He remained conscious just long enough to see his two sub-ordinates,
General Ducrot and General de Wimpffen quarrelling like a pair of fishwives over the possession of his Marshal's baton and the command of the remnants of his army.

He was not fatally wounded, but by then he was past caring.

The man standing at the windows watching the clouds of smoke drift past him was still an Emperor. He was greater than any of them. He had been anointed. His mind could span heights that theirs had never attempted. And the genius of war was in him.

But the smoke for the moment was obscuring everything. And every second house in Sedan seemed to be on fire. The walls of the room creaked and the windows rattled as another shell burst near them. A cloud of sparks like fiery bees was swept past him on the smoke.

“I must remain calm,” he told himself. “Calm and dignified. It is at times like these that people naturally turn to their Emperor.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. And as he did so he saw a white English villa enclosed behind high yew hedges.

“How peaceful it would be over there,” he reflected. “And how safe. If only the Germans would grant me my passage through Belgium I could join Eugénie again. We could spend our old age there together. I think I should probably be happy.”

One of the Generals approached him, and the Emperor drew himself to attention.

“Is there no news of the counter-attack?” the Emperor asked irritably. “Isn't any one capable of succeeding MacMahon?”

The voice somehow did not seem to belong to his body. The voice was brave and commanding; he made it sound so. But the body, with its short legs and long bulging stomach, was like a shopkeeper's. His face, too, was puffy and unsoldierly, and he carried his head bent over to one side.

The general who he had addressed was not deceived.

“Your Majesty,” he said. “I come on the most difficult of missions. Your generals are petitioning you to sign a letter of surrender. In another twelve hours Sedan will be utterly destroyed.…”

His words were interrupted by the roar of an explosion. This time the shell had fallen uncomfortably close. The ceiling above
them sagged in the middle, and the heavy chandelier jangled wildly for a moment and then fell. The gobbets of glass scattered themselves on the floor at the Emperor's feet amid a litter of laths and plaster. Members of the Emperor's personal staff came rushing in to be the first to pick up their prostrate monarch.

The Emperor, however, had not fallen. He had retreated to the farther side of the room into a corner, and was standing there with his back against the wall. He was pleased that at this moment he should suddenly have an audience.

“Never,” he said in the loudest voice he could muster. “Never will I sue for peace with the Germans.”

But his eyes and the general's met as he said it. And again the general was not deceived.

When M. Duvivier heard of the fall of Sedan and the surrender of the Emperor, along with more than a hundred thousand Frenchmen, he wept. Alone in his empty restaurant—it was about nine-thirty in the morning when the news of the capitulation reached him—he sat down at one of the unlaid tables and buried his head in his large, red hands.

“I shall be ruined,” he told himself, “My patrons will be ruined. We shall all be ruined.”

It was thus that Anna found him as she came down from her room and passed through the restuarant on her way out to the street. He rose to his feet at once.

“Don't go out to-day, Mademoiselle,” he implored her. “There will be riotings. Demonstrations. Anything might happen.”

But Anna assured him that she would be safe, that nothing would happen to her. In any case, she said, she had important business on hand and could not stay there. She went out and left him there, lamenting among his vacant chairs and tables.

She had paid four visits to the State pawnbroker's already. It was now not merely the watch that the Baron had given her, but her brooch and her handbag and her velvet travelling cloak that were there as well. The money that the clerk advanced—and it was advanced grudgingly, as though his conscience were against him—was wretchedly small. The brooch paid one week's rent; the
handbag another; and the travelling cloak, that had cost two hundred marks and was edged with sable, less than a month's.

“And what,” she asked herself, “when these are gone? What if I have nothing left to sell, and I am still alive?”

At the corner of the street a small crowd was assembled. Anna crossed over and tried to avoid it. But it was quite harmless. It was merely a group of patriots declaring vehemently that, with the traitor Emperor gone, the Third Republic would rise up in all its glory and sweep the Germans out of France.

She turned down the alley of sluttish houses and took her place at the end of the queue that was already formed outside the moneylender's, even though it had only just opened. The queue was longer nowadays. In it a number of quite respectably-dressed citizens were standing.

And evidently the price of war was being paid piecemeal by these people. The man in front of her, an elderly, dignified creature, who might have been a lawyer or a doctor, was clasping two pairs of lady's lace-up boots. He had endeavoured to conceal them in a wrapping of newspaper that had slipped.

This time Anna's offering was the dressing-case that her father had given to her after her mother had died.

“Another dressing-case,” the clerk grumbled. “Thank God the shutters are going up to-morrow.”

But around Paris, on the outskirts of the city itself, it was more than shutters that were being erected. General Trochu's Provisional Government of National Defence had proclaimed “War to the Bitter End.” And it was for precisely this bitterness that Paris was now preparing. Earthworks were being frantically dug, and naval guns removed from the dockyards and rushed up to the forts in front of Paris. On the Seine itself floating batteries and gunboats suddenly appeared. Even railway trucks on the sidings were mounted with cannon.

The whole city was rapidly becoming a fortress on the most colossal scale, a fortress supported by an arc of satellite fortresses. To defend the two million inhabitants there were now two hundred thousand men under arms inside the gates. And to feed this garrison vast herds of cattle, droves of pigs and flocks of sheep were being poured into the capital. The Bois de Boulogne ceased to be a public park and became a farm. There were some 180,000 sheep within the walls seeking pasturage on any piece of grass that they could find.

Everything, in fact, that could be done, was being done. It was only that everyone had the unpleasant suspicion that it was all being done just a little too late. But these preparations which were visible at every street corner in the suburbs had one hugely salutary effect: they persuaded people that General Trochu meant precisely what he said. This remarkable man in fact really intended to fight. All hope of a shameful peace, which so many Parisians still secretly prized in their hearts without confessing it, now vanished.

And most Parisians had already been pressed into the National Guard. This was no longer a soldier's war at all. Out in the countryside it was not the armies of France, but the
franc-tireurs
, peasants without uniform, who were holding-up the German advance. These nondescript fighters appeared out of ditches, from behind trees, through gaps in the hedges—and fought for their country. Their presence disturbed the orderly mind of Count Bismarck more than any regular divisions could have done. It was the fact that they were not in uniform against which his Prussian spirit revolted.

“If they are not in uniform,” he argued, “they cannot be soldiers. And if they are not soldiers they are guilty of murder if they kill anyone.”

So, to keep the world civilised, he ordered that any
franc-tireur
who was apprehended should be shot. And because he was a thorough man, he added the stipulation that any house in which weapons were discovered should be set ablaze as an example.

Even so, all the way between Sedan and Paris, these same illogical peasants continued to appear out of ditches, from behind trees, through gaps in the hedges—and fight for their country.

Anna returned to the restaurant to find the place—though it was now almost lunch-time—still empty. M. Duvivier was standing at the door, his back turned upon the scene of desolation behind him His dark hair was a little ruffled and his face was as red as his hands. There was a strangely clumsy gallantry in his gesture as he bent forward to open the door to her.