The Gods Want Blood by Anatole France

Author:Anatole France
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2017-05-25T10:51:28+00:00

13

Évariste Gamelin was sitting on the Tribunal for the second time. While waiting for the proceedings to begin, he chatted with his fellow jurors about the news that had come in that morning. Some of it was unclear or false, but the general picture was appalling. The coalition armies had joined forces and were holding every road, the Breton rebels had gained ground, there was an uprising in Lyon, Toulon had surrendered to the English, who were landing fourteen thousand troops.

For these officials, domestic affairs were as important as these world-shaking events; were their country to be destroyed, they would certainly be destroyed too, and since the external fate of the country was so indissolubly linked with their own, public safety became their own special concern, dominating their every feeling, their passions and their actions.

On his seat on the bench, Gamelin found a letter from Trubert, the secretary of the section defence committee, notifying him that he’d been appointed commissioner for gunpowder and saltpetre:

You are to excavate every cellar in the section to extract every substance that is required to produce gunpowder. The enemy may be at the gates of Paris; the soil of our fatherland must supply us with the gunpowder which is needed to launch missiles against its aggressors. Instructions issued by the Convention on the methods of treating saltpetre are enclosed herewith. Fraternal greetings.

At that moment, the accused was brought in: he was one of the last and most obscure of the defeated generals handed over by the Convention for trial by the Tribunal. Gamelin shuddered when he saw him; he felt that he was seeing the same man whom he’d seen tried and condemned to be guillotined three weeks earlier. It was the same sort of man: pig-headed and obtuse. And the same trial was re-enacted. His crafty, boorish manner made even his most sensible answers unconvincing. His quibbling, his equivocations and his accusations against his subordinates made it difficult to remember that he was quite laudably defending his honour and his life. Nothing was certain or incontrovertible: the position of the armies, the number of troops, the supplies of munitions, the orders issued, the orders received, the troop movements. Nobody knew anything or could understand anything about these confused, pointless operations which had ended so disastrously, not anybody, neither the accuser, the defendant, the judges nor the jury. And strangely enough, nobody would admit, to himself or to anybody else, that he didn’t understand. The judges were happily drawing up plans, holding forth on strategy and tactics, while the accused general was indulging in his natural propensity for pettifogging.

The discussion was dragging on and on, and meanwhile Gamelin could see in his mind’s eye ammunition wagons stuck in the mud on the rough roads of northern France, guns overturning in the ruts and columns of defeated troops retreating in a disorderly rout, while from every side enemy cavalry suddenly charged out from the abandoned gullies. And from that army which had been betrayed there rose a deafening roar of angry voices accusing the general.

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