THE HEROES.
Suddenly the drum beat the charge, and the attack was a hurricane. On
the previous evening the barricade had been silently approached in the
darkness as by a boa; but at present, in broad daylight, within this
gutted street, surprise was impossible; besides, the armed force was
unmasked, the cannon had begun the roaring, and the troops rushed upon
the barricade. Fury was now skill. A powerful column of line infantry,
intersected at regular intervals by National Guards and dismounted
Municipal Guards, and supported by heavy masses that could be heard
if not seen, debouched into the street at a running step, with drums
beating, bugles braying, bayonets levelled, and sappers in front, and
imperturbable under the shower of projectiles dashed straight at the
barricade with all the weight of a bronze battering-ram. But the wall
held out firmly, and the insurgents fired impetuously; the escaladed
barricade displayed a flashing mane. The attack was so violent that it
was in a moment inundated by assailants; but it shook off the soldiers
as the lion does the dogs, and it was only covered with besiegers as
the cliff is with foam, to reappear a minute later scarped, black, and
formidable.
The columns, compelled to fall back, remained massed in the street,
exposed but terrible, and answered the redoubt by a tremendous
musketry-fire. Any one who has seen fireworks will remember the piece
composed of a cross-fire of lightnings, which is called a bouquet.
Imagine this bouquet, no longer vertical but horizontal, and bearing
at the end of each jet a bullet, slugs, or iron balls, and scattering
death. The barricade was beneath it. On either side was equal
resolution. The bravery was almost barbarous, and was complicated by a
species of heroic ferocity which began with self-sacrifice. It was the
epoch when a National Guard fought like a Zouave. The troops desired an
end, and the insurrection wished to wrestle. The acceptance of death in
the height of youth and health converts intrepidity into a frenzy, and
each man in this action had the grandeur of the last hour. The street
was covered with corpses. The barricade had Marius at one of its ends
and Enjolras at the other. Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade
in his head, reserved and concealed himself. Three soldiers fell under
his loop-hole without even seeing him, while Marius displayed himself
openly, and made himself a mark. More than once half his body rose
above the barricade. There is no more violent prodigal than a miser who
takes the bit between his teeth, and no man more startling in action
than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive, and in the battle
was like a dream. He looked like a ghost firing. The cartridges of the
besieged were exhausted, but not their sarcasms; and they laughed in
the tornado of the tomb in which they stood. Courfeyrac was bareheaded.
"What have you done with your hat?" Bossuet asked him; and Courfeyrac
answered,--
"They carried it away at last with cannon-balls."
Or else they made haughty remarks.
"Can you understand," Feuilly exclaimed bitterly, "those men,"---and he
mentioned names, well-known and even celebrated names that belonged to
the old army,---"who promised to join us and pledged their honor to aid
us, 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 the
stars,--a long distance off."
The interior of the barricade was so sown with torn cartridges that
it seemed as if there had been a snow-storm. The assailants had the
numbers and the insurgents the position. They were behind a wall, and
crushed at point-blank range the soldiers who were stumbling over
the dead and wounded. This barricade, built as it was, and admirably
strengthened, was really one of those situations in which a handful
of men holds a legion in check. Still, constantly recruited and
growing beneath the shower of bullets, foe column of attack inexorably
approached, and little by little, step by step, but with certainty, the
army squeezed the barricade as the screw does the press.
The assaults succeeded each other, and the horror became constantly
greater. Then there broke out on this pile of paving-stones, in
this Rue de la Chanvrerie, a struggle worthy of the wall of Troy.
These sallow, ragged, and exhausted men, who had not eaten for
four-and-twenty hours, who had not slept, who had only a few rounds
more to fire, who felt their empty pockets for cartridges,--these men,
nearly all wounded, with head or arm bound round with a blood-stained
blackish 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, and
never captured. To form an idea of the contest it would be necessary
to imagine a heap of terrible courages set on fire, and that you
are watching the flames. It was not a combat, but the interior
of a furnace; mouths breathed flames there, and the faces were
extraordinary. The human form seemed impossible there, the combatants
flashed, and it was a formidable sight to see these salamanders of the
mêlée flitting about in this red smoke. The successive and simultaneous
scenes of this butchery are beyond our power to depict, for the epic
alone has the right to fill twelve thousand verses with a battle. It
might have been called that Inferno of Brahminism, the most formidable
of 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, from
the roof of the house, from the wine-shop, and even from the traps of
the 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 a
shapeless hole tumultuously stopped up with paving-stones. Bossuet was
killed. Feuilly was killed, Courfeyrac was killed, Joly was killed.
Combeferre, traversed by three bayonet stabs in the breast at the
moment when he was raising a wounded soldier, had only time to look up
to heaven, and expired. Marius, still fighting, had received so many
wounds, especially in the head, that his face disappeared in blood and
looked as if it were covered by a red handkerchief. Enjolras alone was
not wounded; when he had no weapon he held out his arm to the right
or left, and an insurgent placed some instrument in his hand. He had
only four broken sword-blades left,--one more than Francis I. had at
Marignano.
Homer says: "Diomed slew Axylus, the son of Teuthras, who dwelt
in well-built Arisba; Euryalus, son of Mecisteus, slew Dresus and
Opheltius, Æsepus and Pedasus, whom the Naiad Abarbarea brought forth
to blameless Bucolion; Ulysses killed Percosian Pidytes; Antilochus,
Ablerus; Polypœtes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otus of Cyllene; and
Teucer, Aretaus. Meganthius fell by the spear of Euripilus; Agamemnon,
king of heroes, struck down Elatus, born in the walled town which the
sounding river Satniois washes."
In our old poems of the Gesta, Esplandian attacks with a flaming
falchion Swantibore, the giant margins, who defends himself by storming
the knight with towers which he uproots. Our old mural frescos show
us the two Dukes of Brittany and Bourbon armed for war and mounted,
and approaching each other, axe in hand, masked with steel, shod with
steel, gloved with steel, one caparisoned with ermine and the other
draped in azure; Brittany with his lion between the two horns of his
crown, and Bourbon with an enormous _fleur-de-lys_ at his visor. But
in order to be superb it is not necessary to wear, like Yvon, the
ducal 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 loyal
deed. This little simple soldier, yesterday a peasant of Bearne or
the Limousin, who prowls about, cabbage-cutter by his side, round the
nursemaids in the Luxembourg, this young, pale student bowed over an
anatomical study or book, a fair-haired boy who shaves himself with a
pair of scissors,--take them both, breathe duty into them, put them
face to face in the Carrefour Boucherat or the Planche Mibray blind
alley, and let one fight for his flag and the other combat for his
ideal, and let them both imagine that they are contending for their
country, and the struggle will be colossal; and the shadow cast by
these two contending lads on the great epic field where humanity is
struggling will be equal to that thrown by Megarion, King of Lycia,
abounding in tigers, as he wrestles with the immense Ajax, the equal of
the gods.