Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/160

122 In answer, everywhere appear workmen with cartridge belts outside of overcoats, blankets strapped on their backs, spades, tea-kettles and revolvers tied on with strings. Long, irregular lines of slanting bayonets winding thru the dark.

Red Petrograd rises in arms to repel the Counter-Revolutionary forces marching up out of the south. Over the roofs, now hoarse, now shrill, comes the sound of factory-whistles blowing the tocsin to war.

On all roads leading out of the city pours a torrent of men, women and boys, carrying kit-bags, picks, rifles and bombs. A drab and motley throng. No banners, no drums to cheer them on. Plunging trucks splash them with mud, freezing slush oozes thru their shoes, winds from the Baltic chill to the bone. But they push on to the front, unresting, as the grey day turns to sullen night. Behind them the city flings its lights into the sky, and still they press forward into the dark. Fields and forests are swarming now with dim shapes, pitching tents, building camp-fires, cutting trenches, stretching wire. One brief day, and tens of thousands have moved out twenty miles from Petrograd, and stand, a bulwark of living flesh against the forces of the Counter-Revolution.

To military experts it is a rag-tag army, a rabble. But in this "rabble" there is a drive and power not reckoned with in the books of strategy. These dark masses are exalted with visions of a new world. Their veins burn with a crusading fire. They fight