The Beast Within - Emile Zola [187]
‘I tell you Jacques is under here!’ Flore kept repeating.
She seemed to derive some comfort from this obstinate, mindless cry, as if it allowed her to vent her despair.
‘Listen! He’s calling!’
The tender was pinned beneath the carriages, which had piled on top of each other and collapsed on to it. Now that the engine was making less noise, they could hear a man screaming at the top of his voice from inside the wreckage. As they picked their way towards him, the screaming grew louder and louder; he sounded in such terrible pain that the rescuers could not bear to hear him and started weeping and shouting themselves. When they eventually reached him and freed his legs to lift him out, the screaming stopped. He was dead.
‘That’s not him,’ shouted Flore. ‘He’s underneath, further down!’
With a remarkable display of strength, she lifted wheels and flung them out of the way, tore the cladding from the carriage roofs, smashed open doors and removed lengths of coupling. When she came across a body or someone who was injured, she called to one of the others to come and take them away, not wishing to abandon her frantic search for even a second.
Cabuche, Pecqueux and Misard worked behind her. Séverine, weary from standing on her feet doing nothing, had sat down on a broken carriage-seat. Misard, having recovered his usual implacable indifference to all around him, avoided the more tiring work and spent most of his time carrying away bodies. Like Flore, he examined each corpse as if hoping to recognize someone from the thousands and thousands of faces that for the last ten years had flowed past their window, coming and going in a flash, leaving behind them only the uniform impression of a nameless crowd. But no! It was still the same anonymous stream of people, always on the move. Death had come to them, cruelly and unexpectedly, but death was as faceless as the frantic pace of life, which had borne them past their window, rushing madly towards some unknown future. They could attach no name, no piece of information to the horror-struck faces of these wretched individuals, who had been brought down in full flight, trampled underfoot and crushed, like soldiers whose bodies fill holes in the ground before the charge of an advancing army. There was one person whom Flore thought she recognized, a man she had spoken to on the day the train was caught in the blizzard, an American. His face was quite familiar, but she didn’t know his name or anything about him or his family. Misard carried him away, along with the other bodies that had met their end there. No one knew where they came from and no one knew where they were bound.
In the first-class compartment of an overturned carriage another harrowing spectacle met their eyes. They found a young couple, newly weds no doubt. They had been thrown together awkwardly; the woman had fallen on top of her husband and was unable to move to take her weight off him. He was being suffocated and was about to expire. The woman, whose mouth was free, was calling desperately for someone to help them quickly, heartbroken and horrified at the thought that she was killing him. When they succeeded in getting them out, the woman died immediately; there was a large hole in her side, made by one of the buffers. The man regained consciousness and knelt beside her, wailing inconsolably. The woman still had tears in her eyes.
The dead now numbered twelve, and there were more than thirty injured. They had at last managed to free the tender. From time to time Flore stopped to thrust her head down between the splintered wood and twisted metal, frantically looking for some sign of the driver. Suddenly she shouted out, ‘I can see him! He’s down there! That’s his arm with the blue woollen sleeve! He’s not moving! He’s not breathing!’
She stood up, swearing