“Our brave comrades are coming,” Hartman said.

We could see the front of their column filling the street from gutter to gutter, as the last war-automobile fled past.  The machine stopped for a moment just abreast of us.  A soldier leaped from it, carrying something carefully in his hands.  This, with the same care, he deposited in the gutter.  Then he leaped back to his seat and the machine dashed on, took the turn at the corner, and was gone from sight.  Hartman ran to the gutter and stooped over the object.

“Keep back,” he warned me.

I could see he was working rapidly with his hands.  When he returned to me the sweat was heavy on his forehead.

“I disconnected it,” he said, “and just in the nick of time.  The soldier was clumsy.  He intended it for our comrades, but he didn’t give it enough time.  It would have exploded prematurely.  Now it won’t explode at all.”

Everything was happening rapidly now.  Across the street and half a block down, high up in a building, I could see heads peering out.  I had just pointed them out to Hartman, when a sheet of flame and smoke ran along that portion of the face of the building where the heads had appeared, and the air was shaken by the explosion.  In places the stone facing of the building was torn away, exposing the iron construction beneath.  The next moment similar sheets of flame and smoke smote the front of the building across the street opposite it.  Between the explosions we could hear the rattle of the automatic pistols and rifles.  For several minutes this mid-air battle continued, then died out.  It was patent that our comrades were in one building, that Mercenaries were in the other, and that they were fighting across the street.  But we could not tell which was which—­which building contained our comrades and which the Mercenaries.

By this time the column on the street was almost on us.  As the front of it passed under the warring buildings, both went into action again—­one building dropping bombs into the street, being attacked from across the street, and in return replying to that attack.  Thus we learned which building was held by our comrades, and they did good work, saving those in the street from the bombs of the enemy.

Hartman gripped my arm and dragged me into a wide entrance.

“They’re not our comrades,” he shouted in my ear.

The inner doors to the entrance were locked and bolted.  We could not escape.  The next moment the front of the column went by.  It was not a column, but a mob, an awful river that filled the street, the people of the abyss, mad with drink and wrong, up at last and roaring for the blood of their masters.  I had seen the people of the abyss before, gone through its ghettos, and thought I knew it; but I found that I was now looking on it for the first time.  Dumb apathy had vanished.  It was now dynamic—­a fascinating spectacle of dread.  It surged past my vision in concrete waves of wrath, snarling and