CHAPTER XXXV.
THE GREAT FIGHT IN FLEET STREET.
Untilthree o'clock on Monday afternoon there was no new disturbance, no reassembling of the rioters; but soon after that hour it was clear that something was astir. This time there was no marching in companies, but the vast crowds that were quietly but systematically pouring cityward from every quarter were clearly acting under instructions, and according to some method of organisation. So far as I could see, it was towards the open space in front of the Royal Exchange that the crowd was converging, and thither I allowed myself to be carried with the stream.
On this occasion it was quite clear that the mob was neither sanguine nor confident, and for this there were reasons. The first was the absence of the Dumpling. That he was to have met his lieutenants at a certain hour, and at a certain place, that morning, but for some unaccountable cause had failed to keep the appointment, was already commonknowledge. When he was present, that heterogeneous gathering seemed organic. It acted not as a mob, but as one man; and one man, in a sense, it was, since each contingent—come as it might from Bermondsey, from Poplar, or from Canning Town—seemed like one of the limbs of a human body, of which this man, the Dumpling, was the controlling brain.
By his absence, however, this body politic seemed dismembered. The magnetism exercised by his single personality was extraordinary. So long as he was known to be at their head, the rioters followed their appointed leaders, his lieutenants, with fearless confidence, moving and acting in concert, not like an undisciplined mob, but like drilled troops, trained and controlled by a master of men. Now, in a single day, the whole movement seemed, in his absence, to have gone to pieces.
Another reason for the nervousness of the rioters was the mysterious action, or inaction, of the military and the police. No attempt either to prevent the people from assembling, or to disperse them when assembled, had been made; and no blue or red-coated myrmidons of the civil orof the military forces had attempted to bar the thoroughfares, or to offer opposition of any sort to the revolutionaries. With the Dumpling present, as their leader and head, the absence of the police and of the military would have been counted by the mob as a signal proof of the completeness of their victory. With him away, it seemed ominous of ambush, pregnant with evil; and when the Dumpling's second in command announced that he intended, in their leader's absence, to carry out the plan of campaign as arranged by their leader himself, and gave the order for the riflemen to form up, and for the rank and file to fall in behind, the order, though obeyed, was obeyed spiritlessly and unwillingly.
Then came the news that troops, mounted and on foot, were approaching by way of Queen Victoria Street and Cheapside; and as the trees of a great forest sway and waver before the coming of a storm, so over the rebel army there passed a sudden tremor, as if the members of that army were undecided whether to fight or to fly.
Sharp and clear, however, came the words of command, and sullenly the legions of Labour prepared for the fray. Onceagain victory rested with the revolutionaries. Nor was I surprised, for to me, at that stage of the struggle, it seemed as if the police and the soldiers had bided their time too long. An armed mob gathered together in the space known as the Poultry, and holding all the approaches, would be difficult to dislodge, presenting as it did a solid phalanx to any opposing force which, owing to the comparative narrowness of the converging thoroughfares, would of necessity be compelled to present a somewhat narrow front to the rebel army. Queen Victoria Street, it is true, being broad, would allow the soldiery to come on in companies, forming an attacking line of formidable length. This, however, the Dumpling's second in command had realised, for, immediately facing Queen Victoria Street, he placed the pick of the rebel riflemen. No sooner did the troop of cavalry, which was advancing upon the rioters, come within range, than the barrels of the riflemen, and the saddles of the front row of soldiery, were almost simultaneously emptied. After each volley Queen Victoria Street was for a moment blocked by a line of dead and dying soldiers and horses, but no sooner was the opposing line re-formed,and ready to come on, before another volley from the rebel riflemen emptied every saddle again.
In Queen Victoria Street, at least, the victory of the rebels was complete, and what happened to the troops in Queen Victoria Street, happened upon a smaller scale to the police and to the military who attempted to disperse the mob by making charges by way of Cheapside, Lombard Street, and the other narrower approaches. Recognising the hopelessness of the position, and anxious to husband their strength for the final struggle, the officers in command of the police and of the military gave the word for withdrawal. In this withdrawal the mob saw a tacit admission of defeat, and became more reckless, more eager for destruction, more difficult of organisation. Freed from the restraining and controlling influence of the Dumpling, it swept along Cheapside to St. Paul's and down Ludgate Hill, no longer an organised rising with a definite end in view, but a rabble of reckless ruffians, ready and greedy to rob, to rape, to wreck, and to destroy.
At Ludgate Circus it divided, part going westward by way of Fleet Street and theStrand, another part by way of St. Bride Street, and yet another by the Embankment.
Then it was that the police and the soldiery showed how prepared they were for the outbreak, how admirable was their organisation. Suddenly down St. Bride Street, and moving by some inside and unseen motor-power, there appeared a procession of engines of war, the like of which none of the rioters had ever seen. These engines had been constructed secretly and in sections so as to be ready to put together and run out at a moment's notice, and had been concealed at the various fire stations till such time as they should be required.
Imagine, if you can, that a square-built fort had suddenly detached itself at the corners, so as to break up into four armed sections, each of which presented on either side an iron-plated front, almost as steep and almost as high as the side of a house, with gun-mouths grinning out at regular intervals. Armoured trains the rioters had heard of, but armoured sides of an iron-built house, moving, each complete in itself, upon unseen wheels in a long procession down St. Bride Street, was something entirelynew. For an instant the mob surged back, awed and wondering. Then, like an angry sea leaping against a breakwater, it flung itself forward upon the first of these new and advancing engines of war.
But for the tragic loss of life, the impotency of the rush would have been ludicrous. It was as if a child, by the throwing of a handful of sand, had tried to stop a motor-car going at the top of its speed. The huge instrument of war not only did not swerve an inch from its course, but, so great was its weight, that it passed, without so much as a bump, over the bodies of those who fell beneath it, scrunching bone and limb into shapeless and quivering pulp.
Then from either side belched sheets of flame, and, for the first time since the rising, the mob fell back and away, leaving the monsters of war-mechanism to accomplish their manœuvres unhindered.
On the four moving walls filed, like a troop of ambling elephants. The foremost wheeled heavily round the obelisk in the centre of Ludgate Circus till it blocked London southwards by barricading off New Bridge Street and Blackfriars Bridge. The second steered round the obelisk westward,till it faced and closed Fleet Street. The third stretched itself eastward across the foot of Ludgate Hill; and the fourth, by spanning the road where St. Bride Street and Farringdon Street bifurcate, thus closed those roads to all comers.
The four walls now formed a huge square, and as soldiers "dress" the line and close up in a drill yard, so at a given signal—a shrill whistle twice repeated—the four sides edged closer and closer together, till, if I may use such a term, they touched elbows. Then came a second signal—the same whistle three times repeated—and now there were the clink and rattle of bolts and chains. The four walls were locked impregnably together, thus forming a fort, facing London on every side. No sooner was the locking accomplished than, upon the walls of the fort, hundreds of policemen swarmed to complete the closing up of the streets. At a word of command from above, iron barriers shot out to the required lengths from the four corners of the fort below, and when it was impossible to adjust these barriers with sufficient nicety, absolutely to close every opening, huge sacks of sand were hurled from the walls, so that in less than fiveminutes the army of rioters was divided up into four separate wings, each for the moment effectually cut off from holding any communication with any of the others.
The great body of the rebel army and the riflemen were, however, now west of Ludgate Circus, and passing up Fleet Street and the Strand; so that the closing of the ways seemed for a few minutes to have come too late.
But the authorities who had anticipated this outbreak, and prepared for it by constructing these street-barricading forts, knew what they were about. From mouth to mouth of the rebels, passing up Fleet Street, Strandwards, the word was repeated that similar forts now blocked advance at Charing Cross.
Panic-stricken, the mob surged down the side streets to the Embankment, only to find that similar barriers had been erected at either end. Then the forts at every point opened fire, and with terrible results. The scenes that followed I do not wish further to describe, except to say that, for the present at least, the rout of the leaderless rebels was complete, and only a shattered sectionescaped to press on to Buckingham Palace, the point to which all contingents of that great army had been instructed to converge.