All day, from the time the arsenal fell into their hands, the
revolutionists felt their strength growing, and from noon on no attack
was led against them. At first the soldiers simply gave up their guns
and mixed in the crowd, but they grew bolder, too, when they saw the
workmen forming into regiments and marching up the Fourshtatzkaya, still
fumbling with the triggers of their rifles to see how they met the enemy
at the next corner. The coolness of these revolutionists, their
willingness to die for their cause, won the respect of a small group of
us who were standing before the American Embassy. The group was
composed chiefly of Embassy attaches who wanted to go over to the old
Austrian Embassy, used by us as the headquarters for the relief of
German and Austrian prisoners in Russia; but though it was only a five
minutes' walk, the hottest corner in the revolution lay between.
[Sidenote: Soldiers ground arms and become revolutionists.]
When we left the Embassy, Captain McCulley, the American Naval Attache,
said he knew a way to get out of the revolutionary quarter without
passing a line of fire. So he edged us off toward the distant Nevsky
along several blood-blotched streets in which there were occasional
groups of soldiers who did not know which way to turn. Then, as the
Bycenie, beyond, suddenly filled with revolutionists coming from some
other quarter, we turned to cross the Litenie. Twenty minutes earlier
Captain McCulley had passed there and the Government troops controlled
for another quarter mile. Now we passed a machine-gun company commanding
the street, which dared not fire because there was a line of soldiers
between it and a vast crowd pouring through the street toward us. The
crowd had already overwhelmed and made revolutionists out of hundreds of
soldiers, and the situation for a moment was dramatically tense.
Down the bisecting Litenie another crowd was advancing, filling the wide
street. Before it there was also a company of soldiers, and it did not
know whether to face the Bycenie or the river. Three immense mobs were
overwhelming it, though it knew of but two. Suddenly, just at the moment
when we expected a shower of bullets, and flattened ourselves against a
doorway, the company grounded arms and in three seconds was in the arms
of the revolution.
[Sidenote: Company after company joins.]
As we retreated to the Nevsky ahead of the victorious crowd we could see
company after company turn, as if suddenly deciding not to shoot, and
join.
[Sidenote: Thunder of motor trucks.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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