M. ZOLA ON SEDAN.*

IT would probably be no exaggeration to say that, taken as a whole, La Debacle is the most wonderfully faithful reproduc- tion of an historical drama ever committed to writing. La Debacle is an appalling record of long-drawn-out misery, pro- fligacy, and military and official incapacity, unbroken by any ray of hope or sunshine. It is a literally true Inferno, through which the reader is conducted by a guide, who not only seems to revel himself in the horrors he describes in minutest detail, but who is not satisfied unless the agony is driven well home to the reader. Every one who is bold enough to attempt to traverse this lacerating jungle, must be pre- pared to have his flesh morally torn to ribbons, and to be called upon, in his own proper person, to bear his share in expiating the sins of France under the Second Empire. La Debacle is a fearfully black dose to take all at once, as it is now presented in the six hundred and thirty-six pages of the Charpentier edition, of which over sixty thousand copies have been sold already. Originally appearing in the weekly periodical 'La Vie Papulaire,' La Debacle was taken by the French public in comparatively small doses, in which form its pungent ingre- dients were gradually assimilated by the reader's system, without necessarily bringing on the moral collapse which ensues from swallowing the dose whole. But by every robust student of contemporary European history and literature swallowed the dose must be, at whatever cost, under penalty of being left altogether behind in the race.

In the spring of this year, when on a visit to Sedan, the present reviewer was informed that M. Zola had devoted less than a fortnight to his study of the locality. Viewed in that light, La Debacle becomes a greater marvel still. For after twenty-two years' acquaintance with the ground, and after perusing almost every work in French, German, or English, which has appeared on the subject, we have been unable to detect a single important error in M. Zola's topography or facts. As some comprehension of that same topography is all essential to following the narrative, we will begin by giving its main outlines, limiting ourselves to the battlefield of Sedan, which is complicated enough. In concentrating our • La pbacle. Par Emile Zola. Paris : Charpeutier.

attention on Sedan and its neighbourhood, we shall be follow- ing the lead given us by M. Zola himself, who devotes fully two-thirds Of his pages to the terrible drama played out on that theatre. Lying full south, and at the foot of the vast forest-wall of the Ardennes, which bounds the horizon to the north, the straggling town and fortress of Sedan is jammed in between the river Meuse and its steep northern banks, which were laboriously carved into stupenduously massive fortifications by the Dukes of Bouillon before its annexation to France. After "la deroute de Beaumont," twenty miles off to the south-east, where Defailly, the favourite General of the Empress, disgracefully allowed himself to be surprised by the Crown Prince of Saxony, over his midday cafe noir' at the Mayor's house, there was no other course open to Macmahon but to fall back on Sedan during the night of August 30-31st. To remain at Sedan was almost certain de- struction, but to continue his retreat westward on Mezieres, with an army reduced to the extremity of exhaustion by want of food and sleep, was found by Macmahon to be physically impossible. Had food been obtainable at Sedan, the army might have recovered some of its strength ; but, as it turned out, all available stores had been forwarded eastwards to Montmedy, to be ready against the expected junction there of Macmahon's army with that of Bazaine.

If repose during the day of August 31st was absolutely in- dispensable to his exhausted and demoralised army, there is no conceivable excuse for Macmahon's failure to utilise the precious hours of darkness in retreating on Mezieres, by the road on the right bank of the Meuse, which was still open till 6 a.m., September 1st. But Macmahon could not be persuaded by Ducrot to believe in the imminence of the danger threaten- ing from the westward in the swinging round of the Third Army under the Crown Prince of Prussia, to envelop the French by giving the hand to the Army of the Meuse, under the Crown Prince of Saxony, attacking from the east- ward. So nightfall of August 31st found the four French Corps d'Armee in position on a triangular plateau, with the Meuse and town of Sedan for its southern base, the brook Givonue on its eastern side, and the brook of Floing on its western. The Calvaire d'Illy, to which the plateau gradually rises, and where the German armies eventually joined hands at 3 p.m., forma the apex of the triangle on the north, some four miles distant from its base, the Meuse. The ground falls rapidly away from the triangular plateau both east and west, especially towards the Givonne, where it is precipitous in places. To the south, the wide meadow, through which the Meuse flows, was flooded up to the ramparts of Sedan. So the French position would have been a strong one had it not been commanded by higher ground on every side, from which six hundred German guns poured a convergent fire, com- pletely sweeping the plateau, the Bavarian batteries to the south firing right across the flooded meadows and the town, and occasionally letting shells drop into Sedan itself.

As the German guns carried nearly a thousand yards farther than the French, the German gunners were so un- molested by French projectiles that they were observed through field-glasses to be quietly taking their coffee by the side of their pieces during the battle. The guns of the fortress were so antiquated and harmless, that it was only "par pitie," as M. Zola expresses it, that the Germans replied to them occa- sionally. The triangular plateau forming the French position is by no means unbroken, but intersected by many depressions, and several deep hollows, especially towards its centre, filled up by the large wood of La Garenne, which completely con- cealed the operations on the Floing brook on the west, from those on the Givonne on the east. Into the Bois de la Garenne fugitives from both east and west flocked as the day wore on, where they were shot down like rabbits.

It is to the gallant defence of the western side of the plateau towards Floing by the 7th French Corps, under General Felix Douay, that the attention of the reader is chiefly directed by M. Zola. Here is posted the 106th Regi-

ment of the Line, to which his heroes, Jean Macquard and Maurice Levasseur—the Nians and Euryalus of the story—

belong. Let M. Zola introduce Jean in his own words :—

" Aux premiers bruits de guerre, il avait quitte Rognes, tout saignant du drame, on il venait de perdre sa femme Prancoise et lea terres, qu'elle lui avait apportees ; U s'etait reengage trente- neuf ass, retrouvant ses galons de caporal, tout de suite incorpore an 106th regiment de ligne, dont on completait lea cadres ; et parfois, ii s'etonnait encore, de as revoir avec Is capote aux epaules, lui qui, apres Solferino, etait si joyeux de quitter le service, de n'etre plus un traineur de sabre, un tueur de monde."

Maurice Levasseur, a young Parisian advocate, at first de- spises Jean, the typical peasant, set over him as corporal of the

section, of which Maurice is a mere private :—

" De guoi se melait-il cc paysan, dont lea mains sentaient encore le fumier P Lui, men avocat au dernier automne, engage volun- taire, gue la protection du colonel avec fait incorporer dans le 106th, sans passer par le depot, consentait bien a porter le sac; mais, des lea premieres heures. une repugnance, une sourde revolte l'avait dresse contre cot Metre, cc metre, qui le commandait."

However, within a month of this introduction to them at the opening of La Debacle on the plains of Alsace, Jean and

Maurice are the fastest of friends, when we find them posted side by side above Floing, on the eve of the battle of Sedan, when, in M. Zola's words, "On n'avait plus devant soi, qae sept on halt heures de ce grand online noir."

Midway between the position occupied by the 7th French Corps and the main outer sweep of the encircling ridge to the north-west, soon to be garnished by the batteries of the 11th and 5th Prussian Corps, stands the isolated mamelon of Hattoy, really the key of the position on the Floing side.

Although originally occupied by the French, the Ha.ttoy was considered by General Douaz as untenable, with the force at his command. Its abandonment was undoubtedly a capital error, of which Commander General von Gersdorff, of the 11th German Corps, took immediate advantage, posting his guns on its advanced slopes, and raking thence the French position at close quarters. Leaving Jean and Maurice "couches parmi lea choux " under this hot fire, let us glance at the terrible house-to-house fight going on in the burning village of Bazeilles, at the extreme south-eastern angle of the battle- field, some five miles away. Here we find the civilian Weiss, the foreman of the cloth-manufacturer M. Delaherche, engaged in the desperate defence of his modest newly-erected villa residence, which, after holding out to the last, eventually becomes a prey to the all-consuming flames. Weiss himself is taken red-handed and shot in the presence of his heroic wife, Henriette, the sister of Maurice Levassenr.

The cloth-manufacturer Delaberche, Imperialist up to the day of the battle, but unable to forgive the Emperor the pecuniary loss occasioned to him personally by the rolling of the tide of war to his own doors at Sedan, is an inimitably drawn character. Over the immoral relations of his wife, Gil- berte, with the captain of Maurice's company, who deserts his post for the purpose the night before the battle, a veil had better be drawn. If it was necessary to introduce this objectionable matter to illustrate the demoralisation of French officers, even in the presence of the enemy, it was a piece of superfluous wantonness on the part of M. Zola to soil the pages of his otherwise admirable book by depicting Madame Delaherche's second intrigue with a beardless boy, slightly wounded in the battle, where her first lover, the captain, had the decency to get his death-wound. Of the terribly life-like descriptions of the sufferings of the demoralised army from hunger, thirst, sleeplessness, exposure, wounds, and, worse than all, imbecile leadership on the march and in the field, of the wild rush into Sedan and the subsequent horrors of "le camp de la misere," where eighty thousand French prisoners were reduced to the state of famished wild beasts, it is im- possible to give the faintest idea in a single review. For all this, and for the subsequent events of the war, only lightly touched on by M. Zola, the reader must be referred to the book itself.

Nor does our space admit of more than the barest mention of is pere Fouchard, the avaricious peasant-butcher, who makes his fortune by selling diseased meat to the Germans ; of Honore, his son, the gallant artilleryman, who falls dead across his gun ; of Silvine and the brutal Goliath, who richly deserves his terrible fate at the hands of the franc-tireurs ; of the widowed Heiniette, and her devoted nursing of Jean, who had been wounded while escaping with Maurice from the guarded convoy of prisoners on their way to Germany from Sedan; of Maurice's separation from Jean, and his experiences during the siege of Paris, culminating in his joining the Commune, and receiving his death-wound at the hands of his friend, unrecognised till too late. The dying Maurice in vain tries to console Jean by the idea that his own death at the hands of his peasant friend is only typiCal of the strangling of the Commune of Paris by the provinces,—a terrible and necessary price of the regeneration of France :—

" C'etait la partie seine de Is France, la raisonnable, Is pon- dere% In paysanne, celle qui etait rest& le plus pres de la terre, qui supprimait la partie foils, exasperee, get& par l'empire, detraquee de reveries et de jouissances—et U lui avail ainsi fallu couper dans sa chair memo, avec un arrachement de tent l'etre, sans trop savoir ce qu'elle faisait. Mais le bain de sang etait necessaire, et de sang Francais, l'abominable holocaust°, le sacrifice vivant, an milien du fen purificateur. Desarmais le calvaire etait monte jusqul In plus tertifiante des agonies, la nation crucificee expiait sea fautes et allait rentare."