No water. Before the insurgents could take the station the wounded (now the prisoners no longer counted: he could only think of his own) would be burned to ashes. Out, out! First of all, think, and thereafter make the fewest possible moves. Although he was trembling, his mind fascinated by the idea of escape was not without lucidity: he had to go to the left, where a covered porch would protect him. He opened the door with his right hand, the left raised in a signal of silence. The enemy above could not see him; the attitude of the insurgents alone could have warned them. He felt the eyes of all his men centered on open door, on his squat figure, blue against the dark background of the hall. He began to sidle to the left, his back brushing the wall, arms crossed, his revolver in his right hand. Advancing step by step, he kept looking at the windows above him: one was protected by an iron plate placed as a screen. In vain the insurgents fired on the windows. The grenades were being thrown over the screen. “When they start throwing again I'll see the grenade and I'll surely see the arm," thought Ch’en, still advancing. “If I see it, I must catch it like a package, and throw it again as far as possible. " He did not cease his crab-like walk. “I won’t be able to throw it far enough: if I’m not protected I'll get a handful of shot in the stomach. ” He was still advancing. The strong b^urn smell, and the sudden absence of support behind him (he did not turn round) told him he was in front of the window of the ground floor. “If I catch the grenade, I’U throw it into the guard-room before it explodes. With the thickness of the wall, by getting beyond the window, I’m saved." What did it matter that the guard-room was not empty, that the very man whose cords he had cut was there- and his own wounded? He did not see the insurgents, not even through the clearings in the smoke, for he could not take his eyes from the screen; but he could still feel the eyes trying to see him: in spite of the firing directed at the windows, which handicapped the officers, he was amazed that they did not understand that something was going on. It suddenly occurred to him that they had only a small supply of grenades and that they looked before throwing them; immediately, as though the idea were born of some shadow, a head appeared under the screen-hidden to the insurgents, but not to him. Franti- caUy, abandoning his tight-rope walker’s posrure, he fired with an instantaneous aim, bounded ahead, reached the porch. A volley went off from the windows, a grenade exploded at the spot he had just left: the officer, whom he had missed when he fired, had hesitated before passing his hand holding the grenade under the screen, fearing a second shot. Ch’en had received a blow in the left arm: nothing but air-pressure from one of the explosions. But the wound he had inflicted on himself with the dagger, before killing Tang Yen Ta, was sensitive and was b!eeding again, though it did not hurt. Making the bandage tighter with a handkerchief, he joined the insurgents by way of the courts.
Those who were directing the attack were assembled in a dark passage.
“You couldn't send scouts, could you!”
The leader of the ch’on, a tall shaved Chinaman, whose sleeves were too short, watched his approaching shadow, slowly raised his eyelids, resigned:
“I had someone telephone,” was all he said. Then added: “Now we’re waiting for an armored truck.” “How are the other sections getting along?”
“We've taken half the stations.”
“Not more?”
“That’s pretty good for a start.”
All that distant gunfiring came from their men who were converging towards the North Station.
Ch'en was panting, as though he had just come out of the water into a strong wind. He leaned against the wall, the angle of which protected them all, getting back his wind by degrees, thinking of the prisoner whose ropes he had cut. “I should have left the fellow alone. Why did I go and cut the rope? It couldn't make any difference.” But he knew that he could not have done otherwise, that even now he would not react differently to that man with his leg cut off, helplessly struggling. Because of his wound, he thought of Tang Yen Ta. What a fool he had been all last night, all this morning! Nothing was easier than to kil.
In the station, the debris was still burning, the wounded were still shrieking before the approaching flames; their repeated, constant clamor reverberated in this low passage, rendered extraordinarily near by the remoteness of the detonations, of the sirens, of all the sounds of war lost in the dismal air. A distant metallic rumble became audible, drew nearer, submerged those other sounds: the truck was arriving. It had been converted into an armored truck overnight, very hastily: the plates were inadequately joined. The brakes were applied, the clatter ceased, and the cries could be heard again.
Ch’en, who was the only one to have entered the station, explained the situation to the chief of the rescue squad. He was a former Whampoa cadet; Ch'en would have preferred one of Katov's groups to this squad of young bourgeois. If it was true that he did not succeed in feeling an absolute bond between himself and his men, even before those dead comrades huddled up in the middle of the street, he knew that at aU times he hated the Chinese bourgeoisie; the proletariat was at least the form of his hope.
The officer knew his business. “The truck’s no use,” he said, “it hasn’t even a top. Ail they have to do is throw a grenade inside to blow up the whole business; but I’ve brought some grenades too.” Those of Ch’en’s men who carried them were in the guard-room-dead? — and the second group had not been able to get hold of any.
“Let’s try from above.”
“Agreed,” said Ch’en.
The officer looked at him with irritation: he had not asked for his opinion; but he said nothing. Both of them — he, a soldier, in spite of his civilian clothes, with his bristling hair, his close-trimmed mustache, his blouse gathered under his revolver-belt; and Ch'en, squat and blue-examined the station. To the right of the door the smoke from the flames which were crawling ever closer to the bodies of their wounded comrades issued forth with a mechanical regularity, like their cries, whose constancy would have seemed childish but for their agonizing tone. To the left, nothing. The windows of the second story were veiled in smoke. From time to time an assailant still fired at one of the windows, and bits of wreckage sprinkled down to increase the dusty pile of plaster, splinters, sticks, in which pieces of glass glistened in spite of the dull light. Now the station was firing only when one of the insurgents left his hiding-place.
“How are the other sections doing?” Ch’en asked again.
“Ahnost all the stations have been taken. The main station, by surprise, at one-thirty. We seized eight hundred guns there. We can already send reenforcements against those who resist: you’re the third squad we have helped. They are not getting any more reenforcements; we have already blocked the barracks, the South Station, the arsenal. But we have to get through here: we need all the men we have for the attack. And there still be the armored train.”
The idea of the two hundred groups engaged in the same activity as his own both exalted and disturbed Ch’en. In spite of the gunfiring which the listless ^ind brought from the entire city, violence gave him the sensation of solitary activity.