3.V.1.21. 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 re-appear, 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,
buck-shot or a biscaien 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 bare-headed.
"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 snow-storm.
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 facade 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 Francois
I. at Marignan. Homer says: "Diomedes cuts the throat of
Axylus, son of Teuthranis, who dwelt in happy Arisba;
Euryalus, son of Mecistaeus, exterminates Dresos and Opheltios,
Esepius, and that Pedasus whom the naiad Abarbarea
bore to the blameless Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidytes of
Percosius; Antilochus, Ablerus; Polypaetes, 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 Satnois." 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.