My Favorite Scene

----The barricade.
----Law students, thirty or forty of them. All running confusedly through the filthy portion of city street about twice the size of the school gym they've barricaded off with heaps of garbage, chairs, old mattresses.
----Most of them have never held a gun before, and now here they are, brandishing borrowed (read: stolen) muskets and sabres with the bravado they think they should have. This is war; they're rebelling against authority, monarchy, the economic system, poverty... every single person in this world is sick and tired of their misery. Something's gotta give, change will come.
----The tension has boiled over. It's ten at night, the stars are bright, and each man, left to his own devices, trapped in this death chamber he himself constructed, is moodily swinging between patriotic passion and selfish regret. But they don't fear death. I don't blame them. We're going to die anyway; if it comes down to furthering a cause I love or moaning about it at home, I know the choice I'll make.
----But it's hard to remember that choice here. Musket balls fly in an impenetrable horizontal plane, explosions rock the ground, cough on the smoke, food ran out 24 hours ago, got no sleep last night. Gun jams under enemy fire, paving stones piled in a heap next to the bodies, hands crusted in someone else's blood, no leadership, our flag is the ragged coat of the first man to die, can't hear myself think, no functional weapons left, attack with broken glass bottles, lost an arm, hurts so bad, whack my head on a falling beam, window shatters, duck for cover, can't find my friends, dirt smeared on his face, curled up in a cellar, don't know anyone's name, a child is singing somewhere, Paris is indifferent to us... me... my family, who won't be able to find me, identify the body, no hope... locked in to the barricade, no escape, they'll breach the wall sooner or later, only a matter of time, two a.m., no sleep, battle still raging, screaming, yelling, running, can't run anymore, lungs crushed...
----That, my friends, is the barricade where Marius is fighting.