Maurice is hardly young either, being twenty-nine, but he was helped and protected by his twin sister, who sacrificed to send him to Paris and train him as a lawyer, and he still behaves as impetuously as a spoilt child. The friendship of these two men is one of the most beautiful human relationships in all Zola’s work. Maurice finds himself in a squad of men under Corporal Macquart. At first there is instinctive aversion and mistrust between the simple peasant and the highbrow intellectual. But Maurice is forced to admire the solid qualities of Jean who in his turn helps Maurice when he is in pain and distress and learns to love him like a brother. Later each saves the life of the other. From then onwards their relationship becomes highly symbolical, as Zola himself is at pains to point out. The two apparently contradictory aspects of France are wedded in this wonderful friendship in which Maurice makes the solid peasant more aware, more sensitive, while Jean makes the brittle, frivolous intellectual deeper and more human. And when this union is torn asunder by the national disaster and Maurice, without his sheet-anchor of common sense, hurls himself into the frenzies of the Commune, Jean, the other France, kills him – accidentally of course – but it symbolizes self-amputation, the cutting out and casting away of a rotten, septic limb which, if retained, would ultimately poison and kill the whole organism.

The other soldiers in the squad are well differentiated types, each heavily charged with symbolism and political significance, possibly a little overdrawn in consequence, but none the less recognizable.

Loubet is the smart-aleck Parisian cockney, a jack of all trades, full of bright ideas and gadgets, the artful dodger but also the wit of the party. Lapoulle is the sheer clodhopper, physically magnificent but slow-witted, amiable and a willing beast of burden, but potentially very dangerous, because he can be cruel and bestial, like the peasants in La Terre, and his invincible ignorance and super-stitiousness make him a tool for the unscrupulous. Pache, also from the country, is the pious one who furtively says his prayers and is the natural butt of the others. Meek and mild and consequently a bad soldier who breaks down under hardship and conceals some food, he is denounced by Chouteau, who significantly leaves the actual murdering, for a crust of bread, to the brutish Lapoulle. Finally Chouteau, who could be described in three words : a bloody-minded skunk. He is the professional agitator and trouble-maker, the political pub-orator, the demonstrator against everything, who never does anything except to feather his own nest. He escapes from a prisoner-of-war column by causing his best friend Loubet to be done to death, predictably turns up in Paris as a fire-raising and looting Communard, but quickly changes his coat when the other side looks like winning. Chouteau is another example of Zola’s consistent hatred and contempt for the violent left-wing agitator type, the thoroughly unsatisfactory workman who is a parasite thriving on the hopes and fears of his fellow-men – Lantier in L’Assommoir, Pluchart in Germinal – who never did an honest day’s work in their lives.

Similarly the officers, almost always seen through the eyes of the common soldiers or civilians, fall naturally into the categories of careerists, like Bourgain-Desfeuilles, or brave, old-fashioned diehards still living out the glories of old France or Napoleon’s Grande Armée, like Rochas and Colonel de Vineuil. Most of the higher officers are real historical figures, shown to be incompetent, ambitious and jealous of each other. On his lonely peak is the Emperor Napoleon III, a puppet driven by forces beyond his control, hounded on by Paris and his megalomaniac Empress, ignored by his own military commanders, in constant pain from a mortal illness, a painted figurehead seeking an honourable end but rejected even by death, finding some sort of dignity and strength only at the end when he insists on surrender to avoid further bloodshed.

Zola’s treatment of the Emperor is a remarkable example of his attempts, all through his career as a novelist, except perhaps in his final, ‘evangelical’ stage, to be as fair as possible even to those with whom he has no ideological sympathy. Just as the anti-Catholic found room to bring in some good Christians and saintly priests in the name of the law of averages, if nothing else, so, although himself politically to the left of centre, he had refused to take the facile black-or-white way of demagogues and, for instance in Germinal, treat all employers as capitalist oppressors and all workers as innocent victims, but had depicted some good and just employers and some lazy and selfish workers. So, once again, in spite of the tendency throughout the Rougon-Macquart novels to attack retrospectively the Second Empire, Zola cannot bring himself, in common fairness, to overlook the personal tragedy of Napoleon III or the criminal hooliganism of many of the Paris Communards, who are out for destruction, loot and personal power and use for their own ends such starry-eyed idealists as Maurice. Not that Zola holds any brief for the Maurice type, for none is more inhumanly bloodthirsty than the blind intellectual fanatic. Lovable though he may be at times, Maurice has in him the stuff of a Robespierre.

It is this all-embracing humanity, perhaps not sufficiently noticed by some critics, Zola’s care to bring in the devotion and beauty of human beings as well as their passions, weaknesses and depravity, that at first sight makes one omission surprising. Here is a novel about soldiers in the demoralizing atmosphere of a campaign, a battle and the subsequent social and political disintegration. Yet although these men are a coarse lot, and some of their language is typically rough, Zola keeps out of their lives almost all sexual behaviour. The man who had recently outraged the respectable with pageants of human lust and bestiality like La Terre and La Bête humaine now, when dealing with soldiers in wartime, a notorious recipe for sexual looseness, reserves such things for civilians, traitors or Germans. The only Frenchman to have a relationship with a woman is carrying on a pre-war affair, and he is killed a few hours after leaving his mistress’s bed. The symbolism of all this hardly needs underlining. Men fighting for their lives not only against the enemy but also against exhaustion, starvation and disease have little inclination for dalliance. That is left to the others.

What of the civilians? They are either innocent victims or motivated by self-interest, and to the latter the war seems either a tiresome interruption of their normal lives or a new chance to do well out of the misfortunes of others. Fouchard, uncle of Maurice and Henriette, will even refuse to sell (let alone give) food or drink to the starving French soldiers because he can get more out of the Germans, yet has the effrontery to claim to be patriotic because he swindles the enemy by selling them rotten meat at exorbitant prices.