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_ 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 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 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. _
Read next: VOLUME V: BOOK FIRST - THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS: CHAPTER XXII. Foot to Foot
Read previous: VOLUME V: BOOK FIRST - THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS: CHAPTER XX. The Dead Are in the Right and the Living Are Not in the Wrong
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