Only one person was dismissed immediately, namely Dansaert, the overman. Since the scandal with La Pierronne he had become quite impossible, but the pretext was his response in the face of danger, his cowardice as a leader in abandoning his men. At the same time his dismissal was intended as something of an overture to the miners, who detested the man.
Meanwhile rumours had spread among the general public, and the management had had to write to one newspaper correcting its version of events and denying that the strikers had exploded a barrel of gunpowder. After a rapid inquiry the report by the government-appointed engineer had already concluded that the tubbing in the pit-shaft had given way of its own accord following some subsidence in the surrounding earth; and the Company had preferred to keep quiet and accept the blame for inadequate maintenance supervision. By the third day the disaster had become one of the topical news items in the Parisian press: people talked of nothing else but the workers still fighting for their lives at the bottom of the mine, and each morning everyone avidly scanned the latest reports. In Montsou itself the bourgeois turned pale and seemed to lose the power of speech as soon as Le Voreux was mentioned, and a legend was beginning to form which even the bravest were afraid to whisper in each other’s ear. The whole region was full of pity for the victims, and people organized excursions to the demolished pit, with entire families rushing to the scene to treat themselves to the horror of its ruins and the heavy mass of debris hanging over the heads of the wretched people incarcerated below.
Deneulin, as newly appointed divisional engineer, found himself in the thick of dealing with the aftermath of the catastrophe; and his first priority was to stop the flooding from the canal, which was steadily aggravating the damage to the pit with each hour that passed. Substantial work was required, and he put a hundred workers on the job of building a dyke. Twice the sheer weight of water had swept away the initial dams. Now they were installing pumps, and it was a long, hard struggle as they fought inch by inch to reclaim the land that had been submerged.
But the rescue of the trapped miners was causing even more excitement. Négrel’s orders were still to make one last attempt, and he did not lack for volunteers as all the miners rushed to offer their services in an upsurge of fraternal solidarity. Now that comrades’ lives were in danger they had forgotten all about the strike, and their rate of pay was no longer an issue; as far as they were concerned it wouldn’t matter if they weren’t paid at all, just as long as they could be allowed to risk their own lives to save them. They were all there, tools at the ready and raring to go, just waiting to be told where to dig first. Many had not recovered from the shock of the accident and still had constant nightmares about it. But though they had the shakes and kept breaking out in cold sweats, they dragged themselves from their beds none the less and were among the most determined to engage in combat with the earth, as if they wanted revenge. Unfortunately the one difficult question was precisely that of how best to proceed: what should they do? How could they get down? Which side should they attack the rocks from?
In Négrel’s view none of the poor wretches would have survived; all fifteen would certainly have perished, whether by drowning or from lack of oxygen. But in mining disasters the rule is always to assume that the people trapped are still alive, and so he reasoned accordingly. The first problem was to work out where they might have tried to seek refuge. When he consulted the deputies and the old hands among the miners, everyone was agreed: faced with the rising floodwater, the comrades would definitely have made their way upwards from roadway to roadway, until they reached the coal-faces nearest the surface, which meant that they were probably trapped at the end of one of the higher roads. Moreover, this tallied with the information given by old Mouque, whose garbled account even suggested that in the general panic as they tried to escape the miners might have split up into smaller groups, with people disappearing off in all directions and ending up on separate levels within the mine. But when it came to deciding what they could do to rescue them, opinion among the deputies was divided. Since even the roads nearest to the surface were a hundred and fifty metres down, sinking a new shaft was out of the question. This left Réquillart, which was the only way in and the only way of getting near them. But the worst of it was that the old mine, which had itself been flooded, no longer connected with Le Voreux, and that the only free means of access, above the flood-level, were a few short roadways running out from the first loading-bay. Draining the mine was going to take years, so the best plan would be to inspect these areas to see if they might not be close to the flooded roads at the far end of which they suspected the trapped miners to be. Before reaching this logical conclusion there had been considerable discussion, and a whole host of other, impracticable suggestions had been rejected.
At this point Négrel went through the files and found the original plans for the two pits, which he studied carefully, identifying the places where they ought to search. Little by little, this hunt for the trapped miners had begun to excite him, and he, too, now felt passionately committed to finding them, despite his customary ironic nonchalance towards the affairs of men and the things of this world. There were initial difficulties in getting into Réquillart: they had to clear the entrance to the shaft by removing the rowan tree and cutting back the sloe and hawthorn bushes, and then there were the ladders to be repaired as well. After that the preliminary search began. Négrel went down with ten men and had them tap their iron tools against certain parts of the seam which he indicated; and then in complete silence each man pressed his ear to the coal and listened for answering taps in the distance. They tried every roadway they could reach, but in vain; there was no answer. Now they were in even more of a quandary: where should they start cutting through the coal? In which direction should they go, since there was nobody there to guide them forward? But they kept at it, searching and searching, and the tension rose as they became increasingly concerned.
From the very first day La Maheude had come to Réquillart each morning. She would sit down on an old beam opposite the entrance and stay there till the evening. Whenever a man came out, she stood up and gave him a questioning look. Anything yet? No, nothing. And then she would sit down again and continue to wait, without a word, her face set hard and closed. Jeanlin, too, on seeing that his den was being invaded, had been prowling around with the frightened look of an animal whose burrow full of plundered prey is about to be uncovered. He was also thinking about the young soldier whose body lay under the rock, worried that the men might be about to disturb his peaceful resting-place; but that part of the mine had been flooded, and in any case the search was being carried out further over to the left, in the west part. At first Philomène had come along also, to accompany Zacharie, who was part of the rescue team; but she had got fed up getting cold for no good reason and with nothing to show for it. And so she remained behind in the village and spent her days mooching about, unconcerned, coughing from morning till night. Zacharie, on the other hand, had no thought for his own life and would have eaten the earth beneath him if it meant finding his sister. He cried out in his sleep: he saw her, he heard her, shrivelled by starvation, her throat worn out from shouting for help. Twice he had been about to start digging of his own accord, without authorization, saying this was the spot, he could feel it in his bones. Négrel wouldn’t let him go down any more, but he refused to leave the mine even though it was out of bounds; he couldn’t even sit down and wait beside his mother, but instead kept walking round and round, desperate with the need to do something.
It was the third day. Négrel despaired, and was resolved to abandon the search that evening. At noon, after lunch, when he came back with his men to make one last attempt, he was surprised to see Zacharie coming out of the shaft, all red in the face, waving frantically and shouting:
‘She’s there! She answered me! Come on, quickly!’
He had sneaked down the ladders unseen by the guard, and he swore that he’d heard tapping over in the first road in the Guil
laume seam.
‘We’ve checked there twice already,’ Négrel objected in disbelief. ‘But, all right, let’s go and see.’
La Maheude had risen to her feet and had to be prevented from going down with them. She stood waiting at the edge of the shaft, staring into the dark hole.
Down below Négrel tapped three times himself, leaving a reasonable space between each tap, and then pressed his ear to the coal, bidding the men be as quiet as possible. Not a sound came, and he shook his head; the poor lad had plainly been imagining it. Zacharie tapped frantically himself, and again he did hear something; his eyes shone, and he was shaking all over with joy. Then the other men repeated the exercise, one after another; and they all became excited as they distinctly made out a response coming from far away. Négrel was astonished, and when he listened again he eventually heard the faintest of sounds, like the waft of a breeze, a barely audible rhythmic drumming that followed the familiar pattern used by miners when they tap out the signal to evacuate at times of danger. For coal can transmit crystal-clear sound over a great distance.
A deputy who was there estimated the thickness of the intervening mass of coal at not less than fifty metres. But for everyone present it was as though they could shake hands with them already, and they were elated. Négrel duly gave orders at once to dig towards them.
When Zacharie saw his mother again back above ground, they hugged each other.
‘I shouldn’t get carried away,’ La Pierronne was cruel enough to say, having come out for a walk to see what was going on. ‘If Catherine’s not there, it’ll only make it worse for you.’
It was true, Catherine might be somewhere else.
‘Mind your own bloody business!’ Zacharie said savagely. ‘She’s there all right. I know she is!’
La Maheude had resumed her seat, silent and expressionless, and once more she settled down to wait.
As soon as word reached Montsou, people again arrived in their droves. There was nothing to see, but they stayed all the same, and the more curious among them had to be kept back. Below ground, work continued round the clock. In case they met anything that completely blocked their way, Négrel had ordered three sloping shafts to be cut through the seam, which would all converge down at the point where the miners were thought to be trapped. In the cramped space at the end of each shaft there was room for only one miner at a time to cut the coal, and he was replaced every two hours; the coal itself was loaded into baskets, which were passed back along a human chain which grew longer with the shaft. They made rapid progress at first: six metres in one day.
Zacharie had managed to get himself included among those selected for the task of cutting the coal. It was a position of honour and much sought after. He would get cross when they tried to relieve him after his regulation two-hour stint, and he would pinch the comrades’ turns and refuse to relinquish his pick. His shaft was soon ahead of the others, and he attacked the coal with such ferocity that the panting and grunting coming up from below sounded like the noise of bellows in an underground forge. When he emerged, covered in black dirt and giddy with exhaustion, he would collapse on the ground and have to be covered with a blanket. Then back he would go, still staggering with exhaustion, and battle recommenced to the sound of thudding pick and muffled groan as he slew the coal in furious triumph. The worst of it was that the coal was becoming hard, and twice he broke his tool on it in his rage at not being able to go as fast as before. He was also suffering from the heat, which was increasing with every metre, and it was quite unbearable at the bottom of the tiny shaft where the air had no room to circulate. A hand-operated ventilator was working well enough, but it was difficult to get a draught going, and three times they had to pull a man free after he passed out for lack of air.
Négrel lived underground with his men. Meals were sent down to him, and occasionally he snatched a couple of hours’ sleep, wrapped in his coat on top of a bale of straw. What kept everyone going was the desperate pleading of the poor wretches below, who could be heard tapping out the signal more and more distinctly and urging them to come quickly. This tapping was now clearly audible, like a tune being played on the keys of a harmonica. It helped to guide them, and they advanced to its music like soldiers marching to the sound of cannon on a battlefield. Each time a hewer was relieved, Négrel would go down himself, tap and listen; and each time, so far, the response had come, swiftly and urgently. He no longer had any doubt, they were heading in the right direction. But how dangerously slow it all was! They would never get there in time. Over the first two days they had cut their way through no less than thirteen metres; but on the the third day this had fallen to five, and on the fourth to three. The coal was becoming so much denser and harder that now they could barely manage two metres in a day. By the ninth day, thanks to their superhuman efforts, they had covered a distance of thirty-two metres, and they calculated that another twenty remained in front of them. For the trapped miners it was their twelfth day that was starting, twelve times twenty-four hours without food or warmth in that icy darkness! This horrific thought brought tears to the eyes of the men and stiffened their sinews to the task in hand. It seemed impossible that any God-fearing soul could survive much longer; the distant tapping had been growing fainter since the previous day, and they were extremely concerned that it might cease at any minute.
La Maheude still came regularly to sit at the entrance to the pit. She would bring Estelle along in her arms, since she could not be left on her own all day. For hour after hour she followed the progress of the rescue work, sharing in the hopes and the disappointments. The tension among the groups of people waiting around, and even in Montsou, was at fever pitch, and nobody talked of anything else. Every heart in the district was beating in time with those beneath the ground.
On the ninth day, at lunch-time, Zacharie failed to answer when they called to him that it was time for him be replaced. It was as though he had gone mad, and with much cursing and swearing he refused to stop. Négrel, who had left the mine for a moment, was not there to make him obey; and in fact the only people present were a deputy and three miners. Unable to see properly and frustrated by the delay caused by the dim, flickering light from his lamp, Zacharie must have been foolish enough to turn it up. Strict orders had been given not to do so: firedamp had been detected, and huge pockets of gas had been building up in the narrow, unventilated shafts. Suddenly there was a thunderous explosion, and a jet of flame shot out of the shaft like the flash from a gun loaded with grapeshot. Everything ignited, and from one end to the other each shaft caught fire like a trail of gunpowder. The sudden torrent of flame engulfed the deputy and the three miners, travelled up the main pit-shaft, and erupted into the open air, spewing out rock and broken timber. The onlookers fled, and La Maheude leaped to her feet, clutching a terrified Estelle to her chest.
When Négrel and the other men returned, they were filled with unspeakable rage. They stamped their feet on the earth as if it were some wicked stepmother who had gratuitously slaughtered her children in an act of cruel, mindless whimsy. You did what you could as best you could, you rushed to the rescue of your comrades, and then you lost even more men! After three long, exhausting and dangerous hours they finally managed to reach the rescue shafts, and then they had the gruesome task of bringing the victims up to the surface. Neither the deputy nor the three men were dead, but they were covered in terrible burns and giving off a smell of roast meat; having inhaled the burning air, they had suffered further burns all the way down their throats. They kept screaming and begging to be put out of their misery. One of the three miners was the man who, during the strike, had demolished the pump at Gaston-Marie with that final blow of his pick; the other two still had the scars on their hands where their fingers had been cut or rubbed raw from throwing bricks at the soldiers. As they were carried past, the crowd of onlookers, each of them white-faced and trembling with shock, bared their heads.
La Maheude stood waiting. Eventually Zacharie’s body appeared. His
clothes had been burned away and the body reduced to an unrecognizable, charred lump. The head was missing, blown to bits by the explosion. After his ghastly remains had been placed on a stretcher, La Maheude followed them mechanically, her eyes blazing, without a tear. Holding the sleeping Estelle in her arms, she cut a tragic figure as she left the scene, with her loose hair blowing in the wind. Back in the village Philomène received the news in stunned silence but soon found relief in floods of tears. La Maheude, on the other hand, had immediately turned round and gone back to Réquillart: the mother had brought home her son and was now returning to wait for her daughter.
Another three days went by. The rescue work had resumed, despite the appallingly difficult conditions. Fortunately the new shafts had not collapsed in the firedamp explosion, but they were thick with hot, foul air and more ventilators had to be installed. The hewers relieved each other every twenty minutes. And on they went, with only two metres remaining between them and their comrades. But now they worked with a heavy heart, and if they struck hard into the coal, it was only by way of revenge; for the tapping had stopped, and its bright little tune was no longer to be heard. This was the twelfth day of the rescue work and the fifteenth since the disaster; and that morning a deathly silence had fallen.
This latest accident had revived the interest of people in Montsou, and so many bourgeois were enthusiastically arranging excursions to the mine that the Grégoires decided to follow the fashion. They wanted to make a party of it, and so it was agreed that they would drive to Le Voreux in their carriage while Mme Hennebeau would bring Lucie and Jeanne along in hers. Deneulin would show them how his repair work was progressing, and then they would come back via Réquillart, where Négrel would be able to tell them how far the rescue shafts had got and whether he thought there was still hope. And then they would all have dinner together that evening.