Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/165

Rh the arrival of the first Red corpuscle carrying a gun. Ping! Ping! Crash! Crash! A gust of lead, biting stone-chips from the wall, heralds the advent of more attacking units.

Peering thru the barricades, the Counter-Revolutionists already see swarms of Red Guards at the ends of the street. The sight of them arouses an old Czarist officer to savagery. "Turn on the guns!" he shouts. "Kill the rabble!" Up and down the streets they let loose a storm of rifle and machine-gun fire. Like a canyon the street is filled with noise and ricochetting bullets. But there are no Red corpses. The revolutionary masses have no appetite for martyrdom. Provokingly they refuse to be killed.

It is different from former days. Then the mobs obligingly put themselves in the way of the guns. In hundreds they were spattered over the Winter Palace Square, blown to pieces by the artillery, trampled under the hoofs of the Cossacks, massacred by machine guns. It was so easy! How easy now, too, to annihilate them, if they would but rush the barricades.

But the Revolution is careful of its material. It has made these masses cautious. It has taught them the first lesson in strategy: find out what your enemy wants you to do, and then don't do it. The barricades, the Reds see, are intended to destroy them; they intend to destroy the barricades.

They inspect them and decide the tactics of