La Débacle

Fortnightly Review, 1 August 1892, pages 204-210, 3,419 words

“‘We have been betrayed,’ cried a number of terrified voices.

“Then a sudden thought struck Loubet. ‘It is that pig of an Emperor who stops the way with his baggage waggons.’

“The cry was taken up. There were execrations, abominable words, expressive of all the hatred excited by the Emperor’s servants. They occupied all the sleeping quarters in the towns, and seemed to be always engaged in unpacking provisions, baskets of wine, and silver plate before a destitute soldiery, and always piling up kitchen fires when poor devils were squeezing their stomachs. Ah! that miserable Emperor, at this moment without a throne, helpless to command, like a lost child in his empire, borne along like a useless bundle, and so forth…. In another moment a shocking catastrophe might have happened, a panic in which men would have been crushed between the walls of this narrow passage in a furious stampede.

“The colonel turned round very pale. ‘Have patience, boys, have a little patience… we are going to march.’... But they did not march, and the seconds seemed like centuries. Jean again took Maurice by the hand, and, full of a fine self-possession, he whispered in his ear that, if the boys did begin to crush forward, they would spring to the left and then climb into the woods on the other side of the river. With a look he sought the francs-tireurs, thinking that they would be likely to know the way; but he was told that they had disappeared while coming through Raucourt. And all of a sudden the troops began to march; they turned the corner of the road and were then sheltered from the German battery. Later on they learned that it was Bonnemain’s division — four regiments of cuirassiers — that had thus cut the line of march of the 7th corps.”

I will ask the reader to read carefully the passage I have translated; it seems to me a capital instance of the faults of M. Zola’s latest work. Note that Jean whispers his plan of escape in his friend’s ear, and looks round for the francs-tireurs, he is told that they disappeared when passing through Raucourt. That some one should have told Jean of the disappearance of the francs-tireurs implies that others beside Jean were thinking of escape through the woods. If we are reading fiction, that is to say, the personal story of Jean and Maurice, this point should be developed or left out altogether; as it stands, it reads like a bit of military history dragged in by the tail; and the information, acquired later on, that it was Bonnemain’s division — four regiments of cuirassiers — that cut the line of march of the 7th corps, still further accentuates the author’s hesitation between history and fiction.

M. Zola’s vast imagination saw vast armies covering vast plains; he saw carnage illimitable, and his architectural genius enabled him to reconstruct the entire plan of campaign. He saw that Sedan was the logical end to a vicious and corrupt empire; he saw that Sedan was the first of many retributions, and the burning of Paris became a symbol in his mind of purification by fire, and a sign that the French nation had determined to renounce for ever the vice and effeminacy of the Empire. And to tell the story of a national disaster leading up to the threshold of a new era, M. Zola saw that the types he would want would be a peasant desirous of peace so that work might begin again and money be made. The wise, sober, hard-working peasant would represent “le fond même de la nation,” and to contrast with this peasant M. Zola saw that he would want a feather-headed Parisian, a man full of bravura and enthusiasm, but easily discouraged and physically weak. There is surely genius in this conception; there always is genius in M. Zola’s conception. And this being admitted it will be interesting to consider the likelihood of M. Zola’s execution being on a level with his conception of the subject.

For the last five-and-twenty years M. Zola has drawn unceasingly upon his talent for pictorial description; for five-and-twenty years he has poured out pictorial descriptions in unstinted measure, so long as the page overflowed he went on satisfied with the result; his own prodigious fecundity enraptured him. He grew to care for little else, and to believe, more and more, that it is the mass rather than the form that counts — that Cecrops was greater than Phidias. But diffuseness treads closely on the heels of profusion, and it would be vain to disguise the fact that M. Zola’s books are growing more and more diffuse; it is clear that he has ceased to practise the art of omission.

It is fifteen years since I read the La Curée, La Conquête de Plassans, La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret and L’Assommoir, and yet I remember the first chapters of each of these books better than I do the first chapter of La Débacle which I read three days ago. I remember the first chapter of L’Oeuvre and of Germinal distinctly, but all I know of the first chapter of La Débacle is that it is laid in the French camp at Mulhouse. The second chapter describes a panic among the French soldiers. I remember that they retreat although no enemy is in sight. My remembrance of the chapter is vague and loose. The troops throw their rifles into the ditches as they go, but I see no single man flinging his rifle aside or disburdening himself of his knapsack. The scene is void of those typical gestures which would express it in its essence — those splendid soul-revealing gestures which are the glory of his earlier novels.

Thinking of the book, I remember that I read of marches and countermarches, accounts of pillage, vacillations of generals, disorganisation of troops. I have a sensation of long pages, bristling with military enumeration: the 7th corps, 17th corps, 106th corps, 18th corps, and then with tedious explanation regarding the strategical position of the two armies: on the left bank the Prussian batteries opened fire, on the right bank the 23rd corps advanced slowly under cover of, &c. I have the sensation too of a profuse nomenclature, towns and villages never heard of before. But the history is not vivid and picturesque as Carlyle would have made it; in the historical pages there is little alertness of mind, they are exceedingly perfunctory, and the pages which deal with the intimate life of the camp are long drawn out and I think feebly invented. There is much discourse about eating and drinking, but surely the stolen goose, the killing, the plucking, the cooking, the eating of the bird is nothing more than the worn habit of a certain form of literary composition: and the mere introduction of the stomach into history will not turn history into fiction. Even when the men are starving and go forth to kill a poor, starving horse with a small pocket-knife the literary form hardly improves; the narrative is equally loose, the scene has not been reduced to its final essence, and we are not touched with the awe of famine, the pity and awe that the pages of Germinal exhale when famine, naked and gaunt, creeps from door to door, taking children away first, laying them stark and cold on their blanketless beds, and then crouches in the dusky corners to watch the haggard faces of the grown men and women. Never was a famine harder and crueller than it was in that grim, mining village; we felt its madness in our foreheads and its misery in our entrails.

Stress has been laid on the admirable manner in which M. Zola draws the curtains of the Imperial train and shows us the Emperor's pale face struck with unalterable belief in his unhappy destiny. We see the Emperor striving to swallow a few mouthfuls of chicken; and on another occasion we see him riding forward to meet his death on the battlefield and returning in sad despair, convinced at last that his destiny is not there. These pictures are effective, but when we consider their obviousness we can hardly deem them worthy of high praise; the idea is striking, but the idea is not M. Zola’s; history furnished the idea, and we have only to think what Carlyle would have done with the idea, to be able to judge M. Zola’s execution. The hospital scenes are good but not excellent. Sensation of the margin of life is not there; and we do not inhale the chloroform, we do not see the steel instruments, and we remember a poem called "Marching,” by Whitman, in which the very soul of the hospital resides. And all scenes that spring out of the joys and sufferings of the flesh, we demand from M. Zola in their most intense expression, and we demand them, for is it not the whole aim of his art to furnish them? So much I ask from Zola, and never the intimate life of the soul. It were superficial to ask from a writer what he does not pretend to give. M. Zola’s novels are poor in psychological interest, but they are rich in scenes of human emotion. Even in La Béte Humaine, certainly not one of his best books, there is the scene where the jealous husband beats his wife until she tells the story of her seduction, and he does not allow her to omit one shameful detail. He who reads this scene never forgets it. But where in La Débacle is there a scene as strictly human, or told with the same conviction and intensity? To lay bare my exact impression I have to confess that La Débacle seemed to me a little commonplace until I came to the great cavalry charge at Sedan. From the top of page 320, “Les trompettes sonnaient,” nearly to the bottom of page 322, "Tonnerre de Dieu, ça ne sert à rien d'être brave,” all is perfection. The language is not so rare or so concentrated as Flaubert’s, but it is of ample rhythm, and the vision of the scene is great and noble. And these pages show us what the book might have been if three years instead of one year had been spent upon it. M. Zola knew that in describing a cavalry charge he was competing with Hugo and Stendhal: he was also competing with Mr. Meredith. I think he has surpassed all battle-pieces in these three pages.

A little later in the book we come upon a very finely imagined scene, the bombardment of a forest through which troops are passing, a sort of battue in which men take the place of pheasants and hares. Two days after the battle we are again taken through the forest. Men have been killed by the falling trees. Here a man is wedged and crushed between two larches, and here a man has died with his hands on his eyes as if to shut out the sight of death, and here is another with his sweetheart’s last letter half drawn from his tunic, And still more pitiful are the horses. They have lingered through two days of suffering. They can still drag themselves a little way, though their hind legs are broken, and the forest rings with their piercing little screams. Suddenly Silvine comes upon a dell, a green smiling place that the battle has passed over. Doves are singing in the leaves, and Silvine stops a moment there so that the donkey may drink in the little brook. A few yards farther on she again comes upon the traces of the massacred regiment. The bombarded forest seems to me to be in M. Zola’s best manner; but in the midst of my admiration, I ask myself why, after having written the second scene, he did not take out the first. For surely the sudden evocation of the forest massacre in a few words exchanged between Silvine and her companion would have been more effective than the double narrative. The love scenes between Jean and Henriette can hardly be regarded otherwise than as a concession to the general reader. They are wholly wanting in accent. And as the pages bring us into the fourth part, the narrative grows more redundant, more oppressed with history. Any description of a Parisian revolution must challenge comparison with the immortal description of the revolution of ‘49 in L’Education sentimentale. In those chapters, which to me at least represent the highest achievement of prose fiction, we have that which represents the essence of things; all is seen in a magical foreshortening. It is ten years since I read the book, and I still see the young man in the long green coat fighting on the bridge; and the imbecile pillage of the Tuileries, and the mental void which fills the minds of the reformers when they look out of the palace windows, has ever since formed an integral part of my comprehension of life.

It is strange that memory of these astonishing chapters did not induce M. Zola to suppress some of the pages of his painstaking history of the Commune — merely painstaking, for nowhere, in the historical portions of his novel, does M. Zola’s genius transpire. M. Zola’s genius is as ill at ease in history as in direct observation of life. He is neither a historian nor a reporter. He is essentially an imaginative writer, who reaches his highest point of excellence when his imagination builds upon a solid foundation of fact, for his imagination is of such quality that it gains strength by strict observance of the general laws which govern humanity. But the exceptional perplexes him, and he deals with it awkwardly and unsympathetically. Zola requires a wide canvas. He is not a genre painter, so the national disaster at Sedan would at first sight seem to be especially suitable to his genius. But the multitude of facts with which his genius was at every moment confronted proved fatal; the practical qualities and the very sincerity of his mind would not allow him to eliminate. But in a novel historical accuracy is as impossible as in a picture. There are no historical novels, and there are no historical pictures. Flaubert, who was a greater artist than Balzac or Zola, chose Carthage for the scene of his historical novel, because next to nothing was known about the Carthaginians, and his imagination could construct and create unhampered by historical data. Shakespeare was able to write historical plays because he knew very little history. The essential quality of the historical novel and the historical picture is that it should contain no history, and from this rule the great masters have never deviated. No one knows this better than M. Zola, but to have left out the history effectually would have required the labour of years. The history was left in because time was wanting to take it out. History has fallen upon this book like a blight. Even at the close of the book history nips the fruit of the story, and just when it seems ready to ripen. Jean, the peasant, "le fond même de la nation,” has remained with the Versailles troops, but Maurice, the Parisian, “la téte légére,” the type of the old enthusiasm, has become a Communist. He has come to believe that in striving for an universal destruction of things he is accomplishing great and noble work. Jean and Maurice have fought side by side; they have alternately saved each other’s lives; war has united them in a bond of inseparable friendship; they have grasped each other’s hands and looked into each other’s eyes overpowered with a love that exceeds the love that woman ever gave to man; now they are ranged on different sides, armed one against the other. The idea is a fine one, and it is to be deeply regretted that M. Zola did not throw history to the winds and develop the beautiful human story of the division of friends in civil war. Never would history have tempted Balzac away from the human passion of such a subject. Balzac’s description of Jean weeping over the dead body of his friend would have burnt itself into our minds; he would have given another such picture of manly grief as we find in Le Curé de Village; possibly he would have invented a series of stratagems whereby Jean seeks to save his friend from the soldiery; he would have given us their thoughts as they lay hidden away; he would have given us the cruelty of capture and the refusal of Jean to serve in the squad told off to shoot Maurice; Jean would have been condemned to death for insubordination perhaps; and, again holding each other’s hands, the friends would have died together. So, I think, Balzac would have ended the book, but Zola uses the incident only as a means of continuing his description of the burning of Paris.

La Débacle is full of magnificent work. It contains, as I have pointed out, one of the finest passages of prose in the French language, a passage that even Mr. Swinburne would find it difficult to deny was not superior to Hugo’s celebrated charge in Les Miserables. I could point out many other passages almost as fine, and yet when it comes to considering the book as a whole it does not stand the test of critical examination at any single point. I have shown, perhaps I should say I have attempted to show, its general literary failings; I have now to say why I cannot accept its philosophy. War, M. Zola says, is necessary; war is salutary; devour or thou shalt be devoured, is a law from which human life can no more escape than animal life. I accept this reading of life without reservation. But M. Zola adds a corollary: war is not a noble thing which should be accepted gaily and with enthusiasm, war is a necessary evil which should be accepted gravely and with resignation. In other words, war, according to M. Zola, is nothing more than a dose of medicine which, at undetermined intervals, we must swallow gravely and with resignation. I have said that M. Zola’s imagination builds only upon substantial basis of fact. There are exceptions to all rules; and I think we should search history vainly for the substantial basis of fact on which M. Zola built his theory respecting war. It is the wine of enthusiasm and the aureole of glory that has enabled man to bear with the abominations and sufferings of war, which no man has depicted with such ghastly conviction, with such atrocious reality, as M. Zola. The bravest man that ever lived could not read M. Zola’s book without feeling that he would sooner blow out his brains than engage in such horrible butchery; for bravery is not indifference to death, but the will to fight for life. So when science eliminates all chance of preserving life on the battle-field, man’s courage will give out. Men will not go out to fight earthquakes. To-day warfare is even more terrible than it was at the time of the battle of Sedan. Smokeless powder has been invented, noiseless powder has been spoken of, and rifles are now in use which can kill at a mile and a half. Naval war is in an even worse plight. The beauty of a ship, and the gallantry of seamanship, is one of the dreams of the past. The modern ship is an iron pot, furnished with leaky boilers, worked by engineers who stand in a stifling heat amid gigantic engines. These iron pots have never been tested in actual war; torpedos may at this moment be in course of perfection that will send them to the bottom like so many stones. The hygienic war dreamed of by M. Zola is surely a dream. Looking into the future, may we not rather think that the day will come when not even the old enthusiasm will suffice to induce nations to engage in war? What will happen it seems difficult even to conjecture. All we may say with certainty is, that the law, devour or thou shalt be devoured, will remain the supreme law of life, even when the cannon’s mouth is closed for ever.

GEORGE MOORE.