The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack: 20 Classic Novels and Short Stories (182 page)

George was pale with excitement, his voice shook. Grédel, at the top of the stairs, was hastily twisting her hair into a knot.

“Look, Christian,” said my cousin, pulling a paper out of his pocket; “the armies of Bourbaki and Garibaldi are surrendered by this armistice. Manteuffel has come down from Paris with 80,000 men to occupy the passes of the Jura in their rear: the unfortunate men are caught as in a vice, between him and Werder; and all who have escaped from the hands of the Prussians and taken service again, like our poor Mobiles of Phalsbourg, will be shot!”

While cousin was speaking, Grédel had come downstairs, without even putting on her slippers; she was leaning against him, as pale as death, trying to read over his shoulder; when suddenly she tore the paper from his hands. George wished he had said nothing; but it was too late!

Grédel, after having read with clinched teeth, ran off like a mad woman, uttering fearful screams: “Oh! the wretches!… Oh! my poor Jean Baptiste!… Oh! the thieves!… Oh! my poor Jean Baptiste!”

She seemed to be seeking something to fight with. And as we stood confounded at her outcries, I said: “Grédel, for Heaven’s sake don’t scandalize us in this way. The people will hear you from the other end of the village!” She answered in a fury: “Hold your tongue! You are the cause of it all!”

“I!” said I, indignantly.

“Yes, you!” she shrieked, with a terrible flashing in her eyes: “you, with your Plébiscite; deceiving everybody by promising them peace! You deserve to be along with Bazaine and the rest of them.”

And my wife cried: “That girl will be the death of us.”

She had sat down upon the stairs. Marie Anne, with her hands clasped, said: “Do forgive her; her mind is going.”

Never had I felt so humbled; to be treated thus by my own daughter! But Grédel respected nothing now; and Cousin George, trying to get in a word, she exclaimed: “You! you! an old soldier! Are you not ashamed of staying here, instead of going to fight? The Landwehr are as old as you, with their gray hairs and their spectacles; they don’t make speeches; they all march. And that’s why we are beaten!”

At last I became furious; and I was looking for my cowhide behind the door, to bring her to her senses, when, unfortunately, a Landwehr came in to ask if the flour was ready. The moment Grédel caught sight of him, she uttered such a savage shriek that my ears still tingle with it, and in a second she had laid hold of her hatchet; George had scarcely time to seize her by her twisted back hair, when the hatchet had flown from her hand, whizzing through the air, and was quivering three inches deep in the door-post.

The Landwehr, an elderly man, with great eyes and a red nose, had seen the steel flash past close to his ear; he had heard it whiz, and as Grédel was struggling with George, crying: “Oh, the villain; I have missed him!” he turned, and ran off at the top of his speed. I ran to the mill-dam, supposing he was going to the mayor’s, but no, he ran a great deal farther than that, and never stopped till he reached Wéchem.

Then Grédel became aware that she had made a mistake; she went up into her room, put on her shoes, took her basket, went into the kitchen for a knife and a loaf, and then she left the house; running down the other side of the hill to gain the Krapenfelz, where our cow was with several others, under the charge of the old rag-dealer.

“This is a very bad business,” said George, fixing his eyes upon me; “that Landwehr will denounce you: this evening the Prussian gendarmes will be here. I’m sure I don’t know, my poor Christian, where you got that girl from; amongst those who have gone before us, there must have been some very different from your poor mother, and grandmother Catherine.”

“What would you have,” said Marie Anne; “she is fond of her Jean Baptiste.” And I thought: “If he but had her now; it is not I would refuse them permission to marry now; no, not I. I only wish they were married already!”

I was thinking how I might settle this dangerous business. George said we must overtake the Landwehr, and slip three or four cent-sous pieces in his hand, to induce him to hold his tongue: the Prussians are softened with money. But where could he be found now? How was he to be overtaken? I had no longer my two beautiful nags. So I resolved to leave it all to Providence.

To my great surprise, the Landwehr never returned. That same day two other Germans, with Lieutenant Hartig, came to take an invoice of the flour, without mentioning that affair: one would have thought that nothing had occurred. The next day, and the day after that, we were still in painful expectation; but that man gave no sign of appearing. No doubt he must have been a marauder; one of those base fellows who enter houses without orders, to receive requisitions of every kind, to sell again in the neighboring villages; such things had been done more than once since the arrival of the Germans. This is the conclusion I came to by and by; but at that time the fear of seeing that fellow returning with the gendarmes, left me no peace; every minute my wife, standing at the door, would say: “Christian, run! Here are the Prussian gendarmes coming!”

For a cow, or a Jew astride upon a donkey at the end of the road, she would throw one into fits.

Grédel remained a week in the woods in the Krapenfelz. Every day the woodman brought her news of what was going on in the village. At last she came back, laughing; she went up into her room to change her clothes, and resumed her work without any allusion to the past. We did not want to start the subject of Jean Baptiste again; but she herself, seeing us dispirited, at last said to us: “Pooh! it’s all right now. There; look at that!”

It was a letter from Jean Baptiste Werner, which she had received among the rocks on the Krapenfelz. In that letter, which I read with much astonishment, Werner related that he had at first wished to join Garibaldi at Dijon; but that for want of money he had been obliged to stop at Besançon, where the volunteers of the Vosges and of Alsace were being organized; that upon the arrival of Bourbaki, he had enlisted as a gunner in the 20th corps. Two days after there were engagements at Esprels and Villersexel, where more than four thousand Prussians had remained on the field. The cold was extraordinary. The Prussians, repulsed by our columns, had retired from village to village, on the other side of the Lisaine, between Montbéliard and Mont Vaudois. There Werner, behind a deep ravine, had mounted batteries of twenty-four-pounders, well protected, on three stages, one over another; his army and his reinforcements were concentrated and securely intrenched. In spite of this, Bourbaki, wanting to relieve Belfort and descend into Alsace, had given orders for a general assault, and all that country, for three days, resembled a sea of smoke and flame under the tremendous fire of the hostile armies. Unhappily, the passage could not be forced; and the exhaustion of munitions, the fatigue, the sharp sufferings of cold and hunger—for there were no stores of clothing and provisions in our rear—all these causes had compelled us to retire, but in the hope of renewing the assault; when all at once the news spread that another German army was standing in our line of retreat, near Dôle: a considerable army, from Paris. They had hurried to get clear as far as possible by gaining Pontarlier; but these fresh troops had a great advantage over us. Werder, also, was following us up; and we were going to be surrounded on all sides around Besançon. Jean Baptiste went on to say that then Bourbaki had attempted his own life, and was seriously wounded; that General Clinchamp had then assumed the command-in-chief; but that all these disasters would not have hindered us from arriving at Lyons, across the Jura, if the Maires of the villages had not published the armistice, causing the army to neglect to secure a line of retreat; that a great number had even lain down their arms and withdrawn into the villages; that the Prussians had kept advancing, and that only in the evening, when they had occupied all the passes, General Manteuffel declared that the armistice did not extend to operations in the east, and that our army must lay down their arms, as those of Sedan and Metz had done! But the soldiers of the Republic refused to surrender, and they had made a passage through the ice, the snow, and thousands of Prussian corpses, to Switzerland.

Jean Baptiste Werner related, in this long letter, full particulars of all that he had suffered; the attacks delivered by the corps of General Billot, who was charged to protect the retreat, upon the rocks, at the foot of precipices, in all the deep passes where the enemy lay in wait to cut off our retreat; how many of our poor fellows had perished of cold and hunger! And then the admirable reception given to our unhappy soldiers by the noble Swiss, who had received them not as strangers, but as brothers: every town, village, and house, was opened to them with kindness. It is manifest that the Swiss are a great people; for greatness is not to be measured by the extent of a country, and the number of the inhabitants, as the Germans suppose; but by the humanity of the people, the elevation of their character, their respect for unsuccessful courage, their love of justice and of liberty.

How much help have the Swiss sent us in succor, in money, in clothing, in food, in seed corn, for our poor fellow-countrymen ruined by the war! It came to Saverne, to Phalsbourg, to Petite Pierre—everywhere. Ah, we perceived then that heaven and earth had not altogether deserted us; we saw that there were yet brave hearts, true republicans; that all men were not born for fire, pillage, and slaughter; that there are men in the world besides hypocrites—true Christians, inspired by Him who said to men: “love one another; ye are brethren.” He would not have invented petroleum bombshells, or declared that brute-force dominated over right, like those barbarians from the other side of the Rhine.

That letter of Jean Baptiste Werner’s pleased me; it was clear that he was a brave man and a good patriot. But in the meanwhile, the policy of Bismarck and Jules Favre went on its way. The order of the day was, “elect deputies to sit in the assembly at Bordeaux,” which was to decide for peace, or the continuance of the war: the twenty-one days’ armistice had no other object, it was said.

So those who did not care to become Prussians took up arms, George and I the first; myself with the greatest zeal, for every day I reproached myself with that abominable Plébiscite as a crime. And now began the old story again: no Legitimists, no Bonapartists, no Orleanists could be found; all cried: “We are Republicans. Vote for us!”

But in every part of the country through which the Prussians had gone, the Plébiscite was remembered; the people were beginning to understand that this unworthy farce was our ruin, and that men should be judged by their actions, not their words.

At Strasbourg, at Nancy, all who desired to remain French nominated two lists of old republicans, who immediately started for Bordeaux. Gambetta was elected by us and by La Meurthe; he was also elected in many other departments, with Thiers, Garibaldi, Faidherbe, Chanzy, etc.

These elections once more revived our hopes. We supposed that everything had taken place in the West and the South as with us.

Gambetta, who never lost his sound judgment in critical moments, had declared that all the old official deputies of Bonaparte, all the senators, councillors of State, and prefects of the Empire, were disqualified for election. George commended him. “When a spendthrift devours all his living in debauchery, he is put under restraint; much more, therefore,” he urged, “ought men to be restrained who have devoured the wealth of the nation and put our two finest provinces in jeopardy. All these men ought forever to be held incapable of exercising political functions.”

But Bismarck, who relied chiefly on the old Imperial functionaries, by way of testifying his gratitude to the
honest man
for all he had done for Prussia—for his noble behavior at Sedan, and his gift of Metz to his Majesty, William—protested against this manifesto by Gambetta: he declared that the elections would not then be free, and that liberty was so dear to his heart, that he had rather break the armistice than in any way cramp the freedom of the elections.

George, on hearing this, broke out into a rage. “What,” he cried, “this Bismarck, who has warned the Prussian deputies to be careful of their expressions in speaking of the nobleness and the majesty of King William, ‘because laws exist in Prussia against servants who presume to insult their masters’—this very Bismarck comes here to defend liberty, and support the accomplices of Bonaparte! Oh! these defenders of liberty!”

Unhappily, all this was useless; the Prussians were already in the forts of Paris, and the menaces of Bismarck had more weight in France than the words of Gambetta. Therefore, once more we had to yield to his Majesty, William, and many of our deputies are indebted to him for their admission into the Chambers of Bordeaux.

These defenders of the Republic immediately showed that they were not ungrateful to Bismarck; for they hissed Garibaldi, who had come from Italy, old, sick, and infirm, with his two sons, to fight the enemies of France, and uphold justice, when all Europe held aloof!

Garibaldi was not even allowed to reply: these representatives of the people hissed him down! He calmly withdrew!

The Sunday following—I am ashamed to say it—our curé Daniel, and many other curés in our neighborhood, preached that Garibaldi was a
canaille
. I am not condemning them; I am simply stating a fact. They had received orders from their bishops, and they obeyed; for the poor country priest is at his bishop’s mercy, and under his orders, like a whip in a driver’s hand; if he disobeys, he is turned out! I know that many would rather have been silent than said such things, and I pity them!