The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack: 20 Classic Novels and Short Stories (111 page)

I took on in this way for about half an hour, thinking of all the calamities which threatened us, when I heard outside the city, toward Quatre-Vents, a kind of heavy rolling, rising and falling like the murmur of running water. This was repeated every second. I raised myself on my elbow to listen, and I knew that it was a fight far more terrible than that at Mittelbronn, for the rolling did not stop, but seemed rather to increase.

“How they are fighting, Sorlé, how they are fighting!” I exclaimed, as I pictured to myself the fury of those men murdering each other at the dead of night, not knowing what they were doing. “Listen! Sorlé, listen! If that does not make one shudder!”

“Yes,” said she. “I hope our sergeant will not be wounded; I hope he will come back safe!”

“May the Lord watch over him!” I replied, jumping from my bed, and lighting a candle.

I could not control myself. I dressed myself as quickly as if I were going to run away; and afterward I listened to that terrible rolling, which came nearer or died away with every gust of wind.

When once dressed, I opened a window, to try to see something. The street was still black; but toward the ramparts, above the dark line of the arsenal bastions, was stretched a line of red.

The smoke of powder is red on account of the musket shots which light it up. It looked like a great fire. All the windows in the street were open: nothing could be seen, but I heard our neighbor the armorer say to his wife, “It is growing warm down there! It is the beginning of the dance, Annette; but they have not got the big drum yet; that will come, by and by!”

The woman did not answer, and I thought, “Is it possible to jest about such things! It is against nature.”

The cold was so severe that after five or six minutes I shut the window. Sorlé got up and made a fire in the stove.

The whole city was in commotion; men were shouting and dogs barking. Sâfel, who had been wakened by all these noises, went to dress himself in the warm room. I looked very tenderly on this poor little one, his eyes still heavy with sleep; and as I thought that we were to be fired upon, that we must hide ourselves in cellars, and all of us be in danger of being killed for matters which did not concern us, and about which nobody had asked our opinion, I was full of indignation. But what distressed me most was to hear Zeffen sob and say that it would have been better for her and her children to stay with Baruch at Saverne and all die together.

Then the words of the prophet came to me: “Is not this thy fear, thy confidence, thy hope, and the uprightness of thy ways?

“Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished being innocent, or where were the righteous cut off.

“No, they that plough iniquity and sow wickedness, reap the same.

“By the blast of God they perish, and by the breath of his nostrils are they consumed.

“But thee, his servant, he shall redeem from death.

“Thou shalt come to thy grave in a full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in his season.”

In this way I strengthened my heart, while I heard the great tumult of the panic-stricken crowd, running and trying to save their property.

About seven o’clock it was announced that the casemates were open, and that everybody might take their mattresses there, and that there must be tubs full of water in every house, and the wells left open in case of fire.

Think, Fritz, what ideas these orders suggested.

Some of our neighbors, Lisbeth Dubourg, Bével Ruppert, Camus’s daughters, and some others, came up to us exclaiming, “We are all lost!”

Their husbands had gone out, right and left, to see what they could see, and these women hung on Zeffen and Sorlé’s necks, repeating again and again, “Oh, dear! oh, dear! what misery!”

I could have wished them all to the devil, for instead of comforting us they only increased our fears; but at such times women will get together and cry out all at once; you can’t talk reason to them; they like these loud cryings and groanings.

Just as the clock struck eight, Bailly the armorer came to find his wife: he had come from the ramparts. “The Russians,” he said, “have come down in a mass from Quatre-Vents to the very gate, filling the whole plain—Cossacks, Baskirs, and rabble! Why don’t they fire down upon them from the ramparts? The governor is betraying us.”

“Where are our soldiers?” I asked.

“Retreating!” exclaimed he. “The wounded came back two hours ago, and our men stay yonder, with folded arms.”

His bony face shook with rage. He led away his wife; then others came crying out, “The enemy has advanced to the lower part of the gardens, upon the glacis.” I was astonished at these things.

The women had gone away to cry somewhere else, and just then a great noise of wheels was heard from the direction of the rampart. I looked out of the window, and saw a wagon from the arsenal, some citizen gunners; old Goulden, Holender, Jacob Cloutier, and Barrier galloped at its sides; Captain Jovis ran in front. They stopped at our door.

“Call the iron-merchant!” cried the captain. “Tell him to come down.”

Baker Chanoine, the brigadier of the second battery, came up. I opened the door.

“What do you want of me?” I asked in the stairway.

“Come down, Moses,” said Chanoine. And I went down.

Captain Jovis, a tall old man, with his face covered with sweat, in spite of the cold, said to me, “You are Moses, the iron-merchant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Open your storehouse. Your iron is required for the defence of the city.”

So I had to lead all these people into my court, under the shed. The captain on looking round, saw some cast-iron bars, which were used at that time for closing up the backs of fireplaces. They weighed from thirty to forty pounds each, and I sold a good many in the vicinity of the city. There was no lack of old nails, rusty bolts, and old iron of all sorts.

“This is what we want,” said he. “Break up these bars, and take away the old iron, quick!”

The others, with the help of our two axes, began at once to break up everything. Some of them filled a basket with the pieces of cast-iron, and ran with it to the wagon.

The captain looked at his watch, and said, “Make haste! We have just ten minutes!”

I thought to myself, “They have no need of credit; they take what they please; it is more convenient.”

All my bars and old iron were broken in pieces—more than fifteen hundred pounds of iron.

As they were starting to run to the ramparts, Chanoine laughed, and said to me, “Capital grape-shot, Moses! Thou canst get ready thy pennies. We’ll come and take them to-morrow.”

The wagon started through the crowd which ran behind it, and I followed too.

As we came nearer the ramparts the firing became more and more frequent. As we turned from the curate’s house two sentinels stopped everybody, but they let me pass on account of my iron, which they were going to fire.

You can never imagine that mass of people, the noise around the bastion, the smoke which covered it, the orders of the infantry officers whom we heard going up the glacis, the gunners, the lighted match, caissons with the piles of bullets behind! No, in all these thirty years I have not forgotten those men with their levers, running back the cannon to load them to their mouths; those firings in file, at the bottom of the ramparts; those volleys of balls hissing in the air; the orders of the gun-captains, “Load! Ram! Prime!”

What crowds upon those gun-carriages, seven feet high, where the gunners were obliged to stand and stretch their arms to fire the cannon! And what a frightful smoke!

Men invent such machines to destroy each other, and they would think that they did a great deal if they sacrificed a quarter as much to assist their fellow-men, to instruct them in infancy, and to give them a little bread in their old age.

Ah! those who make an outcry against war, and demand a different state of things, are not in the wrong.

I was in the corner, at the left of the bastion, where the stairs go down to the postern behind the college, among three or four willow baskets as high as chimneys, and filled with clay. I ought to have stayed there quietly, and made use of the right moment to get away, but the thought seized me that I would go and see what was going on below the ramparts, and while they were loading the cannon, I climbed to the level of the glacis, and lay down flat between two enormous baskets, where there was scarcely a chance that balls could reach me.

If hundreds of others who were killed in the bastions had done as I did, how many of them might be still living, respectable fathers of families in their villages!

Lying in this place, and raising my nose, I could see over the whole plain. I saw the cordon of the rampart below, and the line of our skirmishers behind the palankas, on the other side of the moat; they did nothing but tear off their cartridges, prime, charge, and fire. There one could appreciate the beauty of drilling; there were only two companies of them, and their firing by file kept up an incessant roll.

Farther on, directly to the right, stretched the road to Quatre-Vents. The Ozillo farm, the cemetery, the horse-post-station, and George Mouton’s farm at the right; the inn of La Roulette and the great poplar-walk at the left, all were full of Cossacks, and such-like rascals, who were galloping into the very gardens, to reconnoitre the environs of the place. This is what I suppose, for it is against nature to run without an object, and to risk being struck by a ball.

These people, mounted on small horses, with large gray cloaks, soft boots, fox-skin caps, like those of the Baden peasants, long beards, lances in rest, great pistols in their belts, came whirling on like birds.

They had not been fired upon as yet, because they kept themselves scattered, so that bullets would have no effect; but their trumpets sounded the rally from La Roulette, and they began to collect behind the buildings of the inn.

About thirty of our veterans, who had been kept back in the cemetery lane, were making a slow retreat; they made a few paces, at the same time hastily reloading, then turned, shouldered, fired, and began marching again among the hedges and bushes, which there had not been time to cut down in this locality.

Our sergeant was one of these; I recognized him at once, and trembled for him.

Every time these veterans gave fire, five or six Cossacks came on like the wind, with their lances lowered; but it did not frighten them: they leaned against a tree and levelled their bayonets. Other veterans came up, and then some loaded, while others parried the blows. Scarcely had they torn open their cartridges when the Cossacks fled right and left, their lances in the air. Some of them turned for a moment and fired their large pistols behind like regular bandits. At length our men began to march toward the city.

Those old soldiers, with their great shakos set square on their heads, their large capes hanging to the back of their calves, their sabres and cartridge-boxes on their backs, calm in the midst of these savages, reloading, trimming, and parrying as quietly as if they were smoking their pipes in the guard-house, were something to be admired. At last, after seeing them come out of the whirlwind two or three times, it seemed almost an easy thing to do.

Our sergeant commanded them. I understood then why he was such a favorite with the officers, and why they always took his part against the citizens: there were not many such. I wanted to call out, “Make haste, sergeant; let us make haste!” but neither he nor his men hurried in the least.

As they reached the foot of the glacis, suddenly a large mass of Cossacks, seeing that they were escaping, galloped up in two files, to cut off their retreat. It was a dangerous moment, and they formed in a square instantly.

I felt my back turn cold, as if I had been one of them.

Our sharpshooters behind the ammunition wagons did not fire, doubtless for fear of hitting their comrades; our gunners on the bastion leaned down to see, and the file of Cossacks stretched to the corner near the drawbridge.

There were seven or eight hundred of them. We heard them cry, “Hurra! hurra! hurra!” like crows. Several officers in green cloaks and small caps galloped at the sides of their lines, with raised sabres. I thought our poor sergeant and his thirty men were lost; I thought already, “How sorry little Sâfel and Sorlé will be!”

But then, as the Cossacks formed in a half-circle at the left of the outworks, I heard our gun-captain call out, “Fire!”

I turned my head; old Goulden struck the match, the fusee glittered, and at the same instant the bastion with its great baskets of clay shook to the very rocks of the rampart.

I looked toward the road; nothing was to be seen but men and horses on the ground.

Just then came a second shot, and I can truly say that I saw the grape-shot pass like the stroke of a scythe into that mass of cavalry; it all tumbled and fell; those who a second before were living beings were now nothing. We saw some try to raise themselves, the rest made their escape.

The firing by file began again, and our gunners, without waiting for the smoke to clear away, reloaded so quickly that the two discharges seemed to come at once.

This mass of old nails, bolts, broken bits of cast-iron, flying three hundred metres, almost to the little bridge, made such slaughter that, some days after, the Russians asked for an armistice in order to bury their dead.