Germinal - Emile Zola [213]
At dawn, on his way back, he found the sentry still standing on the spoil-heap. This time he would surely be spotted. As he walked along, he thought of these soldiers, of these men of the people who had been armed against the people. How easily the revolution would have triumphed had the army suddenly come over to their side! All it needed was for the working man or the peasant in his barracks to remember his origins. This was the supreme danger, the doomsday vision which set bourgeois teeth chattering when they thought about the possibility of the troops defecting. In two short hours they would be swept away, wiped out, along with all the pleasures and abominations of their iniquitous lives. Already it was said that whole regiments had become infected with socialism. Was it true? Would the age of justice dawn thanks to the very cartridges issued by the bourgeois themselves? And as his mind raced with new hope, the young man imagined the regiment deployed to guard the mines deciding instead to support the strike, turning their guns on the Company’s directors, and at last delivering the mine into the hands of the miners themselves.
He suddenly found himself climbing the spoil-heap, his head spinning with these thoughts. Why not have a chat with the soldier? That way he’d learn how the fellow saw things. Casually he drew nearer, pretending to scavenge for old wood among the rubbish. Still the sentry did not move.
‘Hallo, comrade. Bloody awful weather!’ Étienne said finally. ‘It looks like snow.’
The soldier was short, with very fair hair and a pale, gentle face covered in freckles. Wrapped in his cape he looked ill at ease, every inch the raw recruit.
‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it?’ he muttered.
And his blue eyes gazed at the wan sky and a grey misty dawn in which coal-dust seemed to hang like lead over the distant plain.
‘Damned stupid of them to stick you up here like this so you can freeze to death!’ Étienne went on. ‘It’s not as if we’re expecting the Cossacks,1 is it?…And there’s always such a terrible wind up here, too!’
The little soldier shivered uncomplainingly. In fact there was the dry-stone hut in which old Bonnemort used to shelter on the nights when it was blowing a gale; but the soldier’s orders were not to move from the summit of the spoil-heap, and so he stayed where he was, his hands so stiff from the cold that he could no longer feel his rifle. He belonged to a detachment of sixty men whose job it was to guard Le Voreux; and as this cruel watch fell to him frequently, he had more than once nearly breathed his last up here, all feeling gone from his feet. But it was what the job required; passive obedience had finally numbed his brain, and he replied to questions with the garbled mumblings of a child who is half asleep.
For a quarter of an hour Étienne tried in vain to get him to talk politics. He answered yes and no but without appearing to understand; some comrades said the captain was republican; as for himself, he didn’t really know, it was all the same to him. If they ordered him to shoot, he’d shoot, so as not to be punished. As Étienne, the working man, listened to him, he was filled with the people’s instinctive hatred of the army, of these brothers whose allegiance changed the minute they pulled on a pair of red trousers.
‘So what’s your name?’
‘Jules.’
‘And where are you from?’
‘From Plogoff, over yonder.’
He gestured randomly with his arm. It was in Brittany, that was all he knew. His small, pale face lit up, and he began to laugh with