In the Shadow of the Fire, page 40
A dozen men are lying on the floor. Two soldiers in shirtsleeves come and go among them, leaning over one, comforting another in murmurs. Their wounds have been bandaged with strips torn from shirts and dirty rags. One of them is breathing through a piece of bloody linen laid over his face. When Caroline lifts away the cloth she notices his teeth first, and his tongue, moving in his mouth. She can’t quite comprehend what she’s seeing. A large part of his face has been torn away. One of his eyes has been crushed into bloody gelatin. The man grips her hand.
“Well?”
The voice from above her makes her jump. The corporal squats down next to her and sighs.
“You see what these barbarians are capable of.”
Caroline tries to regain her breath to answer. She just encountered the barbarians ten minutes ago on a street corner, making fun of the dead. She saw them clustered around a group of corpses like crows on carrion. Joking. Cawing.
“He’ll need a surgeon,” she says. “I can’t stitch up what isn’t there anymore.”
She stands up and looks around at this aid station that has been set up among the scattered shoes and spools of thread and sheets of leather in this cobbler’s shop. The corporal leads her to a lieutenant whose thigh has been gashed open to the bone by an exploding artillery shell. Grimacing and pale, the officer thanks her for coming. She wipes the wound with a bit of bleach, explaining that she will have to sew it up. The man visibly gathers his courage, stands up against the wall he’s leaning on, closes his eyes, grits his teeth.
Caroline tries to remember what Doctor Fontaine always said, that this was a way for her, as a dressmaker, to keep up her professional skills. She has sewn up wounds at least a dozen times now, but she’s never quite managed to think of human flesh as just another kind of fabric.
The man starts to groan at the first prick of the needle. The corporal gives him a rag to bite on.
“Just think of those bastards, Lieutenant. Of all the ones we’ve crossed off the lists already. In three days you’ll be back out there, putting those sons of bitches to the sword again.”
Caroline pauses to wipe her forehead on her sleeve. She doesn’t know how she’s resisting the temptation to plunge her needle deep into this Versaillais haunch of meat, to make this gunman howl like an animal. She finishes the suture and stands up. The lieutenant thanks her again, sweat pouring down his face, and asks, when the corporal has walked away:
“Is it your religious order that makes you wear trousers?”
He lifts a hand to his holster and then lets it drop again.
“What does it matter, after all . . . the corporal doesn’t realize that in three days, four at the very most, all of this will be over. We’ll have gotten rid of every one of these fanatics. I might be lucky enough to take part in the great street-by-street, house-by-house extermination of the filth. I suppose you’re one of them?”
Caroline kisses the wooden cross hanging around her neck and makes a brief curtsey before moving on to tend the other injured men. For perhaps an hour she bandages wounds, murmuring a few words of comfort to the worst cases, the ones who ask her if God will really be waiting for them in heaven. She expects to hear the lieutenant’s voice ordering her arrest at any moment and doesn’t dare look at him.
When she leaves the shop, she hears him say:
“Good day to you, sister! My best to your sans-culottes!”
She hurries down the sidewalk. The street is crowded with soldiers and stopped wagons. She reaches the quayside, where the wind blowing over the Seine is laden with smoke. Whole companies are marching toward the Latin Quarter. It feels as if the ground beneath her feet is quivering under the thud of boot treads and the rattling of cart wheels. The barricades defending the bridges have all been destroyed; sparks are still crackling along the shattered carts’ wooden shafts and leaping behind the wrenched-off doors of broken furniture piled atop the cobblestone heaps. There are bodies lying on the ground here and there, and even on the demolished barricades themselves, arms flung wide, chests caved in.
The Pont du Carrousel is unguarded on this side of the river, so Caroline starts across it, feigning a limp. On the other side, around twenty soldiers are manning a still-standing barricade, undoubtedly abandoned by the Federates. A sub-officer approaches her, his rifle on his shoulder. He asks her where she’s going, and she says that she has to go see her mother, who is very ill. She arrived this evening with the troops, and Colonel Ferrandeau has granted her a few hours’ leave. She invents the name on the spot, telling herself that there’s no way the strapping fellow now facing her can be familiar with every single colonel in the Versaillais army. He asks to see what she’s carrying in her satchel, then orders his men to let her pass.
She walks away with twenty mistrustful gazes boring into her back, exhausted, perhaps, or simply indifferent, watching this petite nun limp away beneath her wimple. Reaching the opposite bank, she passes the still-smoking Tuileries, flames still leaping in some of the gaping windows. It is broad daylight, and yet Paris is in shadow, as if night might fall at any moment. Everywhere there are fires giving off plumes of black smoke as thick as pitch. The streets are empty. A few figures huddle behind the barricades. She looks up at the windows and sees the occasional curtain twitching. Reaching the Place du Châtelet, she pauses, breathless.
This part of the city is caught between two battlefronts: behind her toward the Latin Quarter, and to her left toward La Madeleine. She wants to scream, to weep, to roar in anger and sorrow, but she doesn’t feel strong enough to do any of those things, and it would be pointless anyway. The smell of burnt fat and old piss rising from her robe makes her gag, so she shoves open a door and pulls off the outer layer of her clothing and throws the putrid rags as far away from herself as she can, and immediately she feels lighter, cleaner. The wooden cross bounces on the stone floor of the corridor, and she is seized with the urge to smash it, but the sound of a bugle close by draws her back outside. Fifty men and women have just passed the Tour Saint-Jacques at a run, armed civilians and national guardsmen, followed by a mitrailleuse being pulled by a mule.
She runs after them and catches up with them on the Avenue Victoria. A barricade erected in front of the Hôtel de Ville brings them up short. With ten rifles pointed at him, a small man explains that this gun is needed at the Rue Beaubourg, that it alone might almost have the power to break the Versaillais offensive. He waves his arms, his gesticulations growing ever broader and more dramatic, seizing great armfuls of air and then clutching theatrically at his chest, fists closed, almost begging, and the men standing on the barricade listen to him silently, their expressions inflexible or dubious, some of them nodding, some shrugging. They’ve probably heard this kind of thing from others, too, the same sort of claptrap, promises of radiant tomorrows and victory from the barrel of a gun, exhortations of courage and sacrifice.
Suddenly a window explodes behind them, and then another, and everyone watches the flames leap and dance across the elegant façade, and they all cry out with surprise and rage, some of them burying their faces in their hands, their shoulders shaking with sobs, while others disperse, some even abandoning their rifles and shrugging off their bullet pouches.
Caroline has cried out, too, and now she stands and watches the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Commune burn, watches all of their mad hope rise in smoke and flame above the tiled rooftops and disappear, hundreds of sheets of paper drifting from the gaping, blown-out windows, undoubtedly containing future plans for the city, heroic proclamations calling for the old world to be brought down and the pages of the bad days to be torn out of the calendar, perhaps to be replaced by new names like in the past. She watches, choked by bitter grief, as her youth and all her desires are consumed, the pleasures that have illuminated her nights reduced to mere ashes.
The little man who was arguing for their passage at the barricade now steps forward with the twenty or so women and national guardsmen remaining after the others have dispersed. The Federate sentries let them pass with their mitrailleuse. Caroline walks behind the heavy gun, keeping her eyes on it. They can still bring down some of these butchers before they’re killed themselves. Her steps are quick and firm. A little girl takes her hand, almost skipping beside her, looks up at her with large, smiling blue eyes, and asks her why she’s crying.
28
All night, those who weren’t sleeping had watched the city burn, the sky reflecting the funereal light from the fires back onto their faces. At around midnight, the bombardment had ceased near the Rue de Lille and the Gare d’Orsay, and then the fires had set in, gorging on everything that fell between their crimson-toothed jaws.
Those who managed to fall asleep grunted and tossed uneasily beneath their blankets and opened their eyes wide in the darkness without really seeing anything, then sank back into the bad dream that had awakened them.
In the mild early morning, everyone smelled of sweat and yearned to rinse their mouths and spit out the foul-smelling residue of tobacco and wine. Provisioners brought buckets of water, and they rushed over for a swallow, pushing and shoving one another, almost fighting to fill their tin flasks, drink, and wash their faces. Water was given to the injured, who hung back on the edges of the melee without daring to stick their crutches in, and everyone eventually shared as friends once their throats had been moistened a bit.
Now the morning’s repast arrives under escort. A baker on the Rue Laplace has managed to produce a batch of bread, the last one. There’s no more flour. The two hansom cabs full of bread have had to be protected from attack by furious citizens claiming that they had more right to it than all those lowlifes getting drunk on the barricades.
The warm crust crackles between Nicolas’s fingers. He chews slowly, letting the taste fill his mouth, and he closes his eyes to enjoy the flood of happy images crowding his mind. He was on watch from three o’clock to sunrise, and now he should be asleep, but exhaustion has made his body tense up and quiver like a cable about to snap. Next to him, Red is savoring the bread, as well, grimacing at each stab of pain in his leg. The aid station on the boulevard was evacuated during the night. Yesterday evening, at the Pantheon, a nurse had sniffed at the wound and put his bandage back on. “It’s all right for now. But I’m out of clean linen. You should get yourself to the Boulevard de Sébastopol; there are people there who can look after you. We’re waiting on a coach to get us out of here; there’s no use in staying. There’s nobody left at the Rue Saint-Jacques, or even at the École de Médecine. Come with us; we’ll make room for you.”
Red had declined. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “And if we all leave, there’ll be no one left on the barricades.” The nurse had looked at him in surprise. “What are you planning to do on the barricade with that bum leg of yours? If it starts bleeding again, or gets infected, you’ll only be a burden. And between us, one man, more or less, isn’t going to change a thing. We’d need whole regiments.”
Nicolas was going to say something to convince Red to go, but his friend had walked away, limping slightly, forcing his back to stay very straight, his cap set crookedly on the bandage wrapped around his head.
They finish their bread and drain a flask of water, smacking their lips as if it were fine wine. Nicolas gestures at Red’s leg.
“Does it hurt much? What have you done with your crutch?”
Red clutches his knee and shakes his head.
“Dunno . . . I’m all right. Just hurts because it’s scarring over, that’s all.”
“You should have left last night with that wagon they were expecting. You’d be getting treated now.”
“Sure. Hide myself away like all those idiots and cowards who abandon their post as soon as it gets a bit tough. What the hell are they doing to do, each of them behind his own little barricade, guarding his own corner of the street? What good is that? It’s here we need to wait for them, the infantrymen, before they waltz in. We can buy time for our comrades farther down the line to organize a real defense, get back on their feet.”
Two artillery shells explode in the Luxembourg Gardens, throwing up a vast plume of smoke and leaves. Another shell falls near the Senate.
“Look, Montmartre is wishing us good morning,” Nicolas says. “Can you believe this? We could have held off the Versaillais forces with our fire, and yet they’re shelling us! The ones in command there should be shot, the ones who’ve done fuck all.”
“Yeah, I call that traitorous. But it boils down to the same thing. Have to line them up against the wall.”
Nicolas gets up and holds out a hand to Red, who doesn’t refuse it. They walk to the barricade on the Rue Soufflot. Red is still limping slightly and ends up leaning on Nicolas’s shoulder. They find about fifteen Federates busily cleaning rifles, seated on ammunition crates and chairs taken from some café. A pot of coffee sits in the middle of the circle on a round, marble-topped table.
“Is it hot?” asks Red, reaching for the pot.
“Help yourself, Citizen. Someone’s gone for another. There’s a woman in the church over there who makes a hell of a pot of coffee.”
“Hell, eh?” remarks an old man with a full beard. “That’s fitting, considering what we’ve got in store for us!”
They all laugh without taking their eyes off their work.
The coffee is good. Red and Nicolas sit down and apply themselves to the task, wiping the rifles clean of the residue of mingled grease and burnt paper left by the cartridges, swabbing the barrels, making sure the firing pins haven’t broken. Fifty rifles are already stacked against a wall, clean and ready for combat.
The old man with the beard, who has gotten up to add another to the stack, points at the rifles, counting each of them in turn.
“We’ll end up with more rifles than men, if this keeps up,” he says.
No one answers. Doubtless because they all know he’s right.
“Look, there’s the top brass,” he says.
The men look up. Some of them get to their feet.
A group of around ten officers, surrounded by a few escort guards, have stopped at the corner of the boulevard and are looking at the Pantheon, gesturing broadly. They’re speaking loudly, but no one can make out what they’re saying.
“That’s Maxime Lisbonne,” the old man says. “We’d do well to listen to what he’s saying. He’s no windbag, that one. Ah! And I see Citizen Allemane, too.”
He sets off, a rifle on his shoulder, limping slightly. Nicolas goes after him.
“Do you know all those officers?”
“Hell, no. But those two fellows are famous. If the Commune had been led by more men like that, we wouldn’t be in this mess today.”
“I was at the Rue Vavin, but we didn’t have a chance to see Lisbonne.”
“They had to evacuate last night. Same thing at the Croix-Rouge. Things are falling apart everywhere.”
Other men are approaching the group of officers.
“We must withdraw,” Lisbonne is saying. “Gather our troops on the Right Bank, where we still have a solid foothold. We’ll take all the ammunition and artillery we can carry. We can get omnibuses to transport it all. Better to organize a withdrawal in good order than beat a retreat under fire with no plan, leaving our weapons and munitions. If we start now, we can be on the other side of the Seine by late morning. The men are demoralized; they’re abandoning their posts, and we can’t do a thing to stop them!”
Allemane shakes his head. He stares at the ground, scuffing the toe of his boot in the dirt. The area around the Pantheon has been turned into a stronghold, he says. There are barricades everywhere that can still resist, giving the Central Committee time to gather reinforcements. He mentions La Butte-aux-Cailles, held by Wroblewski. More than a thousand men and artillery that will be on the way here by tomorrow.
Lisbonne shrugs.
“It’s hopeless here, Jean. They’re five hundred meters away at most, and there are ten thousand of them, if not more! They’ll raze the Latin Quarter to the ground if they have to, they’ll destroy the Sorbonne, they’ll . . .”
A cavalryman leaps off his horse and bursts into the middle of the group, panting for breath and lifting a hand vaguely in the direction of his cap in a hasty salute.
“The Central Committee is evacuating the Hôtel de Ville as we speak. They’re withdrawing to the town hall of the 11th. They’re ordering all battalions to follow them.”
“Why the 11th? It’s here that things are happening!”
Lisbonne strokes his mustache with his thumb and index finger.
“My decision is made. I’m leaving this afternoon with my men.”
A loud hum makes them all drop to the ground in a single movement. The shell explodes in front of the Pantheon. And then another. The Rue Soufflot is full of crouching bodies all the way to the square, crawling to huddle at the feet of the buildings.
Nicolas hurries toward the barricade, followed by the old man with the beard, who shouts that this is the end, and that they won’t take him alive. The guards have taken up their rifles. They stuff their pockets and pouches with cartridges.
“We have to stay in pairs. One to fire, the other to reload. Take four, because they’ll get clogged quickly.”
Nicolas imitates them. Red has found an empty bullet pouch and is cramming handfuls of cartridges into it.
