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By Root 1707 0

from which they emerged looking like negroes, or playing hide-and-seek among the wood stores, where they could lose themselves as in a virgin forest. Then they had stormed the spoil-heap, sliding down the smooth parts on their bottoms while it continued to smoulder away underneath; or else they would disappear among the brambles that grew in the older parts of the mine, vanishing from sight for the entire day and occupying themselves with quiet little games like mischievous mice. And gradually they extended their empire. They fought till they bled among the piles of bricks, they roamed the fields and ate all kinds of lush grasses, just as they came, without bread, or they grubbed along the banks of the canal where they caught fish in the mud and swallowed them raw. Then they ventured even further afield, whole kilometres away, as far as the woods at Vandame, where they feasted on strawberries in the spring, in summer on hazelnuts and bilberries. Little by little they had made the vast plain their own.

But if they were now to be found prowling round the paths between Montsou and Marchiennes with the look of young wolves in their eyes, it was because of their growing compulsion to plunder. Jeanlin was always the leader of these expeditions, ordering his troops into battle against all manner of target, laying waste onion fields, pillaging orchards, swooping on shop displays. People round about accused the striking miners, and there was talk of a huge, organized gang. One day he had even forced Lydie to rob her mother, making her bring him two dozen sticks of barley sugar that La Pierronne kept in a jar on a shelf in one of her windows; and though she was beaten for it, the little girl had not betrayed him, so much did she fear his authority. The worst of it was that he kept the lion’s share of everything for himself. Bébert, too, had to hand all booty over to him, happy just not to be hit and that Jeanlin didn’t keep the lot.

For a while now Jeanlin had been overstepping the mark. He would beat Lydie as if she were a regular wife, and he exploited Bébert’s gullibility in order to involve him in various unpleasant escapades. It amused him greatly to lead this big lad by the nose when he was much stronger than he was and could have laid him out with a single blow. He despised them both, treating them like slaves and telling them that he had a princess for a mistress and that they were not worthy to appear before her. And indeed for the past week he had taken to leaving them suddenly at the end of a street or a turning in the road, wherever he happened to be, having ordered them with a terrifying air to return at once to the village. First, though, he would pocket their plunder.

And this was what happened on this particular evening also.

‘Give it here,’ he said, grabbing the cod out of his comrade’s hands when the three of them stopped at a bend in the road just outside Réquillart.

Bébert protested.

‘I want some, too, you know. It was me that took it.’

‘What do you mean?’ Jeanlin shouted. ‘You’ll get some if I say so, but not now, that’s for sure. Tomorrow, if there’s any left.’

He punched Lydie and lined the pair of them up like soldiers at attention. Then he went behind them:

‘Now you’re both going to stand like that for the next five minutes, and you’re not to turn round…And, by God, if you do turn round, wild beasts will come and eat you…After that you’re to go straight home. And if you, Bébert, so much as lay a finger on Lydie on the way, I shall know all about it, and I’ll thump the pair of you.’

Then he slipped away into the darkness, so quietly that they didn’t even hear the sound of his bare feet as he left. The two children stood quite still for the whole five minutes, not daring to look behind them in case they received a clout from the blue. A deep affection had slowly grown up between them, born of their common terror. Bébert, for his part, thought constantly about taking Lydie and holding her very tightly in his arms, the way he had seen others do; and she would have liked him to, for it would have made