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He awoke, and found himself lying by the barbed-wire fence in the graying light of dawn. His muscles were stiff and sore, but he felt a strange sense of exhilaration. A mist was driving across the valley and enshrouding the scene of the night's debacle.
'Lord Liverpool's disappearance from the political scene, says Lord Russell, 'gave rise to a great débâcle.
And because it was a remote and insignificant place, far away out of the crowding tragedies of that year of disaster, away from burning cities and starving multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was here that there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest, if possible, before it was too late, the debacle of civilisation.
He himself had an air of slight dishevelment, as though his ideas had been blown about by a rude wind. "I remember Mr. Morton spoke to me your guardian, of course. You should answer properly. But still, surely you have been taught some religious instruction. You say your prayers, don't you?" "No." He added after a moment of sudden, vivid recollection: "Not now." It was nothing short of a debacle.
There are those who will still, in the vein of Mephistopheles-Akinetos, urge that the system which gave us the men who pulled us out of the Indian Mutiny can stand comparison with the system which gave France the authors of the débâcle; that the successes of Germany over France in war have no necessary connection with education, and those of Germany over England in commerce, diplomacy, &c., still less.
"Oh!" she replied. "'La Debacle'?" "Yes. What do ye think of it?" His eyes lighted at the prospect of a talk. He was even pleased to hear her give him the title in French. "I haven't read it," she said, and she was momentarily sorry that she had not read it, for she could see that he was dashed.
And within him there was a sort of debacle; all his doubts, all his anguish and sadness burst forth in an irresistible stream.
One need only think over his books and his subjects to be convinced of this: "L'Assommoir" and drunkenness; "Nana" and harlotry; "Germinale" and strikes; "L'Argent" and money getting and losing in all its branches; "Pot-Bouille" and the cruel squalor of poverty; "La Terre" and the life of the peasant; "Le Debacle" and the decay of imperialism.
The psychological effect of the capital being in the enemy's hands would have been worth more to them at this stage of the war than the annihilation of an army corps. It would have been a moral debacle for the French people, who had been buoyed up with false news and false hopes until their Government had fled to Bordeaux, realizing the gravity of the peril.
She'd just come in and taken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired, and in a business-like dress of black and crimson that didn't suit her and was muddy about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and sniffed penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and interrupted everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at the cushions of her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was overwhelmed with grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately organising.
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