The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 | Page 3

rabble, the men unshaven and dirty, their uniforms
in tatters, slouching along without regimental colors, without
order--worn out, broken down, incapable of thought or resolution,
marching from pure habit and dropping with fatigue the moment they
stopped. The majority belonged to the militia, men of peaceful pursuits,
retired tradespeople, sinking under the weight of their accouterments;
quick-witted little moblets as prone to terror as they were to enthusiasm,
as ready to attack as they were to fly; and here and there a few red
trousers, remnants of a company mowed down in one of the big battles;
somber-coated artillerymen, side by side with these various uniforms of
the infantry, and now and then the glittering helmet of a heavily booted
dragoon who followed with difficulty the march of the lighter-footed
soldiers of the line.

Companies of franc-tireurs, heroically named "Avengers of the
Defeat," "Citizens of the Tomb," "Companies in Death," passed in their
turn, looking like a horde of bandits.
Their chiefs--formerly drapers or corn-dealers, retired soap-boilers or
suet-refiners, warriors of circumstance created officers for their money
or the length of their moustaches, heaped with arms, flannels, and gold
lace--talked loudly, discussed plans of campaign, and gave you to
understand that they were the sole support of France in her death-agony;
but they were generally in terror of their own soldiers, men "of the sack
and cord," most of them brave to foolhardiness, all of them given to
pillage and debauchery.
Report said that the Prussians were about to enter Rouen. The National
Guard, which for two months past had made the most careful
reconnoiterings in the neighboring wood, even to the extent of
occasionally shooting their own sentries and putting themselves in
battle array if a rabbit stirred in the brushwood, had now retired to their
domestic hearths; their arms, their uniforms, all the murderous
apparatus with which they had been wont to strike terror to the hearts of
all beholders for three leagues round, had vanished.
Finally, the last of the French soldiery crossed the Seine on their way to
Pont-Audemer by Saint Sever and Bourg-Achard; and then, last of all,
came their despairing general tramping on foot between two orderlies,
powerless to attempt any action with these disjointed fragments of his
forces, himself utterly dazed and bewildered by the downfall of a
people accustomed to victory and now so disastrously beaten in spite of
its traditional bravery.
After that a profound calm, the silence of terrified suspense, fell over
the city. Many a rotund bourgeois, emasculated by a purely commercial
life, awaited the arrival of the victors with anxiety, trembling lest their
meat-skewers and kitchen carving-knives should come under the
category of arms.
Life seemed to have come to a standstill, the shops were closed, the
streets silent. From time to time an inhabitant, intimidated by their

silence, would flit rapidly along the pavement, keeping close to the
walls.
In this anguish of suspense, men longed for the coming of the enemy.
In the latter part of the day following the departure of the French troops,
some Uhlans, appearing from goodness knows where, traversed the city
hastily. A little later, a black mass descended from the direction of
Sainte-Catherine, while two more invading torrents poured in from the
roads from Darnetal and Bois-guillaume. The advance guards of the
three corps converged at the same moment into the square of the Hotel
de Ville, while battalion after battalion of the German army wound in
through the adjacent streets, making the pavement ring under their
heavy rhythmic tramp.
Orders shouted in strange and guttural tones were echoed back by the
apparently dead and deserted houses, while from behind the closed
shutters eyes peered furtively at the conquerors, masters by right of
might, of the city and the lives and fortunes of its inhabitants. The
people in their darkened dwellings fell a prey to the helpless
bewilderment which comes over men before the floods, the devastating
upheavals of the earth, against which all wisdom and all force are
unavailing. The same phenomenon occurs each time that the
established order of things is overthrown, when public security is at an
end, and when all that the laws of man or of nature protect is at the
mercy of some blind elemental force. The earthquake burying an entire
population under its falling houses; the flood that carries away the
drowned body of the peasant with the carcasses of his cattle and the
beams torn from his roof-tree; or the victorious army massacring those
who defend their lives, and making prisoners of the rest--pillaging in
the name of the sword, and thanking God to the roar of cannon--are so
many appalling scourges which overthrow all faith in eternal justice, all
the confidence we are taught to place in the protection of Providence
and the reason