Germinal - Emile Zola [235]
‘Stand back!’ the captain repeated very loudly. ‘I’m not here to negotiate. My orders are to guard the pit, and guard it I shall…And stop pushing into my men, or I’ll soon give you a reason to stand back.’
Despite the firmness of his voice he was turning paler and paler, his anxiety growing at the sight of the steadily rising tide of miners. He was due to be relieved at noon but, fearing that he might not be able to hold out till then, he had just sent a pit-boy off to Montsou to summon reinforcements.
He was answered by a storm of yelling:
‘Death to the foreigners! Death to the Belgians!…We work here, and what we say goes!’
Étienne stepped back in dismay. It had come to this, and now all that remained was to fight and die. He gave up trying to restrain the comrades, and the mob gradually rolled forward towards the small detachment of soldiers. The miners numbered nearly four hundred now, and people were still emptying out of the surrounding villages and rushing to the scene. They were all sending up the same cry, as Maheu and Levaque shouted furiously at the soldiers:
‘Just go! Leave us! We’ve no quarrel with you!’
‘This has got nothing to do with you,’ La Maheude continued. ‘Leave us to sort out our own business.’
Behind her La Levaque added even more vehemently:
‘Have we got to kill you to get past? Come on, just kindly bugger off!’
And even Lydie’s little, high-pitched voice could be heard coming from the densest part of the crowd where she and Bébert had endeavoured to get out of sight:
‘Look at those silly soldiers all in rows!’
Catherine was standing a few paces away, watching and listening in bewilderment as she surveyed this further scene of violence in which it was her bad luck to have been caught up. Hadn’t she been through enough already? What had she done wrong for fate to hound her like this? Even as recently as the day before she had still not been able to understand why people were getting so worked up about this strike. Then it had seemed to her that if you were already in trouble, you didn’t go looking for more. But now her heart was bursting with the need to hate; she remembered all the things Étienne had said on those long evenings and she tried to hear what he was saying to the soldiers. He was treating them like comrades, reminding them that they, too, were men of the people and telling them that they ought to be siding with the people against those who exploited the people’s poverty.
But then there was a disturbance in the crowd, and an old woman was suddenly ejected at the front. It was La Brûlé, looking terrifyingly thin, her arms and neck bare, who had arrived in such great haste that her grey hair was tumbling down over her eyes:
‘Thank God for that. I made it!’ she stammered, gasping for breath. ‘That damned toady Pierron locked me in the cellar!’
And without further ado she rounded on the troops, spewing abuse from her blackened mouth:
‘You lousy bunch of sods! Always licking your masters’ boots, aren’t you, but never afraid to attack the poor. Oh no!’
Then everyone else joined in, and the insults flew thick and fast. Some still shouted: ‘Long live the squaddies! Throw the officer down the shaft!’ But soon there was only one cry: ‘Down with the army!’ These men who had listened impassively, without a flicker of expression, to the appeals to brotherly solidarity and the friendly attempts to make them change sides remained no less passive and unflinching under the barrage of bad language. Behind them the captain had drawn his sword; and as the