Les Misérables, v. 5/5: Jean Valjean
Page 22
CHAPTER XXI.
THE HEROES.
Suddenly the drum beat the charge, and the attack was a hurricane. Onthe previous evening the barricade had been silently approached in thedarkness as by a boa; but at present, in broad daylight, within thisgutted street, surprise was impossible; besides, the armed force wasunmasked, the cannon had begun the roaring, and the troops rushed uponthe barricade. Fury was now skill. A powerful column of line infantry,intersected at regular intervals by National Guards and dismountedMunicipal Guards, and supported by heavy masses that could be heardif not seen, debouched into the street at a running step, with drumsbeating, bugles braying, bayonets levelled, and sappers in front, andimperturbable under the shower of projectiles dashed straight at thebarricade with all the weight of a bronze battering-ram. But the wallheld out firmly, and the insurgents fired impetuously; the escaladedbarricade displayed a flashing mane. The attack was so violent that itwas in a moment inundated by assailants; but it shook off the soldiersas the lion does the dogs, and it was only covered with besiegers asthe cliff is with foam, to reappear a minute later scarped, black, andformidable.
The columns, compelled to fall back, remained massed in the street,exposed but terrible, and answered the redoubt by a tremendousmusketry-fire. Any one who has seen fireworks will remember the piececomposed of a cross-fire of lightnings, which is called a bouquet.Imagine this bouquet, no longer vertical but horizontal, and bearingat the end of each jet a bullet, slugs, or iron balls, and scatteringdeath. The barricade was beneath it. On either side was equalresolution. The bravery was almost barbarous, and was complicated by aspecies of heroic ferocity which began with self-sacrifice. It was theepoch when a National Guard fought like a Zouave. The troops desired anend, and the insurrection wished to wrestle. The acceptance of death inthe height of youth and health converts intrepidity into a frenzy, andeach man in this action had the grandeur of the last hour. The streetwas covered with corpses. The barricade had Marius at one of its endsand Enjolras at the other. Enjolras, who carried the whole barricadein his head, reserved and concealed himself. Three soldiers fell underhis loop-hole without even seeing him, while Marius displayed himselfopenly, and made himself a mark. More than once half his body roseabove the barricade. There is no more violent prodigal than a miser whotakes the bit between his teeth, and no man more startling in actionthan a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive, and in the battlewas like a dream. He looked like a ghost firing. The cartridges of thebesieged were exhausted, but not their sarcasms; and they laughed inthe tornado of the tomb in which they stood. Courfeyrac was bareheaded.
"What have you done with your hat?" Bossuet asked him; and Courfeyracanswered,--
"They carried it away at last with cannon-balls."
Or else they made haughty remarks.
"Can you understand," Feuilly exclaimed bitterly, "those men,"---and hementioned names, well-known and even celebrated names that belonged tothe old army,---"who promised to join us and pledged their honor to aidus, and who are generals, and abandon us?"
And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with a grave smile,--
"They are people who observe the rules of honor as they do thestars,--a long distance off."
The interior of the barricade was so sown with torn cartridges thatit seemed as if there had been a snow-storm. The assailants had thenumbers and the insurgents the position. They were behind a wall, andcrushed at point-blank range the soldiers who were stumbling overthe dead and wounded. This barricade, built as it was, and admirablystrengthened, was really one of those situations in which a handfulof men holds a legion in check. Still, constantly recruited andgrowing beneath the shower of bullets, foe column of attack inexorablyapproached, and little by little, step by step, but with certainty, thearmy squeezed the barricade as the screw does the press.
The assaults succeeded each other, and the horror became constantlygreater. Then there broke out on this pile of paving-stones, inthis Rue de la Chanvrerie, a struggle worthy of the wall of Troy.These sallow, ragged, and exhausted men, who had not eaten forfour-and-twenty hours, who had not slept, who had only a few roundsmore to fire, who felt their empty pockets for cartridges,--these men,nearly all wounded, with head or arm bound round with a blood-stainedblackish rag, having holes in their coat from which the blood flowed,scarce armed with bad guns and old rusty sabres, became Titans.The barricade was ten times approached, assaulted, escaladed, andnever captured. To form an idea of the contest it would be necessaryto imagine a heap of terrible courages set on fire, and that youare watching the flames. It was not a combat, but the interiorof a furnace; mouths breathed flames there, and the faces wereextraordinary. The human form seemed impossible there, the combatantsflashed, and it was a formidable sight to see these salamanders of themêlée flitting about in this red smoke. The successive and simultaneousscenes of this butchery are beyond our power to depict, for the epicalone has the right to fill twelve thousand verses with a battle. Itmight have been called that Inferno of Brahminism, the most formidableof the seventeen abysses, which the Veda calls the Forest of Swords.They fought foot to foot, body to body, with pistol-shots, sabre-cuts,and fists, close by, at a distance, above, below, on all sides, fromthe roof of the house, from the wine-shop, and even from the traps ofthe cellars into which some had slipped. The odds were sixty to one,and the frontage of Corinth half demolished was hideous. The window,pock-marked with grape-shot, had lost glass and frame, and was only ashapeless hole tumultuously stopped up with paving-stones. Bossuet waskilled. Feuilly was killed, Courfeyrac was killed, Joly was killed.Combeferre, traversed by three bayonet stabs in the breast at themoment when he was raising a wounded soldier, had only time to look upto heaven, and expired. Marius, still fighting, had received so manywounds, especially in the head, that his face disappeared in blood andlooked as if it were covered by a red handkerchief. Enjolras alone wasnot wounded; when he had no weapon he held out his arm to the rightor left, and an insurgent placed some instrument in his hand. He hadonly four broken sword-blades left,--one more than Francis I. had atMarignano.
Homer says: "Diomed slew Axylus, the son of Teuthras, who dweltin well-built Arisba; Euryalus, son of Mecisteus, slew Dresus andOpheltius, Æsepus and Pedasus, whom the Naiad Abarbarea brought forthto blameless Bucolion; Ulysses killed Percosian Pidytes; Antilochus,Ablerus; Polypœtes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otus of Cyllene; andTeucer, Aretaus. Meganthius fell by the spear of Euripilus; Agamemnon,king of heroes, struck down Elatus, born in the walled town which thesounding river Satniois washes."
In our old poems of the Gesta, Esplandian attacks with a flamingfalchion Swantibore, the giant margins, who defends himself by stormingthe knight with towers which he uproots. Our old mural frescos showus the two Dukes of Brittany and Bourbon armed for war and mounted,and approaching each other, axe in hand, masked with steel, shod withsteel, gloved with steel, one caparisoned with ermine and the otherdraped in azure; Brittany with his lion between the two horns of hiscrown, and Bourbon with an enormous _fleur-de-lys_ at his visor. Butin order to be superb it is not necessary to wear, like Yvon, theducal morion, or to have in one hand a living flame like Esplandian;it is sufficient to lay down one's life for a conviction or a loyaldeed. This little simple soldier, yesterday a peasant of Bearne orthe Limousin, who prowls about, cabbage-cutter by his side, round thenursemaids in the Luxembourg, this young, pale student bowed over ananatomical study or book, a fair-haired boy who shaves himself with apair of scissors,--take them both, breathe duty into them, put themface to face in the Carrefour Boucherat or the Planche Mibray blindalley, and let one fight for his flag and the other combat for hisideal, and let them both imagine that they are contending for theircountry, and the struggle will be colossal; and the shadow cast bythese two contending lads on the great epic field where humanity isstruggling will be equal to that thrown by Megarion, King of Lycia,abounding in tigers, as he wrestles with the immense Ajax, the equal ofthe gods.