Caricatures and cartoons -- Great Britain; English wit and humor; English wit and humor, Pictorial
The Armoury, with its three burning floors, each 345 feet in
length--their trophies of past, and provisions of future victory, wrapped
in one flame, and flanked at either end by the Chapel and the Crown Jewel
House--(Church and State in equal danger!)--deserve our description.
That memorable night--so memorable, that, as the keeper's ancestor, Dean
Swift, says of O'Rourke's feast, it will be remembered
"By those who were there,
And those who were not,"
is described in two words, FUSION AND CONFUSION. They tell their story.
* * * * *
Next in sublimity to the spectacle of the blazing pile, was the scene
afterwards presented, when, as the fire lessened, and the smoke cleared
off, the whole space within the walls of the enormous Armoury was
opened to the straining eye--a sight of awe and wonder. Above was the
"sky" of a November morn; and below, covering the immense sweep of the
floor, heaps of fused metal, of dimensions scarcely to be credited,
with bayonet-points bristling up everywhere, close-set and countless,
like long blades of grass. Innumerable as the stand of small-arms had
appeared, they now seemed, starting from the crushed mass, still more
multitudinous; the space appeared larger; the scene of destruction more
gigantic; and we thought of the moralizing fox walking beside the tree
which had been thrown down by a tempest:--"This is truly a noble tree; I
never thought it so great while standing."
After a day or two there was something ridiculous blended with the terror
of the spectacle. The Waterloo guns uninjured--(those guns which had
played upon the guards at Waterloo with shot, and which the guards in
return had played upon with water in _loo_ of shot)--the enormous pieces
of artillery; the mighty anchor; the myriad bayonet-points; the masses of
metal, dull or shining; the broken columns; the smouldering rubbish; were
strangely contrasted with the forms of gaily-attired ladies, courageously
clambering over hot heaps, creeping through apparently unapproachable
avenues, and raking among the ashes for relics--gun-flints, green, blue,
or white, and picturesque bits of metal.
Outside this building, in various directions, the most terrific visible
symptom of the intense burning that had made night hideous, were the
streams of molten lead from surrounding roofs; the liquid metal, as it
fell upon the flagstones, having splashed up and sprinkled the walls to
the height of two or three feet.
[Illustration: BOWYER OR CLARENCE TOWER.]
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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