And suddenly, across the Bebbur mound, we saw shapes crawl along and duck down and rise up, and we said, ‘Perhaps soldiers — soldiers,’ but, ‘In Peshawar,’ says the city boy, ‘you know they would not shoot,’ and we said we too are soldiers, and we are the soldiers of the Mahatma, and this country is ours, and the soldiers are ours and the English they are not ours, and we said to ourselves, a day will come, a day when hut after hut will have a light at dusk, and flowers will be put on the idols, and camphors lit, and as the last Red-man leaps into his boat, and the earth pushes him away, through our thatches will a song rise like a thread of gold, and from the lotus naval of India’s earth the Mahatma will speak of love to all men. — ’Say Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’—’Inquilab Zindabad, Inquilab Zindabad!’— and the police lathis showered on us, and the procession-throne fell, and the gods fell and the flowers fell and the candelabras fell, and yet the gods were in the air, brother, and not a cry nor lamentation rose, and when we reached the village gate, suddenly from the top of a pipal someone swings down and he has a flag in hand, and he cries out:
Lift the flag high,
O, lift the flag high,
Brothers, sisters, friends and mothers,
This is the flag of the revolution.
and the police rush at him, and he slips in here and he slips out there and the boys have taken the flag, and the flag flutters and leaps from hand to hand, and with it the song is clapped out:
O lift the flag high,
Lift it high like in 1857 again,
And the Lakshmi of Jhansi,
And the Moghul of Delhi,
Will be ours again.
and there is a long cry, ‘Down the hedge, here,’ and we rush down the aloe lane, and the police find they are too few, and they begin to throw stones at the crowd and the crowd gets angry, but the boys shut them up and sing:
O fire, O soul,
Give us the spark of God-eternal,
That friend to friend and friend to foe,
One shall we stand before Him.
And suddenly there is an opening in the hedge and the gaslights and the coolies and the barricades are seen, long barricades that lie like an elephant’s carcass under the starlight, and men stand by them, and behind them the trucks, and behind the trucks the wide-eyed lantern of the Skeffington bungalow, and down below, in Satanna’s triangular field men are still working, the coolies from the city are still reaping. And all of a sudden we cry out, ‘Gandhi Mahatma ki jai!’ and they look at us and stop their work but they do not reply, and we shout the louder, ‘Vandè Mataram! Inquilab Zindabad Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’ and the police, seeing the crowd out of their hands, kick and twist the limbs and bang more fiercely, and Seethamma is thrown upon the cactuses and Vedamma and Kanakamma after her, and we could hear their wailings, and we run to them and pull them up, and we run down the lane and the field-bunds and we come to the canal, and the women cry out, ‘We cannot go! We cannot go!’ and the men drag them and the police push them in, and the pebbles slip under our feet, and saying, ‘Ganga, Jumna, Saraswathi!’ we look up into the wide, starry sky, and there is something in the air resonant like the temple bell, and the bell rings on and on, and we wade through the canal and we sing, ‘That friend to friend and friend to foe,’ and the procession still moves on — and suddenly, by Rangamma’s coconut-garden field, from behind the waving, brown paddy harvest, there is a cry sharp and clear, then a rasping hiss as though a thousand porcupines had suddenly bristled up, and we see rising from behind the ridge, ten, twenty, thirty, forty soldiers heads down and bayonets thrust forth. We whirl in shrieks and shouts and yells, and we leap into the harvests. And a first shot is shot into the air.
And there was a shuddered silence, like the silence of a jungle after a tiger has roared over the evening river, and then, like a jungle cry of crickets and frogs and hyenas and bison and jackals, we all groaned and shrieked and sobbed, and we rushed this side to the canal-bund and that side to the coconut garden, and this side to the sugar cane field and that side to the bel field bund, and we fell and we rose, and we crouched and we rose, and we ducked beneath the rice harvests and we rose, and we fell over stones and we rose again, over field-bunds and canal-bunds and garden-bunds did we rush, and the children held to our saris and some held to our breasts and the night-blind held to our hands; and we could hear the splash of the canal water and the trundling of the gun-carts, and from behind a tree or stone or bund, we could see before us, there, beneath the Bebbur mound, the white city boys grouped like a plantain grove, and women round them and behind them, and the flag still flying over them. And the soldiers shouted, ‘Disperse or we fire,’ but the boys answered, ‘Brothers, we are non-violent,’ and the soldiers said, ‘Non-violent or not, you cannot march this side of the fields,’ and the boys answered, ‘The fields are ours,’ and the soldiers said, ‘The fields are bought, you pigs.’ And a peasant voice from the back says, ‘It’s we who have put the plough to the earth and fed her with water,’ and the soldiers say, ‘He, stop that, you village kids,’ and the boys say, ‘Brother, the earth is ours, and you are ours too, brown like this earth is your skin and mine,’ and a soldier shouts out, ‘Oh, no more of this panchayat — we ask you again, disperse, and do not force us to fire!’ Then, it is Ratna’s voice that says, ‘Forward, brothers, in the name of the Mahatma!’ and everybody takes it up and shouts, ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’ and marches forward. And a shower of shots suddenly burst into the air, and we close our eyes, and when we open them again there is not a cry nor shout and the boys are still marching forward, and the soldiers are retreating, and we say, ‘So that was false firing.’ But the city boys will not stop, and the crowd moves on and on, and beneath the stars there is a veritable moving mound of them from the Bebbur field to the canal field.