His voice was drowned by a fresh clamour. Catherine herself had just appeared, dazzled by the bright sunshine and terrified to find herself surrounded by these savages. As she stood there trying to catch her breath, her hands bleeding and her legs about to give way beneath her after climbing those hundred and two ladders, La Maheude saw her and ran forward with her arm raised.
‘You too, you little bitch?…Your own mother is dying of hunger, and you go and betray her for that pimp of yours!’
Maheu caught her arm and prevented the blow. But he started shaking his daughter and, like his wife, reproaching her furiously for how she had behaved. They had both lost control and were screaming wildly above the noise of their comrades.
The sight of Catherine had been the final straw for Étienne.
‘Come on!’ he kept insisting. ‘Let’s go to the other pits! And as for you, you filthy bastard, you’re coming with us!’
Chaval scarcely had time to fetch his clogs from the changing-room and to throw his jersey round his freezing shoulders. They dragged him away with them, forcing him to run along in their midst. Distraught, Catherine also put her clogs back on and buttoned up the old jacket, a man’s one, which she had been wearing since the weather turned cold; and she hurried along behind her man, not wanting to let him out of her sight, for they were surely going to slaughter him.
Jean-Bart emptied in two minutes. Jeanlin had found a horn and was blowing it raucously as though he were rounding up cattle. The women, La Brûlé, La Levaque, La Mouquette, all gathered up their skirts in order to run better, while Levaque twirled an axe about as though it were a drum-major’s baton. Other comrades were still arriving, and there was nearly a thousand of them now, a disorderly rabble that flowed out on to the road like a river in spate. The exit was too narrow, and fences were smashed.
‘To the pits! Let’s get the scabs! No more work!’
And suddenly Jean-Bart fell completely silent. Not a worker to be seen, not a breath to be heard. Deneulin came out of the deputies’ room and, all alone, gesturing that no one should follow, he went round inspecting the pit. He was pale and very calm. First he stopped at the shaft and looked up at the severed cables: the steel strands dangled uselessly in the air, and he could see where the file had left its wound, a gleaming sore surrounded by black grease. Then he went up to the winding-gear and stared at the motionless crank-rod, which looked like the joint of some colossal limb that had been suddenly paralysed; he felt the metal, which had already cooled, and its cold touch made him shiver as though he had laid his hand on a corpse. Then he went down to the boilers, where he walked slowly along the line of extinguished fire-grates, now wide open and flooded, and he tapped his foot against the boilers, which sounded hollow. Well, this was it. His ruin was complete. Even if he mended the cables and relit the fires, where would he find the men? Another two weeks of the strike and he was bankrupt. And in the certain prospect of this disaster he no longer felt hatred towards these bandits from Montsou but rather a kind of complicity, as though together they were all expiating the one same everlasting and universal sin. Animals no doubt they were, but animals who could not read and who were starving to death.
IV
And so, out on the open plain that lay white with frost beneath the pale winter sun, the mob departed along the road, spilling out on both sides into the fields of beet.
By the time they had reached La Fourche-aux-Bœufs, Étienne had taken charge. Without interrupting their advance, he shouted out commands and organized the march. Jeanlin raced along in front, playing barbarous tunes on his horn. Then came the women, in rows, some armed with sticks: La Maheude had a wild look in her eye, as though she were straining to catch a distant glimpse of the promised land of justice, while La Brûlé, La Levaque and La Mouquette strode out in their tattered skirts like soldiers marching off to war. If they ran into any opposition, they’d soon see if the gendarmes would dare to hit a woman. The men followed, a disorderly herd that spread wider and wider as it stretched away into the distance: and among the forest of crowbars Levaque’s solitary axe stood out, its blade glinting in the sunlight. Étienne, in the middle, was keeping an eye on Chaval, whom he made walk in front of him; while behind him Maheu looked thunderous and kept casting dirty looks at Catherine, who was the only woman back here among the men and who had insisted on running along beside her lover to prevent any harm coming to him. Some were without caps, their hair tousled by the breeze; and apart from the wild blasts of Jeanlin’s horn all that could be heard was the clatter of clogs, which sounded like cattle stampeding.
But all at once a new cry rang out.
‘We want bread! We want bread!’1
It was midday: the hunger consequent on six weeks of strike was gnawing at empty bellies, and appetites had been whetted by all this rushing about the countryside. The odd crust eaten that morning and the few chestnuts brought by La Mouquette were already a distant memory; stomachs were crying out to be fed, and the pain of it added to their fury against the traitors.
‘To the pits! Everybody out! We want bread!’
Étienne, who had earlier refused his share of food in the village, felt an unbearable wrenching sensation in his chest. He said nothing, but every so often he would automatically raise his flask to his lips and take a mouthful of gin: he felt so shaky that he had convinced himself he needed it if he were to carry on. His cheeks were burning, and a fire shone in his eyes. Nevertheless he continued to keep his head, and he was still determined to try and prevent pointless destruction.
When they reached the Joiselle road, a hewer from Vandame who had joined the mob to get his own back on his boss screamed to the comrades to turn right:
‘Let’s go to Gaston-Marie! We’ll stop the pump and flood Jean-Bart!’
The crowd, easily led, was already turning, even though Étienne protested and begged them not to stop the drainage. What was the point of destroying the roadways? Despite all his grievances it offended the workman in him. Maheu, too, thought it not right to vent anger on a machine. But the hewer continued to call for vengeance, and Étienne had to shout even louder:
‘Let’s go to Mirou. There are still scabs down there…Mirou! Mirou!’
With a sweep of his arm he had steered the mob on to the road that led off to the left, while Jeanlin resumed his position at the head and blew even harder on his horn. There was a great commotion and, for the time being, Gaston-Marie was saved.
They covered the four kilometres to Mirou in half an hour, proceeding almost at the double over the boundless plain. On this side the canal cut across it like a long ribbon of ice; and only the bare trees along its banks, looking like giant candelabras in the frost, interrupted the flat monotony of the landscape as it stretched away into the distance and eventually merged with the sky like a sea. A slight undulation in the terrain hid Montsou and Marchiennes from view, leaving nothing but a vast featureless space.
As they reached the pit, they saw a deputy take up position on the overhead railway next to the screening-shed, waiting for them. Everybody recognized Quandieu, who was the senior deputy in Montsou, an old man getting on for seventy, whose hair and skin were white and who was still in quite miraculously good health for a miner.
‘What the bloody hell do you lot want,’ he shouted, ‘wandering about the countryside like this?’
The mob came to a halt. They were no longer dealing with a boss but a comrade, and their respect for the old worker gave them pause.
‘There are men below,’ Étienne said. ‘Tell them to come up.’
‘Yes, there are! A good six dozen,’ Quandieu replied. ‘Everyone else is too scared of you, you buggers!…But I can tell you here and now, not one of them is coming up, or you’ll have me to answer to!’
People started shouting; the men jostled, and the women stepped forward. The deputy quickly came down from the railway and blocked their path to the door.
Maheu tried to intervene.
‘Come on, mate, we’re within o
ur rights. How are we going to have a general strike if we can’t force the comrades to join us?’
The old man was silent for a moment. Plainly his ignorance of the procedures of joint action was as great as Maheu’s. Finally he replied:
‘Within your rights? That’s as may be. But I have my orders, and there’s only me here. The men are down there till three, and till three they’ll stay.’
His last few words were lost amid the booing. Fists were raised, and already the women were screaming at him, so that he could feel their hot breath on his face. But he stood his ground, his head held high, with his snow-white hair and little pointed beard; and courage lent such power to his voice that he could be heard quite clearly above the din.
‘As God is my witness, you shall not pass!…As sure as night follows day, I’d rather die than have you lay a finger on those cables…So stop your pushing and shoving, or I’ll throw myself down the shaft here and now!’
This caused a great stir, and the crowd drew back in shocked amazement. He continued:
‘And which bastard among you doesn’t understand that?…I’m just a worker, the same as the rest of you. I’ve been told to guard the place, and guard it I will.’
And this was the limit of Quandieu’s logic as, with a soldier’s sense of duty, he refused to yield, standing there with his narrow head and his eyes that had been dimmed by the gloomy darkness of half a century spent working underground. The comrades gazed at him, moved by what he said, for somewhere within them this soldierly obedience, this sense of brotherhood and resigned acceptance in the face of danger, had struck a chord. Thinking them not yet persuaded, he insisted:
‘I will! I’ll throw myself down the shaft here and now!’
The mob reacted as one: everybody wheeled round and made off down the road to the right, racing away across the countryside and into the distance. Once more the cries went up:
‘To Madeleine! And Crèvecœur! Everybody out! We want bread! We want bread!’
But in the middle of this onward rush a scuffle had broken out. Chaval had evidently tried to take advantage of the situation and escape, for Étienne had just grabbed him by the arm and was threatening to beat the daylights out of him if he so much as tried anything. Chaval, meanwhile, was struggling to get free and protesting furiously:
‘What the hell is this? It’s a free country, isn’t it? I’ve been freezing to death for the last hour, and I need a wash. Let go of me!’
It was true that sweat had glued the coal-dust to his skin, which was becoming quite painful, and his jersey afforded little protection against the elements.
‘Keep moving, or you’ll soon see what sort of a wash you get,’ Étienne replied. ‘This’ll teach you to go round stirring things.’
On they raced, and eventually Étienne looked round to find Catherine, who was still keeping up. It pained him to sense her close by and to know that she was in a wretched state, shivering from the cold in her scruffy man’s jacket and her muddy trousers. She must have been fit to drop, and yet still she kept on running.
‘It’s all right. You can go,’ he said finally.
Catherine appeared not to hear. But her eyes met Étienne’s and shot him a brief look of reproach. And on she ran. Why did he want her to abandon her man? True, Chaval had hardly been very kind to her; in fact sometimes he beat her. But he was her man, the one who had had her first; and it made her furious to see them all ganging up on him like this, a thousand against one. She would have defended him if she’d had to, not from love but as a matter of pride.
‘Clear off!’ Maheu insisted vehemently.
This order from her father slowed her for a moment. She was trembling, and tears welled in her eyes. But despite her fear she caught up again and continued to run with them. After that they let her be.
The mob crossed the Joiselle road and then briefly made for Cron before heading up towards Cougny. Here factory chimneys stood like stripes across the flat horizon, and the road was lined with wooden sheds and brick-built workshops with wide, dusty windows. They raced through Villages One Hundred and Eighty and Seventy-Six one after the other, in quick succession, past the tiny houses; and in both villages the noise of their shouting and the clarion calls of the horn brought whole families out to see, men, women and children, who started running also, joining on behind their comrades. By the time they reached Madeleine there were at least fifteen hundred of them. The road sloped gently downwards, and the roaring torrent of strikers had to flow round the spoil-heap before streaming out across the pit-yard.
It had barely gone two o’clock. But the deputy had been alerted and had brought forward the end of the shift, so that when the mob arrived only about twenty men were left at the bottom. When they surfaced and emerged from the cage, they fled while people ran after them and threw stones at them. Two men were beaten up, and another got away only by forfeiting the sleeve of his jacket. This pursuit of human quarry saved the plant, not a cable or boiler was touched; and already the torrent was departing, rolling on towards the neighbouring pit.
This was Crèvecœur, a mere five hundred metres from Madeleine. There, too, the mob arrived just as the men were coming up. One putter was seized by the women, who ripped her trousers open and started flogging her bare buttocks in full view of the men, to their great amusement. The pit-boys got a clip round the ear, while some of the hewers escaped only after receiving bruised ribs or a bloody nose. As the ferocity of the encounter intensified, fuelled by the demented fury of this immemorial thirst for revenge which had turned everybody’s heads, cries rang out or died in the throat, the roar of empty bellies demanding death to the scabs and an end to low wages. They began to cut the cables, but the file was blunt. Anyway it would take too long, for they were in a frenzy now, desperate to be on the move, on, on. A tap was smashed in the boiler-room and buckets of water were thrown on to the fires, causing the cast-iron grates to crack.
Outside there was talk of marching on Saint-Thomas. As the pit with the most docile workforce, it had been unaffected by the strike, and nearly seven hundred men must be underground, which infuriated them. They would wait for them with cudgels, in battle formation, and then they’d see who left the field victorious! But word went round that there were gendarmes at Saint-Thomas, the very gendarmes they’d made fun of that morning. Yet how did anyone actually know that? It was impossible to say. No matter! They lost their nerve and opted for Feutry-Cantel instead. The thrill of the chase took hold of them once more as they found themselves rushing along the road to the sound of their clattering clogs: To Feutry-Cantel! To Feutry-Cantel! There were a good four hundred spineless bastards there, what a laugh! Situated some three kilometres away, the mine was hidden in a dip near La Scarpe. They were already climbing the hillside at Les Plâtrières, beyond the road to Beaugnies, when somebody or other – they never discovered who – started a rumour that maybe the dragoons were at Feutry-Cantel. This was then repeated from from one end of the column to the other: the dragoons were there. They faltered and slowed their pace; and, after all these hours spent careering round a countryside that seemed to have fallen asleep from the torpor of having so many people out of work, there was a wave of panic. Why hadn’t they come across any soldiers? It worried them that they had got away with it so far, for they could sense the repression to come.
Though no one had any idea where it started, a new rallying cry sent them all rushing off to another pit.
‘La Victoire! La Victoire!’
Were there no gendarmes or dragoons at La Victoire, then? Nobody could say, but everyone seemed reassured. And so they turned on their heels and raced down the Beaumont hill, cutting across the fields to rejoin the Joiselle road. The railway line stood in their path, but they knocked down the fences and passed over it. They were now getting close to Montsou, the gently undulating terrain was flattening out, and the sea of beetfields was beginning to stretch away towards the dark buildings of Marchiennes in the distance.
This time there were
at least five kilometres to be covered, but such was the exhilaration that their momentum carried them forward, and they felt neither their terrible exhaustion nor their bruised and aching feet. The stream of people kept getting longer and longer as they picked up comrades in the villages along the way. By the time they had crossed the canal by the Magache bridge and arrived in front of La Victoire, their number had grown to two thousand. But it was after three o’clock, the shift had already ended and there wasn’t a man left underground. They vented their frustration in empty threats, but all that was left to them was to throw broken bricks at the stonemen arriving for their shift. A rout ensued, and the deserted pit was theirs. In their fury at not having a blackleg to hit, they set about inanimate objects. It was as though an ulcer of resentment had been growing within them, a poisonous abscess, which had finally burst. Year after year of hunger had made them ravenous for a feast of massacre and destruction.
Behind one of the sheds Étienne spotted loaders busy filling a cart with coal.
‘Clear off, you bastards!’ he shouted. ‘Not one lump of coal is going out of here.’
At his command a hundred or so strikers came running up, and the loaders only just had time to get away. Men unhitched the horses, who took fright and ran off, having been pricked in the flanks; while others turned the cart upside down and, in so doing, broke its shafts.
Levaque had set about the trestles with great blows of his axe, hoping to bring down the overhead railway. They refused to give, and so it occurred to him instead to start ripping up the track, so as to sever the connection between one end of the yard and the other. Soon the entire mob was doing the same. Maheu prized up the cast-iron fixings for them, using his crowbar as a lever. Meanwhile La Brûlé led the women off to invade the lamp-room, where a flurry of sticks soon covered the floor with the remains of smashed lamps. La Maheude, beside herself with rage, hit them every bit as hard as La Levaque. Everyone got covered in paraffin-oil, and La Mouquette was busy wiping her hands on her skirt, laughing delightedly at getting so dirty. For a joke Jeanlin had just emptied a lamp down the back of her blouse.