Germinal (53 page)

But all at once a new cry rang out.

‘We want bread! We want bread!'
¹

It was midday: the hunger consequent on six weeks of strike was gnawing at empty bellies, and appetites had been whetted by all this rushing about the countryside. The odd crust eaten that morning and the few chestnuts brought by La Mouquette were already a distant memory; stomachs were crying out to be fed, and the pain of it added to their fury against the traitors.

‘To the pits! Everybody out! We want bread!'

Étienne, who had earlier refused his share of food in the village, felt an unbearable wrenching sensation in his chest. He said nothing, but every so often he would automatically raise his flask to his lips and take a mouthful of gin: he felt so shaky that he had convinced himself he needed it if he were to carry on. His cheeks were burning, and a fire shone in his eyes. Nevertheless he continued to keep his head, and he was still determined to try and prevent pointless destruction.

When they reached the Joiselle road, a hewer from Vandame who had joined the mob to get his own back on his boss screamed to the comrades to turn right:

‘Let's go to Gaston-Marie! We'll stop the pump and flood Jean-Bart!'

The crowd, easily led, was already turning, even though Étienne protested and begged them not to stop the drainage. What was the point of destroying the roadways? Despite all his grievances it offended the workman in him. Maheu, too, thought it not right to vent anger on a machine. But the hewer continued to call for vengeance, and Étienne had to shout even louder:

‘Let's go to Mirou. There are still scabs down there…Mirou! Mirou!'

With a sweep of his arm he had steered the mob on to the road that led off to the left, while Jeanlin resumed his position at the head and blew even harder on his horn. There was a great commotion and, for the time being, Gaston-Marie was saved.

They covered the four kilometres to Mirou in half an hour, proceeding almost at the double over the boundless plain. On this side the canal cut across it like a long ribbon of ice; and only the bare trees along its banks, looking like giant candelabras in the frost, interrupted the flat monotony of the landscape as it stretched away into the distance and eventually merged with the sky like a sea. A slight undulation in the terrain hid Montsou and Marchiennes from view, leaving nothing but a vast featureless space.

As they reached the pit, they saw a deputy take up position on the overhead railway next to the screening-shed, waiting for them. Everybody recognized Quandieu, who was the senior
deputy in Montsou, an old man getting on for seventy, whose hair and skin were white and who was still in quite miraculously good health for a miner.

‘What the bloody hell do you lot want,' he shouted, ‘wandering about the countryside like this?'

The mob came to a halt. They were no longer dealing with a boss but a comrade, and their respect for the old worker gave them pause.

‘There are men below,' Étienne said. ‘Tell them to come up.'

‘Yes, there are! A good six dozen,' Quandieu replied. ‘Everyone else is too scared of you, you buggers!…But I can tell you here and now, not one of them is coming up, or you'll have me to answer to!'

People started shouting; the men jostled, and the women stepped forward. The deputy quickly came down from the railway and blocked their path to the door.

Maheu tried to intervene.

‘Come on, mate, we're within our rights. How are we going to have a general strike if we can't force the comrades to join us?'

The old man was silent for a moment. Plainly his ignorance of the procedures of joint action was as great as Maheu's. Finally he replied:

‘Within your rights? That's as may be. But I have my orders, and there's only me here. The men are down there till three, and till three they'll stay.'

His last few words were lost amid the booing. Fists were raised, and already the women were screaming at him, so that he could feel their hot breath on his face. But he stood his ground, his head held high, with his snow-white hair and little pointed beard; and courage lent such power to his voice that he could be heard quite clearly above the din.

‘As God is my witness, you shall not pass!…As sure as night follows day, I'd rather die than have you lay a finger on those cables…So stop your pushing and shoving, or I'll throw myself down the shaft here and now!'

This caused a great stir, and the crowd drew back in shocked amazement. He continued:

‘And which bastard among you doesn't understand that?…I'm just a worker, the same as the rest of you. I've been told to guard the place, and guard it I will.'

And this was the limit of Quandieu's logic as, with a soldier's sense of duty, he refused to yield, standing there with his narrow head and his eyes that had been dimmed by the gloomy darkness of half a century spent working underground. The comrades gazed at him, moved by what he said, for somewhere within them this soldierly obedience, this sense of brotherhood and resigned acceptance in the face of danger, had struck a chord. Thinking them not yet persuaded, he insisted:

‘I will! I'll throw myself down the shaft here and now!'

The mob reacted as one: everybody wheeled round and made off down the road to the right, racing away across the countryside and into the distance. Once more the cries went up:

‘To Madeleine! And Crèvecœur! Everybody out! We want bread! We want bread!'

But in the middle of this onward rush a scuffle had broken out. Chaval had evidently tried to take advantage of the situation and escape, for Étienne had just grabbed him by the arm and was threatening to beat the daylights out of him if he so much as tried anything. Chaval, meanwhile, was struggling to get free and protesting furiously:

‘What the hell is this? It's a free country, isn't it? I've been freezing to death for the last hour, and I need a wash. Let go of me!'

It was true that sweat had glued the coal-dust to his skin, which was becoming quite painful, and his jersey afforded little protection against the elements.

‘Keep moving, or you'll soon see what sort of a wash you get,' Étienne replied. ‘This'll teach you to go round stirring things.'

On they raced, and eventually Étienne looked round to find Catherine, who was still keeping up. It pained him to sense her close by and to know that she was in a wretched state, shivering from the cold in her scruffy man's jacket and her muddy trousers. She must have been fit to drop, and yet still she kept on running.

‘It's all right. You can go,' he said finally.

Catherine appeared not to hear. But her eyes met Étienne's and shot him a brief look of reproach. And on she ran. Why did he want her to abandon her man? True, Chaval had hardly been very kind to her; in fact sometimes he beat her. But he was her man, the one who had had her first; and it made her furious to see them all ganging up on him like this, a thousand against one. She would have defended him if she'd had to, not from love but as a matter of pride.

‘Clear off!' Maheu insisted vehemently.

This order from her father slowed her for a moment. She was trembling, and tears welled in her eyes. But despite her fear she caught up again and continued to run with them. After that they let her be.

The mob crossed the Joiselle road and then briefly made for Cron before heading up towards Cougny. Here factory chimneys stood like stripes across the flat horizon, and the road was lined with wooden sheds and brick-built workshops with wide, dusty windows. They raced through Villages One Hundred and Eighty and Seventy-Six one after the other, in quick succession, past the tiny houses; and in both villages the noise of their shouting and the clarion calls of the horn brought whole families out to see, men, women and children, who started running also, joining on behind their comrades. By the time they reached Madeleine there were at least fifteen hundred of them. The road sloped gently downwards, and the roaring torrent of strikers had to flow round the spoil-heap before streaming out across the pit-yard.

It had barely gone two o'clock. But the deputy had been alerted and had brought forward the end of the shift, so that when the mob arrived only about twenty men were left at the bottom. When they surfaced and emerged from the cage, they fled while people ran after them and threw stones at them. Two men were beaten up, and another got away only by forfeiting the sleeve of his jacket. This pursuit of human quarry saved the plant, not a cable or boiler was touched; and already the torrent was departing, rolling on towards the neighbouring pit.

This was Crèvecœur, a mere five hundred metres from Madeleine. There, too, the mob arrived just as the men were coming
up. One putter was seized by the women, who ripped her trousers open and started flogging her bare buttocks in full view of the men, to their great amusement. The pit-boys got a clip round the ear, while some of the hewers escaped only after receiving bruised ribs or a bloody nose. As the ferocity of the encounter intensified, fuelled by the demented fury of this immemorial thirst for revenge which had turned everybody's heads, cries rang out or died in the throat, the roar of empty bellies demanding death to the scabs and an end to low wages. They began to cut the cables, but the file was blunt. Anyway it would take too long, for they were in a frenzy now, desperate to be on the move, on, on. A tap was smashed in the boiler-room and buckets of water were thrown on to the fires, causing the cast-iron grates to crack.

Outside there was talk of marching on Saint-Thomas. As the pit with the most docile workforce, it had been unaffected by the strike, and nearly seven hundred men must be underground, which infuriated them. They would wait for them with cudgels, in battle formation, and then they'd see who left the field victorious! But word went round that there were gendarmes at Saint-Thomas, the very gendarmes they'd made fun of that morning. Yet how did anyone actually know that? It was impossible to say. No matter! They lost their nerve and opted for Feutry-Cantel instead. The thrill of the chase took hold of them once more as they found themselves rushing along the road to the sound of their clattering clogs: To Feutry-Cantel! To Feutry-Cantel! There were a good four hundred spineless bastards there, what a laugh! Situated some three kilometres away, the mine was hidden in a dip near La Scarpe. They were already climbing the hillside at Les Plâtrières, beyond the road to Beaugnies, when somebody or other – they never discovered who – started a rumour that maybe the dragoons were at Feutry-Cantel. This was then repeated from from one end of the column to the other: the dragoons were there. They faltered and slowed their pace; and, after all these hours spent careering round a countryside that seemed to have fallen asleep from the torpor of having so many people out of work, there was a wave of panic. Why hadn't they come across any soldiers? It worried
them that they had got away with it so far, for they could sense the repression to come.

Though no one had any idea where it started, a new rallying cry sent them all rushing off to another pit.

‘La Victoire! La Victoire!'

Were there no gendarmes or dragoons at La Victoire, then? Nobody could say, but everyone seemed reassured. And so they turned on their heels and raced down the Beaumont hill, cutting across the fields to rejoin the Joiselle road. The railway line stood in their path, but they knocked down the fences and passed over it. They were now getting close to Montsou, the gently undulating terrain was flattening out, and the sea of beetfields was beginning to stretch away towards the dark buildings of Marchiennes in the distance.

This time there were at least five kilometres to be covered, but such was the exhilaration that their momentum carried them forward, and they felt neither their terrible exhaustion nor their bruised and aching feet. The stream of people kept getting longer and longer as they picked up comrades in the villages along the way. By the time they had crossed the canal by the Magache bridge and arrived in front of La Victoire, their number had grown to two thousand. But it was after three o'clock, the shift had already ended and there wasn't a man left underground. They vented their frustration in empty threats, but all that was left to them was to throw broken bricks at the stonemen arriving for their shift. A rout ensued, and the deserted pit was theirs. In their fury at not having a blackleg to hit, they set about inanimate objects. It was as though an ulcer of resentment had been growing within them, a poisonous abscess, which had finally burst. Year after year of hunger had made them ravenous for a feast of massacre and destruction.

Behind one of the sheds Étienne spotted loaders busy filling a cart with coal.

‘Clear off, you bastards!' he shouted. ‘Not one lump of coal is going out of here.'

At his command a hundred or so strikers came running up, and the loaders only just had time to get away. Men unhitched the horses, who took fright and ran off, having been pricked in
the flanks; while others turned the cart upside down and, in so doing, broke its shafts.

Levaque had set about the trestles with great blows of his axe, hoping to bring down the overhead railway. They refused to give, and so it occurred to him instead to start ripping up the track, so as to sever the connection between one end of the yard and the other. Soon the entire mob was doing the same. Maheu prized up the cast-iron fixings for them, using his crowbar as a lever. Meanwhile La Brûlé led the women off to invade the lamp-room, where a flurry of sticks soon covered the floor with the remains of smashed lamps. La Maheude, beside herself with rage, hit them every bit as hard as La Levaque. Everyone got covered in paraffin-oil, and La Mouquette was busy wiping her hands on her skirt, laughing delightedly at getting so dirty. For a joke Jeanlin had just emptied a lamp down the back of her blouse.

But such vengeance did not feed hungry mouths. Their stomachs cried out even louder. And the great lament could again be heard above the din: