Page 2091 - les-miserables

snowstorm.
The assailants had numbers in their favor; the insurgents
had position. They were at the top of a wall, and they thun-
dered point-blank upon the soldiers tripping over the dead
and wounded and entangled in the escarpment. This bar-
ricade, constructed as it was and admirably buttressed, was
really one of those situations where a handful of men hold
a legion in check. Nevertheless, the attacking column, con-
stantly recruited and enlarged under the shower of bullets,
drew inexorably nearer, and now, little by little, step by step,
but surely, the army closed in around the barricade as the
vice grasps the wine-press.
One assault followed another. The horror of the situation
kept increasing.
Then there burst forth on that heap of paving-stones, in
that Rue de la Chanvrerie, a battle worthy of a wall of Troy.
These haggard, ragged, exhausted men, who had had noth-
ing to eat for four and twenty hours, who had not slept, who
had but a few more rounds to fire, who were fumbling in
their pockets which had been emptied of cartridges, near-
ly all of whom were wounded, with head or arm bandaged
with black and blood-stained linen, with holes in their
clothes from which the blood trickled, and who were hardly
armed with poor guns and notched swords, became Titans.
The barricade was ten times attacked, approached, assailed,
scaled, and never captured.
In order to form an idea of this struggle, it is necessary
to imagine fire set to a throng of terrible courages, and then
to gaze at the conflagration. It was not a combat, it was the

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