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.