He started to run forward, and from the cottages ahead of him came the harsh crackling of musketry. Suddenly, he realized he was no longer afraid.
He was little more than a youth, with smooth. pink cheeks and the lightest golden fluff of a mustache on his upper lip.
They shoved him down the last few steps into the cellars, and he lost his footing and fell. Another yellow belly, called the escort, a strapping bearded fellow with a rifle slung on his shoulder and the red band around his upper arm. Caught him trying to sneak out of the subway. The boy scrambled to his feet. He had skinned his knees in his fall and he was close to tears as Harry Fisher towered above him. He carried a long black sjambok in his right hand, a vicious tapered whip of cured hippo-hide.
A traitor, bellowed Fisher. In the last days of continuous planning and fighting, the strain had started to show.
His eyes had taken on a wild fanatical glare, his movements were jerky and exaggerated, and his voice ragged and overloud. No, comrade, I swear I'm no traitor, the youth bleated pitifully. A coward, then, shouted Fisher, and caught the front of the boy's shirt in one big hairy fist and ripped it open to the waist.
I didn't have a rifle, protested the boy. There'll be rifles for all later, when the first comrades die. The lash of the sjambok split the smooth white skin of the boy's back like a razor stroke, and the blood rose in a vivid bright line as he fell to his knees.
Harry Fisher stood over him and swung the siambok until there were no more screams or groans, and the only sound in the cellar was the hiss and splat of the lash, then he stood back panting and sweating. Take him out so the comrades can see what happens to traitors and cowards. A striker took each of the boy's arms and as they dragged him up the steps, the flesh of his back hung in ribbons and tatters and the blood ran down over his belt and soaked into the gabardine of his breeches.
Mark dropped cat-footed over the back wall into the tiny paved yard. Cases of empty beer bottles were piled high along the side walls, and the smell of stale liquor was fruity and heady in the noon heat.
He had reached the bottle store in Mint Road less than an hour after the starting time of the drive, and the route he had led his men, through the backyards and over the roof-tops, had been more successful than he had dared hope.
They had avoided the road-blocks and twice had outflanked groups of strikers dug in to strong positions, surprising them completely, and scattering them with a single volley.
Mark ran across the yard and kicked in the back door of the bottle store, and in the same movement flattened himself against the wall, clear of the gaping doorway and any striker fire from the interior of the building.
The Sergeant and a dozen men followed him over the wall, and spread out to cover the doorway and barred windows. He nodded at Mark, and Mark dived through the doorway sideways with the rifle on his hip, and his eyes screwed up against the gloom after the bright sunlight outside.
The store was deserted, the shutters bolted down over the front windows and the shelves of bottles untouched by looters, in testimony of the strikers discipline. The tiers of bottles stood neatly in their gaily coloured labels, glinting in the dusky light.
The last time Mark had been in here was to buy a dozen bottles of porter for Helena MacDonald, but he pushed the thought aside and went to the shuttered windows just as the Sergeant and his squad burst in through the back door.
The shutters had been pierced by random shrapnel and rifle fire, and Mark used one aperture as a peephole.
Fifty yards across the road was the Trades Hall, and the complex of trenches and defences that the strikers had thrown up around the square.
Even the public lavatories had been turned into a blockhouse, but all the defenders attention was directed into the streets across the square.
They lined the parapets and were firing frantically at the kilted running figures of the Transvaal Scottish racing towards the Square from the station side.
The strikers were dressed in a strange assortment of garb, from greasy working overalls and quasi-military safari jackets, caps and slouch hats and beavers, to Sunday suits, waistcoats and ties. But all of them wore bandoliers of ammunition draped from their shoulders, and their backs were exposed to Mark's attack.
A volley through the bottle-store windows would have done terrible execution among them, and already the Sergeant was directing his men to each of the windows in a fierce and gleeful croak of anticipation. I could order up a machine gun, Mark thought, and something in him shied away from the mental image of a Vickers firing into that exposed and unsuspecting group. if only I hated them. As he watched, first one and then others of the strikers at the barricades crouched down hopelessly from the withering fire the Highlanders were now pouring on to them. Fix bayonets, Mark called to the men, and the steel scraped from the metal scabbards in the sombre gloom of the store. A stray bullet splintered the shutter above Mark's head and burst a bottle of Scotch whisky on the shelves behind him. The smell of the spirit was sharp and unpleasant, and Mark called again, on my order, break open the windows and doors, and we'll show them steel. The shutters crashed back, the main doors flew open, and Mark led his company in a howling racing line across the road. Before they reached the first line of sand-bags, the strikers began throwing down their rifles and jumping up with their hands lifted above their heads.
Across the square, the Highlanders poured into the Street cheering and shouting and raced for the barricades; Mark felt a surge of relief that he had taken the risk of going with the bayonet, rather than ordering his men to shoot down the exposed strikers.
As his men ran into the square, knocking the weapons out of their hands and pushing the strikers into sullen groups, Mark was racing up the front steps of the Trades Hall.
He paused on the top step, shouted, Stand back inside and fired three rifle bullets into the brass lock.
Harry Fisher leaned against the wall and peered out of the sand-bagged window into the milling yelling chaos of the square.
The madness of unbearable despair shook the huge frame, and he breathed like a wounded bull when it stands to take the matador's final thrust. He watched his men throw down their arms, saw them herded like cattle, with their hands held high, stumbling on weary careless feet, their faces grey with fatigue and sullen in defeat.
