After the first rifle shots, the weapon of the assassin, our opponents’ fire came from handguns. They laid down a barrage with which we could not at first compete. I could make out the long barrels of their Mauser automatic pistols, firing two shots every second. But while their hand-guns might be deadly in intensity they were less accurate than the rifles which their marksmen had used at first. Why had they abandoned those? As it was, their rifle barrels had merely revealed their positions. They had drawn a ferocious fire into the two upper windows of Martin’s Buildings, possibly killing half of those within. Had it been the Home Secretary’s intention to make them show themselves by offering his familiar figure as a target?
The events that followed during the next few hours were printed large in every newspaper across the land. What schoolboy did not know of “The Siege of Sidney Street” and the famous part played by the Scots Guards and Winston Churchill? Even as it progressed, the crowds and the pressure grew behind the police cordons at either end of the street, raising cheers every time our men fired back. It seemed impossible that this was the heart of London on a peaceful weekday morning, when office clerks and shop walkers were on their way to work and schoolchildren trudging to their classes. All had now played truant to watch the drama being played out.
Holmes and I remained under cover for the moment behind the gate-pillar of the coal merchant’s yard. What struck me most of all was the way in which many of the inhabitants of the street went about their normal lives as the two sides exchanged fire and the bullets sang round them. An old women with a shawl over her head crossed the street a little further down to fetch her washing, as indifferent to those bullets as if they had been the falling snow flakes.
In the coal merchant’s gateway a young journalist, the first I had seen that morning, was standing beside me leaning on his stick. He gave a lurch and almost fell as the stick was neatly cut in half by a bullet which we neither saw nor heard-and which was within inches of ending his life and depriving the world of the genius of Sir Philip Gibbs. A piece of stone flew from the corner of the wall beside me as a shot nicked it and another fragment bounced from the metal helmet of a startled policeman. Before long a reek of burnt cordite hung in the damp air and the acrid tang of it scorched one’s throat. The sharp cracks of the service rifles were answered by the snaps of pistols from the besieged Anarchists. This was the point at which we were ordered to remove ourselves to safety.
It was not a time to indulge in irony but I could not help noticing, above the level of the gunmen’s positions, an attic floor running along the eight houses of Martin’s Buildings. In its window was a sign showing, of all things, the Union Jack flag on a large card with the slogan of “Union Jack Tailoring.” Much tailoring would be done that day!
Before long the press had arrived in numbers, greatly to the satisfaction of the landlord of the Rising Sun, who was able to hire out his flat roof to the reporters after all. Captain Nott-Bower of the City Police stood beside us, watching the front of the besieged houses while his inspector organised a cordon at the rear. It was intended that there should be no reinforcements for the Anarchists and no escape. That, at least, was a matter of opinion in the confusion that existed. These were men capable of fighting the police through sewers and over rooftops, if necessity demanded. In Russian uprisings they had already done so.
Only now were the reporters allowed to know that shots coming from the houses on our side were fired by the Scots Guards and that the Home Secretary was directing the operations. I overheard an exchange between Mr Churchill and Lieutenant Ross, the latter asking whether it was intended that his men should presently storm the houses opposite.
“Nonsense!” said Churchill’s gruff and emphatic voice, “do you not see how easily you might trap yourselves in a bunch on those narrow stairways and confined passages? That is just what they would like you to do. I should prophesy the most grievous losses among your detachment. You have only two sergeant-instructors and nineteen men. You cannot afford to lose a single one. No, sir, you must fight it out where you stand.”
In truth, the Scots Guards were no longer standing. At either end of the street, newspaper boards had been thrown flat and guardsmen were using them to lie upon as they directed rifle fire against the windows. The Anarchists emptied their pistols repeatedly. From time to time we glimpsed the hand which held a gun as the grimy shreds of lace curtain were edged aside. Once I saw the side of a face, when the man who had fired drew back behind the wall. To have stood behind the curtain in the window opening would have been certain death, as the guardsmen’s bullets streamed in.
This inferno of small-arms fire was now so intense that most of the time it was almost impossible to make one’s voice heard. The revolutionaries were either using the shelter of the wall of the window-casement when they fired or shooting from far back, at the rear of the room, with no hope of an accurate aim. They dodged from window to window. One was shooting from so high up that I believe he must have been standing on a chair or a step-ladder.
I had been so absorbed by this that I had not noticed Sherlock Holmes move away. Now I turned and saw him approaching again.
“I have been talking to Wodehouse,” he said, “The Home Secretary is sending for a field-gun and its crew from the Horse Artillery in St John’s Wood. That will never do. This is London, not Moscow or Odessa.”
Still we saw nothing of the gunmen, except a hand with a gun at the corner of a window or a glimpse of eyes or chin as the net curtain blew aside. One of their bullets smashed through the brewery gates and there was a smell of escaping gas. Holmes scanned the attic floor of Union Jack Tailoring, above the windows which the gunmen were using. I doubt if any other pair of eyes was raised that high. There had been no movement there and no sign of life.
“I shall not be long,” he said.
I could only assume that he was going to find Lestrade, who was still not to be seen, and possibly to seek out Mycroft Holmes in case he had made the journey from Whitehall.
“I wondered why Holmes should care about Moscow or Odessa?” I asked Captain Nott-Bower beside me.
“Look around you,” said the captain grimly, “The windows are full of women and girls leaning out, there are men and boys watching from the chimneys, let alone the crowds at either end of the street. Artillery fire at this range would do untold damage and the shell splinters or fragments of debris would be lethal. Moscow and Odessa were proof of that. To clear all these buildings of people would take until darkness falls. I really wonder what Winston is thinking of.”
I was also about to wonder aloud where Holmes had gone, when the captain scanned the attic floor and said,
“Do you see that tailor’s workshop? The sign in the window, on a card?”
“I do.”
“It is upside down! It was not so when we took up our position.”
“I daresay one of the gunmen went up there to spy on our positions. He moved the sign away to peep out and replaced it incorrectly without realising it.”