“To see Lieutenant Sui T’un,” said Ch’en.
While eight men were passing, the two last, as if pushed in the slight shuffle, slipped between the sentinels and the wall. By the time the first ones were in the hall, the sentinels felt the muzzles of revolvers in their sides. They let themselves be disarmed: they were better paid than their wretched fellow-policemen, but not sufficiently to risk their lives. Four of Ch’en’s men who had not joined the first group and who seemed to be passing in the street, led them away along the wall. Nothing had been visible from the windows.
From the hall Ch’en could see the racks filled with rifles. In the guard-room there were only six policemen armed with automatics, and those weapons were on their belts, in closed holsters. He threw himself in front of the racks, revolver held out.
If the police had been resolute, the attack would have failed. In spite of his detailed acquaintance with the places where he was to operate, Ch’en had not had time to designate to each of his men the one he was to cover with his gun; one or two of the police could have fired.
But all put up their hands. They were immediately disarmed. A new group of Ch’en’s men entered. A new distribution of arms began.
“At this moment,” Ch’en was thinking, “two hundred groups in the city are doing what we are doing. If they all have as good luck. " Hardly had he taken the third gun when he heard the sound of a headlong dash coming from the stairway: someone was running up the stairs. He went out. The moment he passed the doorway a shot was fired from the floor above. Nothing more at the head of the stairs. One of the officers, upon coming down, had seen the insurgents, fired, and immediately regained the second story.
The fighting was about to begin.
A door, in the center of the second-story landing, commanded the stairway. Send a spokesman, Asiatic- fashion? Ch’en hated all the Chinese good sense which he recognized in himself. Attempt to take the stairs by force? — as well commit suicide: the police no doubt had a supply of hand-grenades. The instructions of the military committee, transmitted by Kyo to all the groups, were to set fire in case of partial failure, to take position in the adjoining buildings, and to caU the special squads for help. There was nothing else to do.
“Set fire!"
The men with the cans tried to pour out the oil in splashes like water out of a bucket, but the narrow openings only squirted derisive little jets. They were obliged to pour it slowly, on the furniture, along the walls. Ch’en looked through the window: opposite, closed shops, narrow windows commanding the exit from the station; above, the rotten curled-up roofs of Chinese houses, and the infinite calm of the gray sky now no longer streaked with smoke, of the intimate low sky on the empty street.
All fighting was absurd, nothing existed in the face of life; he caught himself just in time to see panes and window-frames tumble down, in a crystalline crash mingled with the sound of a volley of gunfire: they were being fired on from outside.
A second volley. They were now-in the room saturated with oil-between the police, who were on the alert and masters of the upper story, and the new assailants whom they could not see. All Ch’en’s men were flat on their bellies, the prisoners bound in one corner. If a grenade exploded they would be consumed in flames. One of the prostrate men grunted, pointing with his finger: a skirmisher on a roof; and to the extreme left of the window, gliding into the field of vision, other irregulars were cautiously advancing, one shoulder held back. They were insurgents, their own men.
The idiots fire before sending out scouts, thought Ch’en. He had the blue flag of the Kuomintang in his pocket. He pulled it out, rushed out into the hall. The moment he was crossing the threshold he received a violent muffled blow in the back, while at the same time a formidable crash seemed to go right through him. He threw back his arms wildly, to get his balance, and found himself on the floor, half stunned. Not a sound; then, a metal object fell, and at the same time loud groans followed the smoke into the hall. He got up again: he was not wounded. He half shut the door opened by the incomprehensible explosion, held out his flag, with his left hand, through the open space. A bullet in. his hand would not have surprised him. But no: there were shouts of joy. The smoke which was slowly pouring through the window prevented him from seeing the insurgents on the left; but those on the right were calling to him.
A second explosion almost knocked him down again.
From the windows of the second story the besieged policemen were throwing hand-grenades. (How could they open the windows without being fired on from the street?) The first, the one that had thrown him down, had exploded in front of the house, and the fragments had flown in through the open doorway and the shattered window, as if it had exploded in the guard-room itself; terrified by the explosion, those of his men who had not been killed had jumped out, inadequately shielded by the smoke. Under the fire of the policemen at the windows, two had fallen in the middle of the street, their knees doubled against their chests, like hunched-up rabbits; another, with his face in a pool of blood, seemed to be bleeding from the nose. The irregulars had recognized their o^ men; but the gesture of those who were calling Ch’en had been a signal to the officers that someone was coming out, and they had thrown their second grenade. It had exploded in the street, to Ch’en’s left: the wall had protected him.
From the hall, he examined the guard-room. The smoke was slowly curling down again from the ceiling. There were bodies on the floor. Moans filed the room. In the corner, one of the prisoners, a leg torn off, was shrieking: “Stop firing!” His panting cries seemed to pierce holes in the smoke which continued its indifferent curve above the suffering, like a visible fatality. That man who was shrieking, with his leg torn off, could not remain with his hands tied behind his back. Yet wouldn’t another grenade explode, at any moment? “It’s none of my business,” thought Ch'en, “he’s an enemy.” But with a hole of flesh at the end of his thigh instead of a leg, with his hands tightly bound, the feeling he experienced was much stronger than pity: he himself was that man bound hand and foot. “If the grenade explodes outside,
I’ll throw myself on the ground; if it rolls here, I’ll have to toss it outside right away. One chance out of twenty of getting away. What in hell am I doing here? What in hell am I doing here?” To be killed-that didn’t matter much. What agonized him was the thought of being wounded in the stomach; yet this fear was less intolerable than the sight of that bound and tortured creature, of human powerlessness in suffering. Unable to do otherwise, he went towards the man, his knife in his hand, to cut his cords. The prisoner thought he was coming to kill him; he wanted to shriek still louder: his voice weakened, became a wheeze. Saturated with horror, Ch'en touched him with his left hand which stuck to the clothes drenched with sticky blood, unable however to take his eyes off the shattered window throughwhich the grenade might fall. At last he felt the cords, slipped the knife underneath, cut them. The man no longer screamed: he had died or fainted. Ch’en, his eyes still fixed on the jagged window, returned to the hall. The change of smell surprised him; as though he had just begun to hear, he realized that the groans of the wounded had become shrieks: in the room, the debris saturated with oil, set on fire by the grenades, was beginning to burn.