Germinal (68 page)

The small squad of men could barely be seen through the hail of brick. Fortunately the bricks were carrying too far, pitting the wall behind them. What should they do? The captain's pale face flushed momentarily at the thought of going inside and turning their backs, but even that wasn't possible any more, they'd be torn to pieces the instant they moved. A brick had just broken the peak on his cap, and blood was dripping from his forehead. Several of his men were injured; he could sense their fury and realized that they were now in the grip of the instinct for survival that makes men cease to obey their superiors. The sergeant had cursed aloud as his left shoulder was almost dislocated by a brick thumping into his flesh, bruising it like a laundry-woman's paddle thudding into a pile of washing. Having been hit twice already, the young recruit had a broken thumb and could feel a burning sensation in his right knee: how much longer were they going to put up with this nonsense? A piece of brick had ricocheted and hit the veteran in the groin; he had turned green, and his rifle shook as his thin arms held it raised in front of him. Three times the captain was on the point of
ordering them to fire. He was paralysed by anguish, and for a few seconds, which seemed like an eternity, he debated between duty and his own mind, between his beliefs as a soldier and his beliefs as a man. The bricks rained down even more fiercely, and just as he was opening his mouth, about to give the order ‘Fire!', the rifles went off of their own accord, three shots at first, then five, then a general volley, and finally – in the midst of a great silence – one single shot, long after the others.

There was general stupefaction. They had actually fired, and the crowd stood there open-mouthed, motionless, unable to believe it. But then there were piercing shrieks, and a bugle sounded the cease-fire. Wild panic followed, a mad flight through the mud like a stampede of wounded cattle.

Bébert and Lydie had collapsed on top of each other after the first three shots; the girl had been hit in the face, while the young boy had a hole through his chest beneath his left shoulder. Lydie lay motionless, as though struck by a thunderbolt. But Bébert was still moving, and in the convulsions of his death throes he grabbed her, as though he wanted to hold her close again as he had held her in the dark hiding-place where they had spent their last night together. And at that moment Jeanlin, who had finally arrived from Réquillart, came skipping bleary-eyed through the smoke just in time to see Bébert embrace his little woman, and die.

The next five shots had brought down La Brûlé and Richomme. Hit in the back just as he was begging the comrades to stop, he had fallen to his knees; and having slumped over on to his side, he now lay gasping for breath, his eyes filled with the tears he had shed. The old woman, her bosom ripped apart, had keeled straight over, landing with a crack like a bundle of dry firewood as she stammered a final curse through a gargle of blood.

But after that the general volley of gunfire had cleared the terrain, mowing down the groups of onlookers who were standing about laughing a hundred paces away. One bullet entered Mouquet's mouth, shattering his skull and knocking him flat at the feet of Zacharie and Philomène, whose two children were spattered in blood. At the same instant La Mouquette was
hit twice in the belly. She had seen the troops take aim and instinctively, with her characteristic generosity of spirit, she had thrown herself in front of Catherine, shouting at her to mind out. With a scream she tumbled backwards under the force of the shots. Étienne rushed across to lift her up and carry her away, but she gestured that it was too late. Then she gave a last gasp, still smiling at the two of them as though she were happy to see them together now that she was taking her leave.

That was it, or so it seemed; the storm of bullets had passed, and the echo was fading away as it reached the houses in the village when the last shot went off, one single, solitary shot, after the others.

It went through Maheu's heart: he spun round and fell with his face in a puddle of coal-black water.

Stunned, La Maheude bent down.

‘Come on, love! Up you get. Just a little scratch, eh?'

Because of Estelle she did not have her hands free, and she had to tuck her under one arm in order to be able to turn Maheu's head.

‘Say something! Where does it hurt?'

His eyes were blank, and his mouth was foaming with blood. She understood. He was dead. And she sat down in the mud, holding her daughter under her arm like a parcel, and stared at her husband in utter disbelief.

The pit had been cleared. The captain had nervously removed his damaged cap and then replaced it on his head, but even as he palely surveyed the greatest disaster of his life he maintained his stiff, military bearing. Meanwhile, expressionless, his men reloaded their rifles. The horrified faces of Négrel and Dansaert could be seen at the window of the loading area. Souvarine was standing behind them, a deep furrow etched across his brow as though the steel bolt of his obsession had ominously planted itself there. Over in the other direction, on the crest of the hill, Bonnemort had not moved, still propped on his stick with one hand and shading his eyes with the other so that he could get a better view of the slaughter of his kin below. The wounded were screaming, and the dead were growing rigid in various twisted postures; all were splashed with the liquid mud left by the thaw,
and here and there some were sinking into the inky patches of coal that were now re-emerging from under the tatters of dirty snow. And in the midst of these tiny, wretched human corpses, all shrivelled by hunger, lay the carcass of Trumpet, a pitiful, monstrous heap of dead flesh.

Étienne had not been killed. Standing beside Catherine, who had collapsed with exhaustion and shock, he was still awaiting the arrival of death when the ringing tones of a man's voice startled him. It was Father Ranvier on his way back from saying Mass, and there he stood with his arms in the air like some crazed prophet, calling down the wrath of God on the murderers. He was proclaiming the dawn of a new age of justice and the imminent extermination of the bourgeoisie by the fires of heaven on account of this, the latest and most heinous of their crimes, for it was they who had brought about the massacre of the workers and caused the poor and outcast of this world to be slain.

The shots fired at Montsou had reverberated as far away as Paris, where the echo was considerable. For the past four days every opposition newspaper had been voicing its outrage and filling its front page with horrifying tales: twenty-five people wounded and fourteen dead, including two children and three women; and then there were the prisoners, with Levaque now something of a hero, credited with having displayed a grandeur worthy of the Ancients in his replies to the examining magistrate. The Empire had received a direct hit from these few bullets, but it was putting on a show of calm omnipotence, oblivious to the gravity of the wound it had sustained. There had simply been an unfortunate encounter, a remote incident somewhere or other in the coal-mining region, very far removed from the streets of Paris where public opinion was formed. People would soon forget, and the Company had been unofficially instructed to hush the matter up and put an end to this strike, which was dragging on in such a tiresome manner and beginning to pose a threat to society.

And so it was that on the following Wednesday morning three members of the Board were to be seen arriving in Montsou. The little town, hitherto shocked and not daring to rejoice in the massacre, now breathed again and tasted the joy of being saved at last. As it happened, there had been a marked improvement in the weather, and there was now bright sunshine, the sunshine of early February whose warmth begins to tinge the lilac shoots with green. The shutters of the Board's offices had been thrown open, and the huge building seemed to have sprung back to life; the most reassuring rumours began to issue forth, how the gentlemen had been deeply affected by the disaster and how they had hastened to the scene to open their paternal arms and embrace the wayward miners. Now that the blow had been delivered, admittedly rather more violently than they would have wished, they were falling over themselves in their desire to rescue the situation, and they took a number of welcome if overdue measures. First, they dismissed the Belgian workers and
made a great fuss about what an enormous concession this was to their workforce. Next, they ended the military occupation of the pits, which were no longer under threat from the crushed miners. By their efforts also a line was drawn under the affair of the vanished sentry at Le Voreux. The whole area had been searched and neither the rifle nor the corpse had been found, and so it was decided to post him as a deserter even though a crime was still suspected. In all matters they endeavoured in this way to take the heat out of the situation, fearful of what the morrow might bring and considering it dangerous to acknowledge their powerlessness in the face of a savage mob let loose on the creaking timbers of the old order. At the same time these attempts at conciliation did not prevent them from getting on with their own administrative affairs, for Deneulin had been seen returning to the Board's offices, where he had meetings with M. Hennebeau. Negotiations were in hand for the purchase of Vandame, and it was confidently expected that Deneulin would soon accept the gentlemen's terms.

But what caused a particular stir throughout the district were the large yellow notices that the directors had had posted in great numbers on the walls. They carried these few lines, in very large print: ‘Workers of Montsou, we do not wish the misguided behaviour whose sorry consequences you have witnessed in recent days to deprive workers of good sense and goodwill of their livelihood. We shall therefore reopen all pits on Monday morning, and when work has resumed, we shall investigate with due care and consideration all areas where it may be possible to make some improvement. We shall do everything that is just and within our power.' In one morning the ten thousand colliers filed past these notices. Not one of them said anything; many just shook their heads, while others simply sloped off without any trace of a reaction on their impassive faces.

Until then Village Two Hundred and Forty had persisted in its fierce resistance. It was as though the comrades' blood that had turned the mud at the pit red now barred the way for the others. Barely a dozen had gone back down, Pierron and a few toadies of his sort, and people merely watched them grimly as
they departed and returned, without a gesture or threat of any kind. Accordingly the notice posted on the wall of the church was greeted with sullen suspicion. There was no mention of the men who had been sacked: did that mean that the Company was refusing to take them back? The fear of reprisals, together with the thought of protesting as comrades against the dismissal of those who had been most directly involved, hardened their stubborn resolve. It was all a bit fishy, the whole thing needed looking into, they would return to work as and when these gentlemen were kind enough to state plainly what they meant. Silence hung heavily over the squat houses; even hunger was no longer of relevance, for now that the shadow of violent death had passed over their roofs it was evident that they might all be going to die whatever happened.

But one house among all the others, that of the Maheus, remained especially dark and silent, plunged in overwhelming grief. Since she had accompanied her husband's body to the cemetery, La Maheude had not said a word to anyone. After the shooting she had let Étienne bring Catherine home with them, half dead and covered in mud; and as she was undressing her in front of the young man before putting her to bed, she had imagined for a moment that she, too, had returned with a bullet in her stomach, for there were large blood stains on her shirt. But she soon realized why; the flow of puberty had finally broken through under the shock of this terrible day. Ah, what a marvellous stroke of good fortune this menstruation was! A fine blessing indeed to be able to make babies for gendarmes to slaughter in their turn! But she did not speak to Catherine, any more than she spoke to Étienne for that matter. He was now sharing a bed with Jeanlin, at the risk of being arrested, having been seized with such dread at the idea of returning to the dark depths of Réquillart that he preferred prison: the prospect of that horrific blackness after all these deaths made him shudder, and he was secretly afraid of the young soldier at rest down there beneath the rocks. Indeed, amid the torment of his defeat, he dreamed of prison as a place of refuge; but nobody even gave him a thought, and time dragged as he endeavoured in vain to find
ways of tiring himself out. Occasionally, however, La Maheude would look at them both with an air of resentment, as though she were asking them what they were doing in her house.

Once more they all found themselves sleeping on top of each other. Old Bonnemort had the bed the two little ones used to sleep in, and they slept with Catherine now that poor Alzire was no longer there to stick her hump into her big sister's ribs. It was when they went to bed that La Maheude most sensed the emptiness of the house, in the cold of her own bed that was now too large. Vainly she clutched Estelle to her, to fill the gap, but she was no substitute for her husband; and she wept silently for hours at a time. Then the days began to pass as before: still no bread, and yet no opportunity either to die once and for all; just scraps picked up here and there which did the poor the disservice of keeping them alive. Nothing about their lives had changed, it was simply that her husband wasn't there any more.

On the afternoon of the fifth day, Étienne, thoroughly depressed by the spectacle of this silent woman, left the parlour and walked slowly down the cobbled street through the village. The inactivity was difficult to bear and had prompted him to take endless walks, with his arms by his side, head down, always tormented by the one single thought. He had been trudging along like this for half an hour when he became aware, from an increase in his own sense of discomfort, that the comrades were coming out on to their doorsteps to watch him. What little popularity he still enjoyed had vanished with the first rifle shot, and now wherever he went he was met with blazing eyes that burned into his back as he passed. Each time he looked up, he saw men standing with a menacing air, or women peering from behind their curtains; and, confronted by their as yet unvoiced accusations and the suppressed anger evident in these staring eyes that were widened still further by hunger and tears, he became so ill at ease that he could scarcely walk. And behind him the mute reproach continued to intensify. He was so afraid that the entire village might appear on their doorsteps and scream their wretchedness at him that he returned home shaking.