The Downfall | Page 4

that the captain of his company,
Beaudoin, was an acquaintance of Gilberte, Delaherche's young wife;
report even had it that she and the captain had been on terms of
intimacy in the days when she was Mme. Maginot, living at Meziere,
wife of M. Maginot, the timber inspector.
"Give Henriette a good kiss for me, Weiss," said the young man, who
loved his sister passionately. "Tell her that she shall have no reason to
complain of me, that I wish her to be proud of her brother."
Tears rose to his eyes at the remembrance of his misdeeds. The
brother-in-law, who was also deeply affected, ended the painful scene
by turning to Honore Fouchard, the artilleryman.
"The first time I am anywhere in the neighborhood," he said, "I will run
up to Remilly and tell Uncle Fouchard that I saw you and that you are
well."
Uncle Fouchard, a peasant, who owned a bit of land and plied the trade
of itinerant butcher, serving his customers from a cart, was a brother of
Henriette's and Maurice's mother. He lived at Remilly, in a house
perched upon a high hill, about four miles from Sedan.
"Good!" Honore calmly answered; "the father don't worry his head a
great deal on my account, but go there all the same if you feel
inclined."
At that moment there was a movement over in the direction of the
farmhouse, and they beheld the straggler, the man who had been
arrested as a spy, come forth, free, accompanied only by a single officer.
He had likely had papers to show, or had trumped up a story of some

kind, for they were simply expelling him from the camp. In the
darkening twilight, and at the distance they were, they could not make
him out distinctly, only a big, square-shouldered fellow with a rough
shock of reddish hair. And yet Maurice gave vent to an exclamation of
surprise.
"Honore! look there. If one wouldn't swear he was the Prussian--you
know, Goliah!"
The name made the artilleryman start as if he had been shot; he strained
his blazing eyes to follow the receding shape. Goliah Steinberg, the
journeyman butcher, the man who had set him and his father by the
ears, who had stolen from him his Silvine; the whole base, dirty,
miserable story, from which he had not yet ceased to suffer! He would
have run after, would have caught him by the throat and strangled him,
but the man had already crossed the line of stacked muskets, was
moving off and vanishing in the darkness.
"Oh!" he murmured, "Goliah! no, it can't be he. He is down yonder,
fighting on the other side. If I ever come across him--"
He shook his fist with an air of menace at the dusky horizon, at the
wide empurpled stretch of eastern sky that stood for Prussia in his eyes.
No one spoke; they heard the strains of retreat again, but very distant
now, away at the extreme end of the camp, blended and lost among the
hum of other indistinguishable sounds.
"_Fichtre_!" exclaimed Honore, "I shall have the pleasure of sleeping
on the soft side of a plank in the guard-house unless I make haste back
to roll-call. Good-night--adieu, everybody!"
And grasping Weiss by both his hands and giving them a hearty
squeeze, he strode swiftly away toward the slight elevation where the
guns of the reserves were parked, without again mentioning his father's
name or sending any word to Silvine, whose name lay at the end of his
tongue.
The minutes slipped away, and over toward the left, where the 2d
brigade lay, a bugle sounded. Another, near at hand, replied, and then a
third, in the remote distance, took up the strain. Presently there was a
universal blaring, far and near, throughout the camp, whereon Gaude,
the bugler of the company, took up his instrument. He was a tall, lank,
beardless, melancholy youth, chary of his words, saving his breath for
his calls, which he gave conscientiously, with the vigor of a young

hurricane.
Forthwith Sergeant Sapin, a ceremonious little man with large vague
eyes, stepped forward and began to call the roll. He rattled off the
names in a thin, piping voice, while the men, who had come up and
ranged themselves in front of him, responded in accents of varying
pitch, from the deep rumble of the violoncello to the shrill note of the
piccolo. But there came a hitch in the proceedings.
"Lapoulle!" shouted the sergeant, calling the name a second time with
increased emphasis.
There was no response, and Jean rushed off to the place where Private
Lapoulle, egged on by his comrades, was industriously trying to fan the
refractory fuel into a blaze; flat on his stomach before the pile of
blackening, spluttering