The Downfall | Page 5

wood, his face resembling an underdone
beefsteak, the warrior was now propelling dense clouds of smoke
horizontally along the surface of the plain.
"Thunder and ouns! Quit that, will you!" yelled Jean, "and come and
answer to your name."
Lapoulle rose to his feet with a dazed look on his face, then appeared to
grasp the situation and yelled: "Present!" in such stentorian tones that
Loubet, pretending to be upset by the concussion, sank to the ground in
a sitting posture. Pache had finished mending his trousers and answered
in a voice that was barely audible, that sounded more like the
mumbling of a prayer. Chouteau, not even troubling himself to rise,
grunted his answer unconcernedly and turned over on his side.
Lieutenant Rochas, the officer of the guard, was meantime standing a
few steps away, motionlessly awaiting the conclusion of the ceremony.
When Sergeant Sapin had finished calling the roll and came up to
report that all were present, the officer, with a glance at Weiss, who
was still conversing with Maurice, growled from under his mustache:
"Yes, and one over. What is that civilian doing here?"
"He has the colonel's pass, Lieutenant," explained Jean, who had heard
the question.
Rochas made no reply; he shrugged his shoulders disapprovingly and
resumed his round among the company streets while waiting for taps to
sound. Jean, stiff and sore after his day's march, went and sat down a
little way from Maurice, whose murmured words fell indistinctly upon
his unlistening ear, for he, too, had vague, half formed reflections of his

own that were stirring sluggishly in the recesses of his muddy, torpid
mind.
Maurice was a believer in war in the abstract; he considered it one of
the necessary evils, essential to the very existence of nations. This was
nothing more than the logical sequence of his course in embracing
those theories of evolution which in those days exercised such a potent
influence on our young men of intelligence and education. Is not life
itself an unending battle? Does not all nature owe its being to a series
of relentless conflicts, the survival of the fittest, the maintenance and
renewal of force by unceasing activity; is not death a necessary
condition to young and vigorous life? And he remembered the
sensation of gladness that had filled his heart when first the thought
occurred to him that he might expiate his errors by enlisting and
defending his country on the frontier. It might be that France of the
plebiscite, while giving itself over to the Emperor, had not desired war;
he himself, only a week previously, had declared it to be a culpable and
idiotic measure. There were long discussions concerning the right of a
German prince to occupy the throne of Spain; as the question gradually
became more and more intricate and muddled it seemed as if everyone
must be wrong, no one right; so that it was impossible to tell from
which side the provocation came, and the only part of the entire
business that was clear to the eyes of all was the inevitable, the fatal
law which at a given moment hurls nation against nation. Then Paris
was convulsed from center to circumference; he remembered that
burning summer's night, the tossing, struggling human tide that filled
the boulevards, the bands of men brandishing torches before the Hotel
de Ville, and yelling: "On to Berlin! on to Berlin!" and he seemed to
hear the strains of the Marseillaise, sung by a beautiful, stately woman
with the face of a queen, wrapped in the folds of a flag, from her
elevation on the box of a coach. Was it all a lie, was it true that the
heart of Paris had not beaten then? And then, as was always the case
with him, that condition of nervous excitation had been succeeded by
long hours of doubt and disgust; there were all the small annoyances of
the soldier's life; his arrival at the barracks, his examination by the
adjutant, the fitting of his uniform by the gruff sergeant, the
malodorous bedroom with its fetid air and filthy floor, the horseplay
and coarse language of his new comrades, the merciless drill that

stiffened his limbs and benumbed his brain. In a week's time, however,
he had conquered his first squeamishness, and from that time forth was
comparatively contented with his lot; and when the regiment was at last
ordered forward to Belfort the fever of enthusiasm had again taken
possession of him.
For the first few days after they took the field Maurice was convinced
that their success was absolutely certain. The Emperor's plan appeared
to him perfectly clear: he would advance four hundred thousand men to
the left bank of the Rhine, pass the river before the Prussians had
completed their preparations,