A Tatter of Scarlet: Adventurous Episodes of the Commune in the Midi 1871, Page 2

  CHAPTER I

  HOW THE TRICOLOUR CAME DOWN

  Deventer and I leaned on the parapet and watched the curious thingswhich were happening in Aramon across the river. We were the biggestboys in the school and kept even the Seniors in awe, being "Les Anglais"to them--and so familiar with the "boxe"--though Deventer was anIrishman, and I, Angus Cawdor, a Scot of the Scots.

  We had explained the difference to them many times by arguments whichmay have temporarily persuaded some, but without in the least affectingthe fixed French notion that all English-speaking people are of Englishrace.

  Behind us circulated the usual menagerie-promenade of the "Grands,"gabbling and whispering tremendous secrets in files of two and three.

  Hugh Deventer was a great hulk of a fellow who would take half a dozenFrench Seniors and rub their heads together if I told him, laughingloudly at their protestations as to loss of honour. He had beenchallenged several times to fight duels with small swords, but theFrenchmen had given that up now. For Deventer spat on his palms andpursued the seconds who came with the challenge round and round theplayground till he caught and smacked them. Whereat he laughed again.His father was chief of the Small Arms Factory, which of late years hadbeen added to the arsenal works of New Aramon opposite to us on the leftbank of the Rhone.

  My own father was a clergyman, who for the sake of his health hadretired to the dry sunny Rhone valley, and had settled in a green andwhite villa at Aramon because of the famous _lycee_ which was perched upon the heights of Aramon le Vieux.

  There was not much to distinguish Aramon the Old from Aramon the New,that is, from a distance. Both glowed out startingly white anddelicately creamy between the burnished river and the flawless sapphireof the Provencal sky. It was still winter time by the calendar, but thesun beat on our bowed shoulders as we bent over the solid masonry of thebreastwork, and the stones were hotter than in English dog-days as weplucked away our hands from it.

  Deventer and I looked across at the greater New Aramon where his fatherlived. It was the Aramon of shops and hotels and factories, while Aramonle Vieux, over which our great _lycee_ throned it like a glorifiedbarracks, was a place of crumbling walls, ancient arcaded streets,twelfth-century palaces let as tenements, and all the interesting_debris_ of a historical city on the verges of Languedoc.

  Our French _lyceens_ were too used to all this beauty and antiquity tocare anything about it, but we English did. We were left pretty much toourselves on our rare days of liberty, and as the professors, andespecially the _proviseur_, knew that we were to be trusted, we wereallowed to poke about the old Languedocian outpost much as we pleased.

  It was the month of January, 1871. France was invaded, beaten, but notconquered; but here in the far South, though tongues wagged fiercely, inhis heart the good bourgeois was glad to be out of it all.

  At any rate, the _lycee_ was carried on just as usual. Punishments weredealt out and tasks exacted. _Pions_ watched constantly over ourunstable morals, and occasionally reported misdemeanours of a milderkind, not daring to make their position worse by revealing anything thatreally mattered.

  But, generally speaking, Aramon le Vieux dreamed away the hours,blinking in the sunshine. The war did not touch it save in the fierceclatter of _cafe_ dispute. Only in the forts that rose about the arsenalof the newer city opposite to us a feeble guard of artillery andlinesmen lingered as a protection for the Small Arms Factory.

  For the new Paris Government was still far from stable, and some feareda renewal of the White Terror of 1815, and others the Red of the Communeof 1848. The workmen of the arsenal, hastily gathered from all quarters,were mostly sealed to the "Internationale," but it was supposed that thefield-pieces in Fort St. Andre could easily account for any number ofthese hot-heads.

  Besides Hugh Deventer and I there were several other English boys, butthey were still screeching like seagulls somewhere in the Lower Schooland so did not count, except when an anxious mamma besought us withtears in her voice to look after her darling, abandoned all day to hisfate among these horrid French.

  To "look after" them Deventer and I could not do, but we gathered theminto a sort of fives team, and organised a poor feckless game in thewindowless angle of the refectory. We also got hockey sticks andbastinadoed their legs for their souls' good to the great marvel of thenatives. Deventer had even been responsible for a trial of lacrosse, butgood missionaries though we were, we made no French converts.

  The Juniors squealed like driven piglings when the ball came their way,while the Seniors preferred walking up and down their paved cattle-pen,interminably talking with linked arms and lips close to the ear of achosen friend.

  Always one or two read as they walked alone, memorising fiercely againstnext Saturday's examination.

  The pariah _pion_ or outcast usher, a most unhappy out-at-elbows youth,was expected to keep us all under his eye, but we saw to it early thatthat eye passed leniently over Deventer and myself. Otherwise he countedfor nothing.

  The War--the War--nothing but talk of the War came to our ears from themurmuring throng behind us. How "France has been betrayed." "How the newarmies of the Third Republic would liberate Paris and sweep thePrussians back to Berlin. From every side brave patriots were even nowclosing in upon the beleaguered city. Ha, then the spiked helmets wouldsee!"

  Still, a few facts grew more clear to us. At Lyons and Grenoble,Bourbaki was organising the army of the South-East. There came a soundfrom nowhere in particular that this army was to be joined and led byGaribaldi himself with thirty thousand of his red jackets from Italy.

  Deventer and I were immensely excited. We made plans for immediateinvasion. We would fight for France and wear a red cardigan in theForeign Legion. But the _Lycee_ St. Andre was well guarded, and so farno one had succeeded in escaping. I do not know that they tried veryhard. They were French lads and brave--as many of them showedafterwards--but they were of the Midi, and even then the Midi wasproverbially hard to budge. Not as in the North and East had the iron ofthe invasion entered the soul.

  The parapet upon which we leaned was of very ancient masonry, solidblocks laid clean and Cyclopean with very little visible cement. It hadformed part of the defences of an ancient castle, long since overwhelmedby the college buildings, the materials of which had mostly beenquarried from its imposing mass.

  Beneath us ran the Rhone in a fine, broad, half-mile-wide sweep, five orsix miles an hour, yet save for the heaped hillocks of water about thebridge piers, and the swirl where the far bank curved over, as smooth asa mirror.

  Hugh Deventer and I had been talking of the great '61 campaign ofGaribaldi in Sicily and through Naples--a thousand red-shirts and akingdom in the dust! Ah, the glory of that time!

  But as we leaned and looked we fell silent. We saw Aramon the Newopposite to us, as it were at our feet, across only that span of water.The factories were curiously silent, and from one fort after anotherdarted the white spurt of smoke which meant artillery practice.

  We listened, knowing that in a little we should hear the report.

  _Boom! Boom! Rattle-rattle-chirr!_

  Fighting--they were fighting in Aramon! Deventer's father would be inthe thick of it. We looked and longed, but the way was closed. Whatcould it be?

  Deventer knew that there were continually troubles between theoperatives and the "masters," or rather the representatives of themasters of whom his father was the chief.

  The great _Compagnie d'Armes de Guerre Aramoise_ was not distinguishedfor generosity. The men were well lodged but poorly paid. In these wartimes they had been over-driven. So many hundreds of rifles to turn outdaily--field artillery, too, and a new department to be set up for themanufacture of mitrailleuses.

  Outside, Dennis Deventer said little about the politics of the works,nothing at all to his son Hugh.

  We of the _lycee_ knew that France was already fairly evenly dividedbetween true Republicans and those others who looked upon Gambetta'srepublic as a step to a monarchy or even the restoration of
theNapoleons. The sons of functionaries mostly held the latter opinion. Thescions of the aristocratic families of the neighbourhood, the old Whitesof the Midi, prayed for the Bourbon flag and the coming of Henry V tohis own again.

  So when we heard the ripple of musketry fire and the sullen boom of theartillery, Deventer and I supposed that a mutiny of sorts had broken outat the works, or that news had come from Paris of some sudden change ofgovernment.

  We were not far from the mark. There had been news from Paris and amutiny had broken out. At any rate, they were fighting over in Aramon,and we must find out what it was all about.

  For the moment this was impossible for us. The cliff was too sheer onthe side of our recreation ground. There were over many eyes upon us. Wemust wait for the night, and in the meantime Deventer could only sniffthe battle from afar, and hold in the desire to set off and help hisfather.

  "The Dad doesn't want me," he said. "Of course, I know that. He wouldmost likely tan me well for breaking bounds, but I can't bear beingcooped up here doing silly mathematics when over yonder----But listen tothem!"

  A patter of what might have been heavy rain on a tin roof came faintlyto our ears. A little white cloud hung over the statue in the marketsquare, and presently flung down devilish fingers earthward. We did notthen know the signs of the explosion of shrapnel.

  By this time the school was crowding about us, as curious as ourselves.The bell clanged for classes to resume, but no one moved. The _pion_screamed impotently in the rear. None took any notice, and the windowsabove were black with the gowns of the professors.

  Some thought that the noise was only the letting off of blasts in thePierre de Montagne quarries, but it was pointed out that such explosionstook place only at eight, one, and four, the hours when the men would beout of the quarries at their meals. Besides, the crackle of small firewas unaccounted for, and each moment it became more lively.

  Practice at the Chassepot factories? Very likely--but at human targets.

  Finally the college authorities caused discipline to prevail, andDeventer and I watched alone by the parapet. We had both passed our_bachot_, and were an honour to the college. So the strictness of ruleand line was relaxed in our case.

  Our hearts beat, and in the instancy of our watch we would not haveturned our heads if the _proviseur_ himself had been at our side.

  Presently we could see soldiers marching, the flash of bayonets, andgroups of a dozen, as if pushed beyond their patience, turning andfiring with rapid irregularity. All this in flashes of vision, mostly atthe bridge-end, or at the intersection of two streets. Through thenorthern gate a kind of uncertain retreat began to dribble--the redbreeches of the linesmen, the canter of the artillery horses attackingthe hill, with stragglers here and there looking about for theirregiments.

  Neither Deventer nor I knew enough to explain these things.

  "There are no Germans nearer than Toul or Besancon," he said, with apuzzled anxiety.

  The field guns answered him smartly. From all the houses about thenorthern gate a storm of rifle fire broke out. The soldiers on foothastened their retreat. The artillerymen, better led or of firmercourage, faced about, and with one volley pitted the facades of thehouses from which the attack had come. They withdrew regularly, coveringthe retreat of the infantry, and spat out their little devils' claws ofshrapnel over every group which showed itself outside the wall. Slowlythe soldiers passed out of sight. The artillery bucketed over the knollsof the Montagne of Aramon among the evergreen odoriferous plants and thefaint traces of the last snow wreaths.

  There was nothing left for us to see now except the town of Aramon, itsgreen and white houses sleeping in the sun, the tall chimney of theSmall Arms Factory, now smokeless--and the broad Rhone sweeping graveand placid between them and us.

  Nevertheless we waited alone on the recreation ground, our heads alittle dizzy. The swooning hum of the class-rooms awoke behind us, butwe heeded not at all.

  We saw the tricolour of the Republic come down with a run from the tallflagstaff on Fort St. Andre, and presently, irregularly tugged, rising afew feet at a time, a red flag fluttered out, probably an improvisedtable-cover or bedspread. It flapped out bravely in the brisk breeze offthe water.

  We had had our first glimpse of "The Tatter of Scarlet."