The Düsseldorf Line and Paris, December 1896
The sergeants were shouting the men into line, but over the noise of the guns, it seemed that they were whispering. The cold wind carried the smells of chlorine and gunpowder overlaid with the stench of terror, and Omar imagined that hell must be something like this.
“Ready to win the war?” asked Marcel next to him. From someone else – from one of the recruits who read the UPF papers and believed the stories about victory being within reach – it might have been a serious question. From Marcel, it wasn’t, and Omar agreed.
If they’re drafting seventeen-year-olds, they’ve already lost, his father had said, and he’d seen nothing in the weeks since he finished his training that would make him disagree.
“All by myself,” he answered.
“Save a few Germans for me.” Marcel looked nervously toward the lip of the trench. “What the hell are you doing here anyway? Isn’t your father a deputy or something?”
“He’s the mayor of the nineteenth
arrondissement. But I didn’t want any favors.” There had been many arguments between Omar and his parents about exactly that subject.
“Good man. Stupid, but good.”
The armored cars were in no-man’s land now clearing the wire, which meant that it was almost time. And it was only seconds later that the sergeants shouted “Masks on!” Omar donned his gas mask carefully, as the others did. The chlorine wouldn’t hurt the Germans much, but their fire would be slower with their protective gear on, and the wind would blow the gas back to their second line and slow down the reinforcements. And when the Frenchmen got to their trenches –
if they got there – it would be bayonet fighting and the masks wouldn’t matter.
“Over!” the sergeants called. “Over the top!” Omar scrambled up the side of the trench and into no-man’s land. His comrades were falling even as they did the same, but he wasn’t hit, and there was only one way onward.
The Germans were two hundred meters away, and the air was filled with the crackle of bullets and the chatter of machine guns. Omar had been at the front for less than two months, but he already knew that luck would decide who made it across the gap – staying low and zigzagging would help, but in the face of machine guns and cannon fire, there was no way to be safe.
He reached the halfway point, and then the three-quarter mark, where soldiers detoured around the clumps of barbed wire that the armored cars had left. The Germans were only fifty meters away now, and the ground was littered with dead and wounded.
“I can see the bastards’ faces,” Marcel shouted. A second later he was dead, shot by a bullet he never saw. Even with carnage all around, Omar felt like he’d been stabbed in the gut. He could have joined the
tirailleurs if he’d wanted, but he’d grown up in Paris and preferred to serve in a local regiment, and Marcel had been one of those who’d made sure he was all right.
But there was no time to mourn, and then Omar’s own immunity ended. A shell burst meters from him, turning three of his comrades into so much shredded flesh, and the shrapnel tore a great gash in his leg. He stumbled and fell sideways, directly onto the wire.
He was dizzy with pain and fear, but forced himself to stay calm. If he struggled, he could become tangled in the wire, and if
that happened, he might linger there for hours. He reached for his pocket – the barbed wire scraped his arm, but he could reach it – and withdrew a wire cutter. He worked slowly, on the edge of panic, and by a miracle he was free.
There was no question of reaching the North German trenches now, and he began dragging himself back from whence he had come. He noticed dimly that other men, still standing, were going in the same direction. The attack must have failed; the intelligence that had told them of a weak point in the German lines must have been wrong. Maybe the Germans themselves would be a step behind, eager for revenge.
But the men who picked him up were French. “Here’s one to take back,” one of them called, and they seized him by the shoulders and half-carried him back to the lines. Halfway back, Omar felt something that may have been a bullet, but he wasn’t sure, and by the time the medics came to put him on a stretcher, he had blacked out.
He woke up hours later. He was in a cot and hurt like hell, so he figured he was alive. There was a powerful smell of alcohol, and the air was full of steam from the cauldron that sterilized the bandages.
“Doctor?” he asked.
The doctor – not the kindly Frenchman Omar had expected, but a kindly French
woman – heard his voice and stopped her rounds at his cot. “Another sleeper awakes,” she said, smiling.
“Am I in the hospital?”
“Yes, but you’ll be all right. We cleaned out the cuts and stitched you up. You’ll have some scars and you’ll walk funny for a few weeks, but you’ll live.”
“No infection?”
“No. It’s amazing, some of the things we can do now to prevent that. In the last war, you’d have lost the leg for sure.”
Whatever response the doctor was expecting, it wasn’t hysterical laughter, and it was ten minutes before Omar could tell her the reason.
“Düsseldorf! Another thirty thousand men dead in an attack that gained us nothing – no, worse than nothing, because it left our defenses weaker! When will this government stop throwing our sons away for no reason? How many more of our children must we lose in this pointless war?”
Emile Zola sat in the well of the
Corps législatif and listened to the socialist deputy speak. The
Rassemblement socialiste et pacifique had been giving one version or another of this speech ever since the election. In his more cynical moments, he wondered
why they kept on making their speeches and filing their no-confidence motions when the Catholics would always help Leclair vote them down? His eyes were drawn to Leclair’s seat behind the speaker’s platform, and he saw that the prime minister also knew: he was listening to the speech with amused tolerance, not anger or fear.
“I move that this House declare its lack of confidence in the government’s prosecution of the war!” The deputy yielded the platform amid applause from the opposition benches and cheers from Leclair’s party.
“There is a motion on the floor,” the speaker declared. “Is there a second?”
A shout of assent came from dozens of throats.
“We will have a voice vote, then. All in favor?” There was thunder and stamping of feet from the socialist benches. “All opposed?” An equal baying came from the parties of the right.
“I declare that the motion has failed. The next…”
“Roll call!” cried the deputy who had made the motion, and he was echoed by hundreds of other voices – including, Zola was surprised to hear, some from the centrist parties’ seats.
“There being enough support,” the speaker said resignedly, “there will be a roll call. Monsieur Abelin…”
Zola turned his attention to his paperwork. The roll call would take an hour, he would be one of the last to vote, and the outcome was foreordained. He began answering a letter from a constituent, and was soon lost to the world.
But then a startled exclamation brought him back, and as he shook his head clear, a rising buzz filled the room, filled with the name “Calvet.”
“What happened?” he whispered to the deputy beside him.
“Calvet! He voted in favor!”
“But he’s from Leclair’s party!”
“Yes, it’s…” but the man’s response was cut off when Chartier, too, voted in favor, and the noise returned redoubled.
If Zola had been surprised before, he was amazed now. He suddenly realized that both Calvet and Chartier were from Algeria, and wondered if that rather than Düsseldorf was what had made them desert the ship: the British and Ottomans were pushing hard in the Algerian mountains, with the army of Bornu and vengeful Sufi brotherhoods at their side.
“Ferrand!” “Oui!” Another one!
Zola tried to keep count, but realized he had missed too many votes. The anticipation was unbearable. Could there really be enough? Could the government really fall?
Up on the dais, Leclair was amused no longer. Zola’s eyes met his, and for a second, they had a strange sort of communion: one was a liberal and the other a lion of the right, but they both burned with desire to know exactly the same thing.
“Zola!” “Oui!”
There were only two others after him – one in favor and one against – and then the speaker rapped his gavel. “The votes are two hundred seventy-nine in favor, two hundred fif…”
The remainder was lost in a crescendo of shouting, cheering and cries of betrayal. Leclair sat straight, but looked as if he’d been shot – and from all Zola could see, some of the RSP deputies looked the same.
He stuffed his coat and papers under one arm and made his way to the foyer. For the opposition, the emergency had only begun. Leclair would go to the emperor and ask to dissolve the legislature and lead another indefinite caretaker government, and with a war on, he might succeed. Only if an absolute majority of the deputies went to the emperor with another candidate would he
have to appoint a new prime minister – and who could all of them agree on? Who would be acceptable to the socialists, the renegades from Leclair’s party and everyone in between?
All Zola could think, as he looked for his party leader among the chaos, was that they’d better find someone quickly.
“Who on earth is
he?” Deputy Terrasse asked.
“The mayor of Amiens,” Zola answered, sipping his coffee. “How could you not know?”
“He writes novels! About trips to the moon!”
“He’s been a deputy twice. He doesn’t belong to any party. And he’s a pacifist since before the war – got locked up for it, even, in ’93.”
Terrasse nodded. In the days of the caretaker government, saying the wrong thing in the wrong place would get you beaten up by Leclair’s gangs and arrested for sedition – you’d be acquitted when the case came to trial, but by then, you’d have spent a few months in jail. “He’ll let them know we’re serious about peace, then. But still, why
him?”
“In a room full of people, all of whom were asking ‘why not me?’ The only one they’d all accept was someone from outside, and we needed to find a name quickly.”
“Fair enough, I suppose.” The emperor’s politics, insofar as he had any, weren’t that different from Leclair’s, and he’d been on the point of giving his blessing to a caretaker cabinet when the opposition presented its petition to him. “Does he have any idea how to do the job? He’s sixty-eight years old.”
“Could he do any worse than Leclair?”
“Another fair point.” Terrasse took a sip from his own cup and held it in his hand, rolling the
café au lait around. “But it still sounds strange. Prime Minister Jules Verne… who’d ever have imagined that?”
