الفصل الفصل 320 · THE HEROES

All at once, the drum beat the charge.

The attack was a hurricane. On the evening before, in the darkness, the

barricade had been approached silently, as by a boa. Now, in broad

daylight, in that widening street, surprise was decidedly impossible,

rude force had, moreover, been unmasked, the cannon had begun the roar,

the army hurled itself on the barricade. Fury now became skill. A

powerful detachment of infantry of the line, broken at regular

intervals, by the National Guard and the Municipal Guard on foot, and

supported by serried masses which could be heard though not seen,

debauched into the street at a run, with drums beating, trumpets

braying, bayonets levelled, the sappers at their head, and,

imperturbable under the projectiles, charged straight for the barricade

with the weight of a brazen beam against a wall.

The wall held firm.

The insurgents fired impetuously. The barricade once scaled had a mane

of lightning flashes. The assault was so furious, that for one moment,

it was inundated with assailants; but it shook off the soldiers as the

lion shakes off the dogs, and it was only covered with besiegers as the

cliff is covered with foam, to reappear, a moment later, beetling,

black and formidable.

The column, forced to retreat, remained massed in the street,

unprotected but terrible, and replied to the redoubt with a terrible

discharge of musketry. Any one who has seen fireworks will recall the

sheaf formed of interlacing lightnings which is called a bouquet. Let

the reader picture to himself this bouquet, no longer vertical but

horizontal, bearing a bullet, buckshot or a biscaïen at the tip of each

one of its jets of flame, and picking off dead men one after another

from its clusters of lightning. The barricade was underneath it.

On both sides, the resolution was equal. The bravery exhibited there

was almost barbarous and was complicated with a sort of heroic ferocity

which began by the sacrifice of self.

This was the epoch when a National Guardsman fought like a Zouave. The

troop wished to make an end of it, insurrection was desirous of

fighting. The acceptance of the death agony in the flower of youth and

in the flush of health turns intrepidity into frenzy. In this fray,

each one underwent the broadening growth of the death hour. The street

was strewn with corpses.

The barricade had Enjolras at one of its extremities and Marius at the

other. Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade in his head, reserved

and sheltered himself; three soldiers fell, one after the other, under

his embrasure, without having even seen him; Marius fought unprotected.

He made himself a target. He stood with more than half his body above

the breastworks. There is no more violent prodigal than the avaricious

man who takes the bit in his teeth; there is no man more terrible in

action than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive. In battle he

was as in a dream. One would have pronounced him a phantom engaged in

firing a gun.

The insurgents’ cartridges were giving out; but not their sarcasms. In

this whirlwind of the sepulchre in which they stood, they laughed.

Courfeyrac was bareheaded.

“What have you done with your hat?” Bossuet asked him.

Courfeyrac replied:

“They have finally taken it away from me with cannon-balls.”

Or they uttered haughty comments.

“Can any one understand,” exclaimed Feuilly bitterly, “those men,—[and

he cited names, well-known names, even celebrated names, some belonging

to the old army]—who had promised to join us, and taken an oath to aid

us, and who had pledged their honor to it, and who are our generals,

and who abandon us!”

And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with a grave smile.

“There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the

stars, from a great distance.”

The interior of the barricade was so strewn with torn cartridges that

one would have said that there had been a snowstorm.

The assailants had numbers in their favor; the insurgents had position.

They were at the top of a wall, and they thundered point-blank upon the

soldiers tripping over the dead and wounded and entangled in the

escarpment. This barricade, constructed as it was and admirably

buttressed, was really one of those situations where a handful of men

hold a legion in check. Nevertheless, the attacking column, constantly

recruited and enlarged under the shower of bullets, drew inexorably

nearer, and now, little by little, step by step, but surely, the army

closed in around the barricade as the vice grasps the wine-press.

One assault followed another. The horror of the situation kept

increasing.

Then there burst forth on that heap of paving-stones, in that Rue de la

Chanvrerie, a battle worthy of a wall of Troy. These haggard, ragged,

exhausted men, who had had nothing to eat for four and twenty hours,

who had not slept, who had but a few more rounds to fire, who were

fumbling in their pockets which had been emptied of cartridges, nearly

all of whom were wounded, with head or arm bandaged with black and

blood-stained linen, with holes in their clothes from which the blood

trickled, and who were hardly armed with poor guns and notched swords,

became Titans. The barricade was ten times attacked, approached,

assailed, scaled, and never captured.

In order to form an idea of this struggle, it is necessary to imagine

fire set to a throng of terrible courages, and then to gaze at the

conflagration. It was not a combat, it was the interior of a furnace;

there mouths breathed the flame; there countenances were extraordinary.

The human form seemed impossible there, the combatants flamed forth

there, and it was formidable to behold the going and coming in that red

glow of those salamanders of the fray.

The successive and simultaneous scenes of this grand slaughter we

renounce all attempts at depicting. The epic alone has the right to

fill twelve thousand verses with a battle.

One would have pronounced this that hell of Brahmanism, the most

redoubtable of the seventeen abysses, which the Veda calls the Forest

of Swords.

They fought hand to hand, foot to foot, with pistol shots, with blows

of the sword, with their fists, at a distance, close at hand, from

above, from below, from everywhere, from the roofs of the houses, from

the windows of the wine-shop, from the cellar windows, whither some had

crawled. They were one against sixty.

The façade of Corinthe, half demolished, was hideous. The window,

tattooed with grape-shot, had lost glass and frame and was nothing now

but a shapeless hole, tumultuously blocked with paving-stones.

Bossuet was killed; Feuilly was killed; Courfeyrac was killed;

Combeferre, transfixed by three blows from a bayonet in the breast at

the moment when he was lifting up a wounded soldier, had only time to

cast a glance to heaven when he expired.

Marius, still fighting, was so riddled with wounds, particularly in the

head, that his countenance disappeared beneath the blood, and one would

have said that his face was covered with a red kerchief.

Enjolras alone was not struck. When he had no longer any weapon, he

reached out his hands to right and left and an insurgent thrust some

arm or other into his fist. All he had left was the stumps of four

swords; one more than François I. at Marignan. Homer says: “Diomedes

cuts the throat of Axylus, son of Teuthranis, who dwelt in happy

Arisba; Euryalus, son of Mecistæus, exterminates Dresos and Opheltios,

Esepius, and that Pedasus whom the naiad Abarbarea bore to the

blameless Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidytes of Percosius;

Antilochus, Ablerus; Polypætes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otos, of Cyllene;

and Teucer, Aretaon. Meganthios dies under the blows of Euripylus’

pike. Agamemnon, king of the heroes, flings to earth Elatos, born in

the rocky city which is laved by the sounding river Satnoïs.” In our

old poems of exploits, Esplandian attacks the giant marquis Swantibore

with a cobbler’s shoulder-stick of fire, and the latter defends himself

by stoning the hero with towers which he plucks up by the roots. Our

ancient mural frescoes show us the two Dukes of Bretagne and Bourbon,

armed, emblazoned and crested in war-like guise, on horseback and

approaching each other, their battle-axes in hand, masked with iron,

gloved with iron, booted with iron, the one caparisoned in ermine, the

other draped in azure: Bretagne with his lion between the two horns of

his crown, Bourbon helmeted with a monster fleur de lys on his visor.

But, in order to be superb, it is not necessary to wear, like Yvon, the

ducal morion, to have in the fist, like Esplandian, a living flame, or,

like Phyles, father of Polydamas, to have brought back from Ephyra a

good suit of mail, a present from the king of men, Euphetes; it

suffices to give one’s life for a conviction or a loyalty. This

ingenuous little soldier, yesterday a peasant of Bauce or Limousin, who

prowls with his clasp-knife by his side, around the children’s nurses

in the Luxembourg garden, this pale young student bent over a piece of

anatomy or a book, a blond youth who shaves his beard with

scissors,—take both of them, breathe upon them with a breath of duty,

place them face to face in the Carrefour Boucherat or in the blind

alley Planche-Mibray, and let the one fight for his flag, and the other

for his ideal, and let both of them imagine that they are fighting for

their country; the struggle will be colossal; and the shadow which this

raw recruit and this sawbones in conflict will produce in that grand

epic field where humanity is striving, will equal the shadow cast by

Megaryon, King of Lycia, tiger-filled, crushing in his embrace the

immense body of Ajax, equal to the gods.