Work Text:
18 January 1871 - Paris
“Typhoid,” Joly said, his voice muffled by the mask covering his lower face. He stepped back from the bed the sick man lay on and faced one of the other medics that manned the sick ward, “Fever, immobility, and the rash. Burn everything he touches and isolate him from the other patients.”
The boy - only a few years younger than Joly himself, only nodded, jotting down his words in a notebook.
A part of him still feared even being near the sick man rattling with every pained breath. But the exhaustion since September - since the siege began - had dulled his previous vigilance.
He left the room with the other medic and pulled off his mask, taking in the foul smell of the hospital ward, “How many today?” He asked.
“Since the morning?” The young medic asked, flipping through his notebook, “20 patients. Most of them, hypothermia, but there’s that man with Typhoid. A few children with dysentery as well. So, around 27.”
“Thank you.” Joly said, “We never seem to have enough beds, do we?”
“Not since the Prussians began shelling last week, no.”
“It’s never ending, isn’t it?” Joly laughed, “Tell me there will be another sortie, and more dead and injured men will come and flood into these halls; I would not even bother with disbelief anymore.”
“Are you going back home?”
“I need to eat,” Joly said, “Something.”
“I saw the papers outside,” the young medic changed the subject, “Nearly caused me to sign up with the National Guard on the spot.”
“That is a fantastic excuse to sleep at work,” Joly said, “A bit risky, but I see what you’re doing.”
Joly left the building and began walking home, passing by ruined, bombed out buildings, and grand boulevards that no longer had the iconic trees that flanked the road. Horses were gone, eaten for food by the desperate populace. Starving people wandering the streets and begging everyone for just a bite to survive.
Normally he would take the train, but the trains were now only for military use. Earlier, he went by just taking the omnibus, but then, as the hunger set into the city, the horses - as with the dogs, the cats, the rats, and the zoo animals - began to be butchered for food.
He bought a small bread roll for an entire Franc, and returned home to Montmartre.
There was a loose newspaper frontpage at his door, so he picked it up and saw the news.
“The King of Prussia, crowned as Emperor in Versailles?” his eyes twitched as he set his jaw. He crumpled the page and tossed it away, before entering his building.
When he arrived in his room, he sunk into his chair and lay his head against the back of the seat.
The room was deathly empty since Bossuet volunteered for the army, thinking he had found some clever solution to his debt problems. He had no idea where that bald fool was, but his atrocious luck really outdid him this time.
23 January 1871
The next few days were just as exhausting as the last. Another failed sortie had brought scores of National Guardsmen into the hospital wards, with men laying and even dying on the hallway floors. The agony-induced moans of the injured and dying made the hospital a riotous place that only nibbled further and further away at Joly’s sanity.
He had knelt, along with the other medic, by a National Guardsman whose leg had been amputated the other day.
“Seems like it’s healing well enough, good sir,” Joly said of the man’s pink tinged stump where his leg once was, “Change his bandages, then.”
As the younger medic got to work, the National Guardsman looked up at Joly, “Wish I could’a…” he mumbled, “Y’know.”
“Killed more of those damned Prussians?” Joly naturally grinned as he finished for him, “I believe they’re just Germans now.”
“Can’t even do shit now with just one leg,” he grunted, “Just like this shitty National Defense Government, shooting its own damned people. Some republic!”
Joly silently nodded. Not needing to say much of yesterday’s horrific scene at the Hôtel de Ville, where the government’s forces began to shoot at a crowd of Parisians.
“Where you from, kid?”
“The south, but I live in Montmartre,” Joly said, “But I live in this mansion during the day. I get to wine and dine with all of you fellows.”
“Still got them cannons up in Montmartre,” the man said, “So we ain’t lost yet.”
“Don’t jinx it,” Joly chuckled, before moving onto the next patient.
01 March 1871
Joly stood to the side of the street and watched as a group of National Guardsmen riding mules dragged up, what seemed to him to be, hundreds of cannons up the hill of Montmartre. The last of the batch of artillery waiting to be transported.
“So that’s it, huh?” A voice from behind, caused the medic to turn.
“You- Enjolras?” Joly raised a brow, “You’re alive?”
Behind him stood a soldier - baggy red trousers, heavy blue coat, a kepi atop his blonde head - leaning to the side against a building with his arms crossed. Hanging off his shoulder from a leather strap was a chassepot rifle, and at his hip, hanging off his belt, was a sword-bayonet inside its sheath.
“It’s been a long half-year, hasn’t it, Joly?” Enjolras asked.
“It has,” Joly said.
“Seen the Prussian dogs parade through the Arc de Triomphe?”
“I don’t even want to watch,” Joly responded, “The streets were so empty you’d’ve believed the plague came in. And for what? To see the Germans that killed our men sneer at our misery?”
“It’s the Prussians,” Enjolras corrected, “Those are our enemies, not the Germans as a whole. They have workers, farmers, laborers, and all sorts of working class, just like us. Our enemy here are those men that barged into Versailles to give a King an even higher title.”
“I’m surprised you joined the Guard,” Joly said, “I remember you made a point to save up for a military exemption so you’d never have to serve the Emperor. I’d never thought I’d see you in a uniform.”
“Does this not enrage you, Joly?” Enjolras asked, “This republic, this dictatorship of the bourgeois, surrendering to a gang of spike-hatted thugs?”
“Of course it does!” Joly said, “But what can I do but stand by all the people this damned war affected?”
“Nothing,” Enjolras said, “Nothing but to stand beside the people of Paris. Just as we all have these past months among this siege. The bourgeois still had food. The bourgeois never suffered at all. Most of them fled the city before the siege began. Never let go of that solidarity, Joly.”
“You never actually made use of that rifle, did you?” Joly asked, as Enjolras turned to walk away.
“I shot a few Prussians during the sorties,” Enjolras continued down the hill, “It was to defend France.”
The rest of the canons had finally made it up the hill, and Joly turned to head home.