Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/311

GERMINAL sabots, rushing forward. To Feutry-Cantel! to Feutry-Cantel! The cowards there were certainly four hundred in number and there would be fun! Situated three kilometres away, this pit lay in a fold of the ground near the Scarpe. They were already climbing the slope of the Platrières, beyond the road to Beaugnies, when a voice, no one knew from whom, threw out the idea that the soldiers were, perhaps, down there at Feutry-Cantel. Then from one end to the other of the column it was repeated that the soldiers were down there. They slackened their march, panic gradually spread. In the country, sleeping without work, which they had been scouring for hours, why had they not come across the soldiers? This impunity troubled them, the thought of the repression which they felt to be coming.

Without anyone knowing where it came from, a new word of command turned them towards another pit.

"To the Victoire! to the Victoire!"

Were there, then, neither soldiers nor police at the Victoire? Nobody knew. All seemed reassured. And turning round they descended from the Beaumont side and cut across the fields to reach the Joiselle road. The railway line barred their passage, and they crossed it, pulling down the palings. Now they were approaching Montsou, the gradual undulation of the landscape grew less, the sea of beetroot fields enlarged, reaching far away to the black houses at Marchiennes.

This time it was a march of five good kilomètres. So strong an impulse pushed them on that they had no feeling of their terrible fatigue, or of their bruised and wounded feet. The rear continued to lengthen, increased by mates enlisted on the roads and in the settlements. When they had passed the canal at the Magache bridge, and appeared before the Victoire, there were two thousand of them. But three o'clock had struck, the ascent was completed, not a man remained below. Their disappointment was spent in vain threats; they could only heave broken bricks at the workmen who had arrived to take their duty at the earth-cutting. There was a rush, and the deserted pit belonged to them. And in their rage at not finding a traitor's face to strike, they attacked things. A rankling abscess was bursting within them, a poisoned boil of slow growth. Years and years of hunger tortured them with a thirst for massacre and destruction. [299]