The Debacle - Emile Zola [277]
‘Oh, what do I matter? There are plenty of others… Perhaps the blood-letting is necessary. War is life, and it cannot exist without death.’
Maurice’s eyes closed, for he was tired from the effort these few words had cost him. Henriette signalled to Jean not to argue. In her anger against human suffering she herself felt a wave of protest taking possession of her, for all her brave, feminine quietness, and in her clear eyes shone the heroic soul of their grandfather, the hero of Napoleonic legend.
Two more days went by, Thursday and Friday, with the same fires and the same massacres. The din of gunfire never stopped, and the batteries up on Montmartre, captured by the Versailles army, were mercilessly pounding the ones the Federals had set up at Belleville and in the Père-Lachaise cemetry. The latter were firing at random on Paris and shells had fallen in the rue de Richelieu and Place Vendôme. By the evening of the 25th the whole of the left bank was in the army’s hands. But on the right bank the barricades at the Place du Château d’Eau and the Place de la Bastille were still holding out, in fact they were real fortresses defended by incessant, withering fire. At dusk, in the final disarray of the last members of the Commune, Delescluze had picked up his walking-stick and coolly strolled along to the barricade blocking the Boulevard Voltaire, where he had fallen, killed instantly in a hero’s death. By dawn on the next day, the 26th, the Château d’Eau and the Bastille had been overcome, and the Communards occupied only La Villette, Belleville and Charonne, and in smaller and smaller numbers, now reduced to the hard core of desperadoes determined to die. For two more days they were to go on resisting and fighting furiously.
On Friday evening, as Jean was making his escape from the Place du Carrousel to go back to the rue des Orties, he witnessed at the bottom of the rue de Richelieu a summary execution which left him thoroughly shaken. For a couple of days two courts martial had been in session, one at the Luxembourg and the other at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Those condemned by the first were shot in the garden, while the victims of the second were dragged to the Lobau barracks where full-time firing squads shot them in the courtyard at almost point-blank range. It was there in particular that the butchery was frightful: men and even children condemned on just one piece of evidence, such as hands dirty with powder or feet that happened to be wearing army boots; innocent people falsely denounced, victims of personal vendettas, screaming explanations but unable to make themselves heard; droves of people herded in front of rifle-barrels, so many poor devils at once that there were not enough bullets to go round and the wounded were finished off with the butts of the rifles. Blood ran in streams and carts were taking away the bodies from morning till night. All over the conquered city other executions were going on, wherever some personal lust for revenge found a chance, in front of barricades, against walls in empty streets, on steps of public buildings. So it was that Jean saw some people who lived in that neighbourhood bring a woman and two men to the post guarding the Théâtre Français. The ordinary citizens were more ferocious than the soldiers, and the newspapers that had resumed publication were howling for extermination. The whole mob was particularly violent against the woman, who was one of the fire-raisers, fear of whom haunted people’s over-wrought imagination, and whom they accused of prowling in the night in front of well-to-do houses and throwing cans of lighted oil into the cellars. This one had been caught, it was alleged, crouching in front of a grating in the rue Sainte-Anne. In spite of her protestations and tears she was flung with the two men into the trench of a barricade not yet filled in and they were shot in this black pit like wolves caught in a trap. People strolling by watched this, and a lady and her husband stopped for a look, while a baker’s boy delivering a pie whistled a hunting-song.
Jean