otested the man in yellow. "It is a fight in a
warren. Your place is here."

He explained elaborately. He motioned towards the room where Graham must
wait, he insisted no other course was possible. "We must know where you
are," he said. "At any moment a crisis may arise needing your presence
and decision."

A picture had drifted through his mind of such a vast dramatic struggle
as the masses in the ruins had suggested. But here was no spectacular
battle-field such as he imagined. Instead was seclusion--and suspense. It
was only as the afternoon wore on that he pieced together a truer picture
of the fight that was raging, inaudibly and invisibly, within four miles
of him, beneath the Roehampton stage. A strange and unprecedented contest
it was, a battle that was a hundred thousand little battles, a battle in
a sponge of ways and channels, fought out of sight of sky or sun under
the electric glare, fought out in a vast confusion by multitudes
untrained in arms, led chiefly by acclamation, multitudes dulled by
mindless labour and enervated by the tradition of two hundred years of
servile security against multitudes demoralised by lives of venial
privilege and sensual indulgence. They had no artillery, no
differentiation into this force or that; the only weapon on either side
was the little green metal carbine, whose secret manufacture and sudden
distribution in enormous quantities had been one of Ostrog's culminating
moves against the Council. Few had had any experience with this weapon,
many had never discharged one, many who carried it came unprovided with
ammunition; never was wilder firing in the history of warfare. It was a
battle of amateurs, a hideous experimental warfare, armed rioters
fighting armed rioters, armed rioters swept forward by the words and fury
of a song, by the tramping sympathy of their numbers, pouring in
countless myriads towards the smaller ways, the disabled lifts, the
galleries slippery with blood, the halls and passages choked with smoke,
beneath the flying stages, to learn there when retreat was hopeless the
ancient mysteries of warfare. And overhead save for a few sharpshooters
upon the roof spaces and for a few bands and threads of vapour that
multiplied and darkened towards the evening, the day was a clear
serenity. Ostrog it seems had no bombs at command and in all the earlier
phases of the battle the flying machines played no part. Not the smallest
cloud was there to break the empty bri