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By Root 1652 0

tapping his stick on the stony road; and when he looked round him, he saw the places he knew so well. Here he was at La Fourche-aux-Bœufs, where he had taken command of the mob that morning when they had stormed the mines. Today the same slave labour was beginning all over again, as dangerous and as badly paid as ever. Just over there, seven hundred metres under the ground, he could almost hear the steady, ceaseless clunk of picks as his black comrades, the very comrades he had seen going down that morning, dug away at the coal in silent fury. Maybe they had been defeated, maybe they had lost money and lives; but Paris would never forget the day that shots were fired at Le Voreux, and the life-blood of the Empire would continue to drain from that unstaunchable wound; and even though this industrial crisis was drawing to an end and the factories were opening again one by one, a state of war had been declared and there could be no more talk of peace. The miners had stood up to be counted, and they had tested their strength; and with their cry for justice they had rallied the workers throughout the length and breadth of France. This explained why their latest defeat had reassured no one. The bourgeois of Montsou might be celebrating, but deep down they felt the gnawing unease that accompanies the end of any strike; and in the heavy silence they kept looking over their shoulders to see if their fate was not already, ineluctably, sealed. They realized that the revolution would not go away, that it would return, perhaps tomorrow even, in the form of a general strike when the workers would all act as one and be able, with the support of strike funds, to hold out for months and on a full stomach. This time, like the last, a crumbling society had been given one more jolt, and they had listened as the ancient structure creaked beneath their feet. They could still feel the shock waves rising, tremor after tremor, until one day the whole tottering edifice would collapse and be engulfed like Le Voreux in one long slide into the abyss.

Étienne turned left along the road to Joiselle. This, he remembered, was where he had stopped the mob from attacking Gaston-Marie. Far away, in the clear morning light, he could make out the headgears of several mines, Mirou over to the right, Madeleine and Crèvecœur side by side. Everywhere things were humming, and the picks he thought he could hear beneath the ground were now tapping away from one end of the plain to the other. Tap, tap, over and over again, under the fields and roads and villages that lay basking in the light: a whole world of people labouring unseen in this underground prison, so deep beneath the enormous mass of rock that you had to know they were there if you were to sense the great wave of misery rising from them. And he began to wonder whether all the violence had really helped their cause. The smashed lamps and the severed cables and the torn-up rails, how pointless it had all been! What good had it done to go rushing around in a mob of three thousand people destroying everything in sight? Dimly he foresaw that one day the law might provide a more terrible and powerful weapon. His thinking was maturing, he had got the wild rage of grievance out of his system. Yes, La Maheude had been right in her usual, sensible way: next time they would show ’em. They would organize themselves calmly and without haste; they would make sure they understood each other; and they would band together in unions as soon as the law allowed it. Then one morning there they would be, millions upon millions of workers standing shoulder to shoulder against a few thousand idle rich, and that day they would take power and become the masters! Ah, what a dawn that would be, the new dawn of truth and justice! It would mean the instant demise of that squat and sated deity, that monstrous idol hidden away in the depths of its temple, in that secret far-away place where it fed on the flesh of poor wretches who never even set eyes upon it.

But Étienne was now leaving the Vandame road and coming out on to the cobbled