Germinal - Emile Zola [188]
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:
‘We want bread! We want bread!’
As it happened, a retired deputy ran a canteen at La Victoire. Doubtless he had taken fright, because his booth was deserted. When the women returned from the lamp-room and the men had finished tearing up the railway, they all attacked the canteen, and its shutters soon gave way. There was no bread there, only two pieces of raw meat and a sack of potatoes. But in the course of their looting they came across fifty bottles of gin, which vanished like water into sand.
Étienne, having emptied his flask, was able to refill it. He was gradually succumbing to that ugly form of drunkenness that comes from drinking on