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By Root 1721 0

had suffered particularly; Hoton and Fauvelle, having both reduced their workforces, had just gone bust one after the other. At the Dutilleul flour-mills the last grindstone had stopped turning on the second Saturday of the month, and the Bleuze rope-works, which made cables for the pits, had been been brought down once and for all by the halt in production. Around Marchiennes the situation was daily getting worse: not one furnace operating at the Gagebois glass factory, continual lay-offs at the Sonneville construction works, only one of the three blast-furnaces at Les Forges still functioning, and not a single battery of coke-ovens was to be seen burning on the horizon. The strike by the Montsou miners, itself the result of the industrial crisis which had been worsening for the past two years, had in turn exacerbated that crisis by precipitating this widespread bankruptcy. To the several causes of this painful predicament – the lack of orders from America, the fact that so much capital was tied up in excess production capacity – was now added an unforeseen lack of coal to fuel the few boilers that were still functioning; and this was the final agony, machines deprived of their sustenance because the pits themselves were no longer supplying it. Alarmed by the poor economic outlook, the Company had reduced output and starved its workers, with the inevitable result that since the end of December it had not had a single lump of coal in any of its pit-yards. It was a case of chain reaction: the problems began far away, one collapse led to another, industries knocked each other over as they fell, and all in such a rapid series of disasters that the effects could be felt as close as the neighbouring towns and cities of Lille, Douai and Valenciennes, where whole families were being ruined by bankers calling in their loans.

Often, at a bend in the road, Étienne would stop in the freezing night air and listen to the sound of structures giving way. He would take deep lungfuls of the darkness, filled with euphoria at the prospect of this black void and with the hope that the new day would dawn on the extermination of the old world, with not a single fortune still intact and everything levelled to the ground by the scythe of equality. But amid this general destruction it was the Company’s pits which interested him the most. He would set off again, blinded by the darkness, and visit each of them one by one, delighted every time he learned of some further damage. New rock-falls were occurring constantly, and with increasing seriousness the longer the roadways remained out of use. Above the northern roadway at Mirou the subsidence was so great now that a whole hundred-metre stretch of the Joiselle road had fallen in as though there had been an earthquake; and the Company would compensate landowners at once when their fields disappeared, not even bothering to haggle over the price, so anxious were they not to let the news of such accidents spread. Crèvecœur and Madeleine, where the rock was particularly unstable, were suffering more and more blockages. There was talk of two deputies being buried alive at La Victoire; there had been flooding at Feutry-Cantel; one kilometre of roadway at Saint-Thomas would have to be bricked where the timbering had been poorly maintained and was splitting all along its length. Huge repair bills were thus mounting by the hour, making severe inroads into shareholders’ dividends, and in the long run the rapid destruction of the pits would end up consuming those famous Montsou deniers that had increased in value one hundredfold over the course of a century.

And so, presented with the news of this series of disasters, Étienne began once more to hope, and he came to believe that a third month of resistance would finish the monster off, that weary, sated beast squatting like an idol in its far-away temple. He knew that the trouble at Montsou had caused much excitement in the Paris press: a furious debate was raging between the newspapers sympathetic to the government and those which supported the opposition,