The shock having twisted the iron-fittings of the carriage doors, it was found impossible to open them, and it became necessary to enter the compartments through the broken glass. Four corpses had already been taken out and placed side by side along the line. About ten wounded extended on the ground, were waiting near the dead bodies, there being no doctor to dress their wounds, and no assistance of any kind. The clearance of the wreckage had barely commenced, and a new victim was found under each bit of lumber, while the heap, streaming and palpitating with this human butchery, never seemed to decrease.
"But I tell you that Jacques is under there!" cried Flore, relieving herself by obstinately repeating this expression, which she uttered without reason, as the lamentation of her despair. "He is calling. There, there! Listen!" she added.
The tender lay buried beneath the carriages, which after running one atop of the other, had then tumbled over; and, in fact, since the locomotive had been making less noise, a heavy masculine voice could be distinguished roaring in the midst of the pile. As the work advanced the clamour of these agonising tones became more subdued, but they revealed such atrocious pain that the rescue party, unable to bear them any longer, gave way and called out themselves. Then, at last, when the excavators reached the victim whose legs they had liberated, and whom they were dragging towards them, the roar of suffering ceased. The man was dead!
"No," said Flore, "it is not Jacques. He is lower down. He is underneath."
And with her arms of a warrior woman, she raised the wheels and cast them to a distance, she twirled the zinc of the roofs, broke the doors, tore away the bits of chain. And as soon as she came to a corpse or a person who was wounded, she called for someone to remove the body, determined not to slacken for a second in her maddening search.
Cabuche, Pecqueux, and Misard worked behind her, while Séverine, enfeebled by standing so long on her feet, had just seated herself on the bench of a shattered carriage. But Misard, gentle and indifferent, again overcome by his sluggishness, anxious to avoid too much fatigue, was always ready to carry away the bodies. And both he and Flore looked at the corpses, as if they hoped to recognise them from among the multitude of thousands and thousands of faces who, in ten years, had filed past before their eyes at full steam, leaving only the confused recollection of a crowd conveyed there and borne away in a flash.
No; it was still that unknown wave of the advancing world, as anonymous in brutal, accidental death, as in that hasty life which brought it tearing past them onward to the future; and they could not name, they could give no information about the heads, furrowed with horror, of these poor creatures struck down on their road, trampled under foot, similar to those soldiers whose bodies fill the trenches in opposing the charge of an enemy ascending to the assault. Nevertheless, Flore fancied she had found one person to whom she had spoken on the day the train was blocked in the snow: that American whose profile she had at last come to know familiarly, without being aware of his name, or anything about him or his. Misard carried him along with the other dead bodies, come no one knew whence, bound for no one knew where, and stopped there.
Then came a heartrending scene: in a first-class compartment turned topsy-turvy they had just discovered a young couple, doubtless newly married, thrown one upon the other in such an unfortunate position that the woman, who was uppermost, crushed the man, and could not make a movement to relieve him. He was choking, he already had the death rattle in his throat; while she, in terror, with her mouth free, her heart rent asunder at the thought that she was killing him, distractedly implored the relief party to make haste. And when they had delivered both, it was she who all at once breathed her last, a blow from one of the buffers having ripped open her side. And the man, coming to himself again, clamoured with grief, kneeling beside the dead body whose eyes remained full of tears.
A dozen corpses and about thirty wounded passengers had now been removed. The workers were setting the tender free. Flore paused, ever and anon, thrusting her head among the splintered wood, the twisted iron, searching ardently with her eyes to see if she could perceive the driver. Suddenly she uttered a loud cry.
"I can see him!" she exclaimed. "He is under here. Look! There is his arm, with his blue woollen jacket. He doesn't move; he doesn't breathe!"