The Beast Within (52 page)

‘Jacques! Oh, Jacques!’ she cried. ‘He’s under there! I saw him! He was thrown backwards! Jacques! Jacques!’

The noise from the engine had begun to subside. All that came from her now was a pathetic, dying wheeze that grew steadily weaker and above which could be heard the cries of the injured, getting louder and louder. Thick smoke still blew everywhere, and the huge pile of wreckage from which these cries of pain and terror issued seemed to be cloaked in an immovable layer of black dust that the sun could not penetrate. What were they to do? Where should they start? How could they get to all these people in distress?

Flore continued to cry out for Jacques.

‘I tell you he looked at me,’ she shouted. ‘He was thrown over there, under the tender. Quick! Come and help me!’

Cabuche and Misard had been offering assistance to Henri, the guard, who had also jumped out at the last minute. He had dislocated his foot. They sat him down on the ground against the hedge, where he watched the rescue operations in stunned silence, apparently unhurt.

‘Cabuche! Come over here!’ yelled Flore. ‘Jacques is under here, I tell you!’

Cabuche didn’t hear. He had run off to see to some of the other injured passengers and came back carrying a young woman, both of her legs hanging limp, broken at the thigh.

Séverine had heard Flore calling to Cabuche and ran over to join her.

‘Jacques! Jacques!’ she cried. ‘Where is he? Let me help you!’

‘Come on then!’ yelled Flore. ‘He’s over here.’

The two women joined hands and started tugging at a broken wheel. Séverine’s dainty fingers were of little use, but Flore simply grabbed hold of things and pulled them aside.

‘Careful!’ shouted Pecqueux, who had come to join them.

He had put out his hand to prevent Séverine from treading on an arm, torn off at the shoulder and still wearing a blue sleeve. She recoiled in horror. She didn’t recognize the sleeve, and there was no knowing who the arm belonged to; it had just rolled there. No doubt the body would be found somewhere else. It made her feel so shaky that she could hardly move; she stood there weeping and watching the others struggling with the wreckage. She couldn’t even bring herself to pick up bits of broken glass lest she cut her hands.

The rescue work and the search for bodies became even more desperate and fraught with danger when the fire from the engine began to spread to other pieces of wood. In order to contain the blaze it was necessary to shovel earth on to the flames. Someone ran to Barentin to ask for help, and a telegraph message was sent to Rouen. Meanwhile, everyone bravely set about helping to clear the wreckage. Many of those who had run away had come back, apologizing for having been so scared. Work progressed slowly and cautiously. Every piece of wreckage had to be removed with great care; if it all collapsed, the unfortunate people trapped underneath would be killed. Some of the injured were buried up to their chest, unable to move as if held in a vice, screaming. The rescuers spent a quarter of an hour trying to free one of them. He was as white as a sheet but didn’t complain; he said he wasn’t in pain and that he was all right. When they got him out, he had lost both legs; he died immediately. He had been so frightened that he didn’t realize he had been so terribly mutilated and he hadn’t felt a thing. An entire family was rescued from a second-class carriage which had caught fire; the father and mother had both injured their knees, and the grandmother had broken her arm. They too felt no pain, but were weeping and calling out to their daughter, who had disappeared in the crash, a little girl hardly three years old with beautiful blonde hair. They found her underneath a shorn-off carriage roof, safe and sound, laughing, and apparently quite happy. They found another girl, however, covered in blood, and with both her hands crushed. They moved her to one side while someone went to look for her parents; and there she waited all alone. No one knew her name; she was so distraught that she couldn’t speak, and froze in sheer terror the moment anyone went near her. The carriage doors couldn’t be opened because the locks had been jammed by the shock of the collision; they had to get in through the broken windows. Within a very short time, four bodies had been placed in a row at the side of the track. Ten or so injured passengers lay on the ground beside them, waiting for help, but there was no doctor to dress their injuries, and no one to treat them. The work of clearing the wreckage had hardly begun. They found a new victim under every piece of debris they lifted, but the seething mound of severed limbs and mangled bodies seemed to get no smaller.

‘I tell you Jacques is under here!’ Flore kept repeating.

She seemed to derive some comfort from this obstinate, mindless cry, as if it allowed her to vent her despair.

‘Listen! He’s calling!’

The tender was pinned beneath the carriages, which had piled on top of each other and collapsed on to it. Now that the engine was making less noise, they could hear a man screaming at the top of his voice from inside the wreckage. As they picked their way towards him, the screaming grew louder and louder; he sounded in such terrible pain that the rescuers could not bear to hear him and started weeping and shouting themselves. When they eventually reached him and freed his legs to lift him out, the screaming stopped. He was dead.

‘That’s not him,’ shouted Flore. ‘He’s underneath, further down!’

With a remarkable display of strength, she lifted wheels and flung them out of the way, tore the cladding from the carriage roofs, smashed open doors and removed lengths of coupling. When she came across a body or someone who was injured, she called to one of the others to come and take them away, not wishing to abandon her frantic search for even a second.

Cabuche, Pecqueux and Misard worked behind her. Séverine, weary from standing on her feet doing nothing, had sat down on a broken carriage-seat. Misard, having recovered his usual implacable indifference to all around him, avoided the more tiring work and spent most of his time carrying away bodies. Like Flore, he examined each corpse as if hoping to recognize someone from the thousands and thousands of faces that for the last ten years had flowed past their window, coming and going in a flash, leaving behind them only the uniform impression of a nameless crowd. But no! It was still the same anonymous stream of people, always on the move. Death had come to them, cruelly and unexpectedly, but death was as faceless as the frantic pace of life, which had borne them past their window, rushing madly towards some unknown future. They could attach no name, no piece of information to the horror-struck faces of these wretched individuals, who had been brought down in full flight, trampled underfoot and crushed, like soldiers whose bodies fill holes in the ground before the charge of an advancing army. There was one person whom Flore thought she recognized, a man she had spoken to on the day the train was caught in the blizzard, an American. His face was quite familiar, but she didn’t know his name or anything about him or his family. Misard carried him away, along with the other bodies that had met their end there. No one knew where they came from and no one knew where they were bound.

In the first-class compartment of an overturned carriage another harrowing spectacle met their eyes. They found a young couple, newly weds no doubt. They had been thrown together awkwardly; the woman had fallen on top of her husband and was unable to move to take her weight off him. He was being suffocated and was about to expire. The woman, whose mouth was free, was calling desperately for someone to help them quickly, heartbroken and horrified at the thought that she was killing him. When they succeeded in getting them out, the woman died immediately; there was a large hole in her side, made by one of the buffers. The man regained consciousness and knelt beside her, wailing inconsolably. The woman still had tears in her eyes.

The dead now numbered twelve, and there were more than thirty injured. They had at last managed to free the tender. From time to time Flore stopped to thrust her head down between the splintered wood and twisted metal, frantically looking for some sign of the driver. Suddenly she shouted out, ‘I can see him! He’s down there! That’s his arm with the blue woollen sleeve! He’s not moving! He’s not breathing!’

She stood up, swearing like a man: ‘For Christ’s sake, hurry up! Get him out of there!’

With her bare hands she tried to tear away the flooring of a carriage that was jammed between other pieces of wreckage. She ran back to the house and fetched the axe they used for splitting logs. Brandishing it like a woodcutter felling oak trees, she cut through the floorboards with a furious rain of blows. Everyone stood out of the way and let her get on with it, shouting to her to be careful. But the only person she could think about was Jacques, lying down there beneath a tangle of wheels and axles. She did not hear their warning; she was completely carried away, fearless and unstoppable. She cut away the carriage floor and, with blow after blow, forced aside the obstacles that barred her way. Her fair hair flew about her face, her blouse was torn open, and her arms were bare. She was like an awesome reaper, furiously scything her way through the havoc she herself had wrought. One final blow landed on an axle and split the axe-head in two. The others came over to help her as she moved aside the wheels that had been protecting Jacques and had undoubtedly saved him from being crushed to death. She lifted him up and carried him away in her arms.

‘Jacques! Jacques!’ she cried. ‘He’s breathing! He’s alive! Thank God! He’s alive! I saw him fall! I knew he was down there!’

Séverine ran after her, overcome with emotion. Together they laid him on the ground beside Henri, who was still totally stupefied, unable to comprehend where he was or what was going on around him. Pecqueux came over to them and stood looking at his driver; it was awful to see him in such a terrible condition. The two women kneeled down beside him, one on his left and the other on his right, supporting his head and peering anxiously at his face for the least movement.

Jacques eventually opened his eyes. He looked vaguely at each of them in turn, without seeming to recognize them. They meant nothing to him. Then, a few metres away, he caught sight of the dying locomotive. He was startled. He gazed at her steadily, his eyes flickering as the emotion welled up inside him. He recognized La Lison only too well. Everything came back to him — the two stones across the track, the terrible impact, the shudder that ran through the two of them. He might recover, but she would surely die. He couldn’t blame her for being slow to respond; she hadn’t been herself since they were caught in the blizzard. If she was no longer quite as agile, it wasn’t her fault; old age came to everyone, tiring the limbs and stiffening the joints. Seeing her lying there mortally wounded and about to expire, he was overcome with grief and willingly forgave her. She had only a few more minutes to live. She was already growing cold. The coal from her firebox fell to the ground as ash. The steam that had gushed so fiercely from her open flanks now leaked from her sides with a pathetic, whimpering sound, like a child crying. She lay on her back in a pool of black sludge, her gleaming metal-work spattered with dirt and grease; it was like the tragic end of a magnificent horse, accidentally knocked down in the street. For a while, as she lay there with her belly ripped open, they had watched the final throes of her stricken body — the pistons still beating like twin hearts, steam pulsing through her cylinders like blood in the veins. But now the piston rods gave only a spasmodic jerk, like two arms twitching involuntarily, in a last defiant assertion of life. Her soul was ebbing away, along with the power that had kept her alive — the store of living breath, which even now continued to seep from her. The mighty creature grew calmer, sank gradually into a gentle sleep and fell silent. She was dead. The twisted heap of iron, steel and brass, which was all that remained of the fallen giant, its body broken in two, its limbs torn apart, lying bruised and battered in the full glare of the sun, took on the pitiful appearance of an enormous human corpse, of a life that had been lived and then violently snatched away.

Realizing that
La Lison
was no more, Jacques closed his eyes, wishing that he might die too. He felt so weak that he thought the last dying whisper of the locomotive had carried him off with her. Tears ran slowly down his cheeks. Pecqueux stood there motionless with a lump in his throat; this was more than he could bear. Their faithful companion had died, and his driver wished to follow her. The marriage of man and machine which had united the three of them was, it seemed, now at an end. Never again would they climb aboard
La Lison
and travel for league upon league, without exchanging a sign or a word, relying solely on the tacit understanding that existed between them.
La Lison’s
days were over; her power and elegance, her gleaming beauty had gone for ever! Although perfectly sober, Pecqueux burst into violent sobs that shook his great frame uncontrollably.

Séverine and Flore too were dismayed to see Jacques lose consciousness again. Flore ran to the cottage and came back with some camphorated spirit, which she rubbed on to his chest, not knowing what else to do. Despite their concern for Jacques, however, they were even more disturbed by the interminable sufferings of the one surviving horse, which had had its two front legs torn off. It lay near them, producing a continuous, almost human whinny of pain, so loud and expressing such unspeakable agony that two of the injured passengers, following its example, began screaming themselves, like animals. Never was there a death-cry like it — an unforgettable, deep-throated complaint that made the blood run cold. Its torment became unbearable. Voices rang out, horrified and enraged, begging someone to put the wretched horse out of its misery; now that the engine was silent, the animal’s endless cry of distress rose into the air like a last, doleful lament for the disaster that had occurred. Pecqueux, still sobbing, picked up the broken axe and felled the horse with a single crushing blow to its skull. Silence descended over the scene of carnage.