The Debacle by Émile Zola

Author:Émile Zola
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141961040
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-12-08T10:00:00+00:00

6

UP on the flat roof where he had gone to take in the situation, Delaherche once again became impatient to know. Of course he could see that the shells were passing over the town and that the three or four which had damaged the roofs of neighbouring houses must be just casual replies to such slow and inefficient fire from the Palatinate fort. But he could not make out anything about the battle itself, and there was inside him an urgent need for information, sharpened by fear of losing his fortune and his life in the catastrophe. So he went down, leaving his telescope trained in the direction where the German batteries were.

But when he got downstairs he was held for a moment by the state of the central garden of the factory. It was nearly one, and the casualty station was crammed with wounded. The line of vehicles coming through the gateway was endless. Already the regulation two-wheel or four-wheel carts were insufficient, and now artillery ammunition waggons were appearing, forage or supply vans, anything that could be commandeered on the battlefield, and now indeed there were even traps and farm carts taken from farms and hitched to stray horses. Into them had been piled wounded picked up by the first-aid men and given emergency dressings. It was a horrible unloading of poor wretches, some with the greenish pallor of death on them, others purple with congestion, many unconscious, others screaming, some so stupefied that they gave themselves to the orderlies with terrified eyes while others died of shock as soon as they were touched. The crowd was so dense that all the mattresses in the huge low shed were on the point of being used up, and Major Bouroche ordered the straw to be used, a large supply of which he had had put at one end. But so far he and his assistants could cope with the operations. All he had asked for was another table, with a mattress and American cloth over it, in the operating shed. An orderly quickly thrust a towel soaked in chloroform under the patient’s nose. Little steel scissors gleamed, saws made a tiny file-like sound, blood squirted out in sudden jets, to be stopped at once. Patients for operation were brought up and carried away in a rapid shuttle-service, with just time for the American cloth to be wiped with a sponge. At the further end of the lawn, behind a clump of laburnums, into the charnel-house they had had to make there to get the dead out of the way, they also threw amputated legs and arms and all the bits of flesh and bone left on the tables.

Madame Delaherche and Gilberte were sitting under one of the big trees and could not manage to roll enough bandages. Bouroche, rushing by red-faced and with his apron already red, threw a bundle of linen to Delaherche and shouted:

‘Look here, why don’t you do something and make yourself useful!’

But the mill-owner protested:

‘Excuse me, I must go again and find out what the news is.

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