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By Root 2167 0

Maurice’s mind – his sudden meeting with Jean. The latter had been in Paris for three days, having reached there penniless and still emaciated and run down by two months of fever that had kept him in a Brussels hospital, and having found a former captain of the 106th, Captain Ravaud, he had at once joined up in the new company of the 124th under his command. He had regained his corporal’s stripes and that evening had been the last to leave the Prince Eugene barracks, with his squad, to go across to the left bank where the whole army was under orders to concentrate, when a dense crowd had brought them to a halt. There was a lot of shouting and talk of disarming the soldiers. He was quite coolly telling them to bugger off, and all this was nothing to do with him – he was just carrying out orders and doing no harm to anybody – when he uttered a cry of amazement, for Maurice rushed up and threw his arms round him in an affectionate embrace.

‘What, it’s you, Jean?… My sister wrote to me. And to think that this morning I meant to go and inquire about you at the War Ministry!’

Jean’s eyes were filling with tears of joy.

‘Oh my dear boy, how wonderful to see you again! I’ve been looking for you, too, but where could I ever get hold of you in this bloody great city?’

The crowd was still threatening, and Maurice turned round to them.

‘Citizens, let me talk to them! They are good chaps and I can answer for them!’

He took both his friend’s hands and lowered his voice:

‘You will stay with us, won’t you?’

An expression of intense surprise came over Jean’s face.

‘With you, what do you mean?’

For a few minutes he listened while Maurice worked himself up against the government and against the army, recalling all that the people had gone through, explaining that at last they were going to be the masters, punish the incompetent and the cowards and save the Republic. As he strove to follow all this Jean’s calm face, the face of an unlettered peasant, darkened with growing distress.

‘Oh no, my dear friend, I’m not staying with you if it’s for that kind of job! My captain has told me to go to Vaugirard with my men and I’m going. If the wrath of God were there I should go all the same. It’s natural, surely you realize that.’

He began to laugh in his open-hearted way, and added:

‘No, it’s you who are going to come with us.’

Maurice let go of his hands in a gesture of furious revolt. And there the two of them stood facing each other for several seconds, one worked up by the fit of madness that was infecting the whole of Paris, a malady of long standing with its roots in the evil ferment of the previous reign, the other strong in his common sense and ignorance, still healthy from having grown up far away from all this, in the land of hard work and thrift. And yet they were brothers, linked by a strong attachment, and it was a terrible wrench when a sudden surge of the crowd separated them.

‘Be seeing you, Maurice!’

‘Be seeing you, Jean!’

It was a regiment, the 79th, emerging in a solid mass from a side street, which had thrown the crowd back on to the pavement. There was more shouting, but they didn’t dare bar the roadway against the soldiers who were being marched along by the officers. And so the little squad of the 124th was free to follow on without any further hold-up.

‘Be seeing you, Jean!’

‘Be seeing you, Maurice!’

They went on waving to each other, yielding to the brutal fatality of this separation, but each with his heart full of the other.

During the days which followed it was at first crowded out of Maurice’s mind because of the extraordinary events happening one after another. On the 19th Paris had woken up without a government, more surprised than frightened to hear about the sudden panic that during the night had swept away the army, public services and government ministers to Versailles, and as the weather was superb on this lovely March Sunday, Paris calmly came down into the streets to have a look at the barricades. A big white poster put up by the Central Committee summoning people for communal elections sounded