Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/52

30 speak!" He patted the guns affectionately. "They will listen then all right."

A mob with nerves at trigger-tension, with such weapons in its hands, and such temper in its soul, did not need much provocation. And provocators were everywhere. Agents of the Black Hundred plied their trade of dissension among the crowds, inciting to riot and pogroms. They turned loose two hundred criminals from Kresty to pillage and loot. In the ensuing ruin they hoped to see the Revolution killed and the Czar restored. In some places they did bring on frightful slaughter.

At a tense moment, in the tight-packed concourse of the Tauride, a provocatory shot was fired. From that shot sprang a hundred. From every quarter rifles blazed, comrades firing point blank into comrades. The crowd screamed, crashed up against the pillars, surged back again, and then fell flat upon the ground. When the firing ceased, sixteen could not rise. During this massacre a military band two blocks away was playing the Marseillaise.

Fighting in the streets is panicky business. At night, with bullets spitting from hidden loopholes, from roofs above and cellar-ways below, with the enemy invisible and friends pouring volleys into friends, the crowds stampeded, back and forth, fleeing from a hail of bullets in one street only to plunge into leaden gusts sweeping thru the next.

Three times that night our feet slipped in blood on the pavement. Down the Nevsky was blazed a