THE BLACK BAND
The first Commune of Aramon had fallen. Its place was taken by a Committee of Public Safety sitting at the Riding School. Of these the chiefs were Georges Barrès, the Catalan, who called himself "of Perpignan"; Chanot, the cadet of a good house, just released from a term of imprisonment (which he described as being for political offences); Auroy, the proprietor of an hotel by no means of the highest class, and Chardon, whose knowledge of the world extended as far as New Caledonia. They were a crew of desperadoes who had been employed chiefly in labourers' work at the factories. They knew no handicraft—at least none sufficiently well to pass the eye of such foremen as worked for Dennis Deventer. And, in addition, they were lazy in working hours, given to obscene conversation and to drinking pure alcohol out of pocket flasks. So it may be well believed that they were not popular with the oversmen at the works, and when they fell under Jack Jaikes' rebuke he was apt to chastise them with whips of scorpions.
At the same time, desperate and careless though they were, and backed by the majority of the unthinking younger men of the National Guard, they had some qualms as to disturbing Keller Bey in his fastness of the Mairie. He had still a number of faithful defenders, and like an old lion of the Atlas he would certainly sell his life dearly.
So Barrès and the Committee of Public Safety laid aside his case for the moment. They had other matters which pressed. Their "rapine and pillage" adherents desired to begin work. On the outskirts were many villas and houses of summer resort which promised loot. Barrès had preached so much, that (though with no great good-will) he was now driven to a little practice. Yet he knew instinctively that in France offences against property are far longer remembered and far more severely dealt with than crimes against persons—shooting and assassination not excluded.
Still, he had to satisfy his followers, and in the bosom of the committee there were already experts—the ex-political prisoner Chanot and the traveller to the coasts of Cayenne were not at their first essay in "personal expropriation."
It was clearly unsafe to cross the river. The town of Aramon le Vieux was a hornets' nest, all Gambetta republicans and royalists. The department, too, had a fine National Guard, mostly Protestants or commanded by Protestants, and the Moblots or Mobiles of the department of Deux Rives were drilling every day. What plundering was to be done must be on this side of the bridge, but there was abundance and to spare for all, if the business were rightly managed.
The first step was to disarm the doubtful companies, and re-enlist only those who were of proper anarchist hue and ready for "expropriation." This was done in the Riding School where the Committee sat all day devising mischief and laying out evil as on a map.
On the night of the 6th of April they were ready. The villas and country houses left vacant by the officers of the troops formerly quartered in Aramon had remained unoccupied, and, as the soldiers went right off to the seat of war from Aramon Junction, the furniture and personal belongings were equally untouched. The wives and children had been dispatched to the care of parents paternal and maternal in Limousin castles and Norman apple-orchards. Only an ancient caretaker or two remained, hiding in some niche of the ground floor and cautiously venturing out to make a hasty and furtive "market" in the grey of the morning.
For the adepts of "individual redistribution" these served to whet an appetite. By midnight Jack Jaikes called me up on the roof of the Château. All along the river front houses were already flaming. Some, as I looked, climaxed their particular display by the crashing down of roofs and the falling in of floor after floor, followed by bursts of flame many hundreds of feet high, which lit up the dim river and the white houses of Aramon le Vieux. I could see the ancient battlements of the Lycée St. André serrated against a velvet-black sky—nay, I could make out that very forehead of promenade from which we had watched, that day in January, the tricolour give place to the Tatter of Scarlet.
The rabble were giving tongue down there like packs of wolves, and at the sound Jack Jaikes stamped and cursed as men swear only in Clydeside ship-building yards.