Germinal - Emile Zola [239]
Just then La Maheude noticed Maheu, who was hanging back with a grim look on his face.
‘What’s up with you?’ she shouted to him. ‘Are you scared? You’re not going to let your comrades be taken to prison, are you?…Oh, if it weren’t for this kid, I’d soon show you how to do it!’
Estelle was hanging on to her neck and screaming, preventing her from joining La Brûlé and the others. When Maheu seemed not to hear, she kicked some bricks over towards his feet.
‘For God’s sake, take some. Have I got to spit in your face to give you the courage?’
The blood rushed to his cheeks, and he broke some bricks and threw them. She whipped him on so hard that it made his head spin, baying at him from behind and urging him to the kill, all the while nearly suffocating the child across her chest with her tensed arms; and he kept moving forward until eventually he stood directly in front of the rifles.
The small squad of men could barely be seen through the hail of brick. Fortunately the bricks were carrying too far, pitting the wall behind them. What should they do? The captain’s pale face flushed momentarily at the thought of going inside and turning their backs, but even that wasn’t possible any more, they’d be torn to pieces the instant they moved. A brick had just broken the peak on his cap, and blood was dripping from his forehead. Several of his men were injured; he could sense their fury and realized that they were now in the grip of the instinct for survival that makes men cease to obey their superiors. The sergeant had cursed aloud as his left shoulder was almost dislocated by a brick thumping into his flesh, bruising it like a laundry-woman’s paddle thudding into a pile of washing. Having been hit twice already, the young recruit had a broken thumb and could feel a burning sensation in his right knee: how much longer were they going to put up with this nonsense? A piece of brick had ricocheted and hit the veteran in the groin; he had turned green, and his rifle shook as his thin arms held it raised in front of him. Three times the captain was on the point of ordering them to fire. He was paralysed by anguish, and for a few seconds, which seemed like an eternity, he debated between duty and his own mind, between his beliefs as a soldier and his beliefs as a man. The bricks rained down even more fiercely, and just as he was opening his mouth, about to give the order ‘Fire!’, the rifles went off of their own accord, three shots at first, then five, then a general volley, and finally – in the midst of a great silence – one single shot, long after the others.
There was general stupefaction. They had actually fired, and the crowd stood there open-mouthed, motionless, unable to believe it. But then there were piercing shrieks, and a bugle sounded the cease-fire. Wild panic followed, a mad flight through the mud like a stampede of wounded cattle.
Bébert and Lydie had collapsed on top of each other after the first three shots; the girl had been hit in the face, while the young boy had a hole through his chest beneath his left shoulder. Lydie lay motionless, as though struck by a thunderbolt. But Bébert was still moving, and in the convulsions of his death throes he grabbed her, as though he wanted to hold her close again as he had held her in the dark hiding-place where they had spent their last night together. And at that moment Jeanlin, who had finally arrived from Réquillart, came skipping bleary-eyed through the smoke just in time to see Bébert embrace his little woman, and die.
The next five shots had brought down La Brûlé and Richomme. Hit in the back just as he was begging the comrades to stop, he had fallen to his knees; and having slumped over on to his side, he now lay gasping for breath, his eyes filled with the tears he had shed. The old woman, her bosom ripped apart, had keeled straight over, landing with a crack like a bundle of dry firewood as she stammered a final curse through a gargle of blood.
But after that the general volley of gunfire had cleared the terrain, mowing