All that was known was that a respectably dressed young man, carrying what appeared to be about a dozen well-worn volumes from Mudie’s, or some other circulating library, had entered an empty first-class carriage at Aldgate station. These books were held together by a strap—as is usual when sending or taking volumes for exchange to the libraries—and it had occurred to no one to ask to examine them, although the officials at all railway stations had, in view of the recent outrages, been instructed to challenge every passenger carrying a suspicious-looking parcel.
The theory which was afterwards put forward was that what appeared to be a parcel of volumes from a circulating library was in reality a case cunningly covered with the backs, bindings, and edges of books, and that this case contained an infernal machine of the most deadly description. It was supposed that the wretch in charge of it had purposely entered an empty carriage that he might the better carry out his infamous plan, and that after setting fire to the fuse he had left the train at the next station.
That this theory afforded the most likely explanation of what subsequently took place was generally agreed, although one well-known authority on explosives expressed himself as of opinion that no infernal machine capable of causing what had happened could be concealed in so small a compass as that suggested. But it was pointed out in reply that from arrests and discoveries which had been made in America and on the Continent, it was evident that the manufacture of infernal machines and investigations into the qualities of explosives were being scientifically and systematically carried on.
Though no connection had as yet been traced between the persons who had been arrested and the perpetrators of the recent outrages, the probabilities were that such connection existed, and it was asked whether it might not be possible that some one who was thus engaged in experimenting with explosives had discovered a new explosive, or a new combination of explosives, which was different from and more deadly than anything known to the authorities.
Into the probability or improbability of this and other theories which were put forward it would be idle here to enter. All that is known is that the train had only just entered the tunnel immediately to the west of Blackfriars station when there occurred the most awful explosion of the sort within the memory of man. The passengers, as well as the guard, driver, and stoker, not only of the train in which the explosion took place, but also of a train which was proceeding in the opposite direction and happened to be passing at the time, were killed to a man, and with the exception of one of Smith’s bookstall boys, whose escape seemed almost miraculous, every soul in the station—ticket-collectors, porters, station-master, and the unfortunate people who were waiting on the platform—shared the same fate.
Nor was this all, for at the moment when the outrage occurred the train was passing under one of the busiest crossings in London—that where New Bridge Street, Blackfriars Bridge, Queen Victoria Street, and the Thames Embankment converge—and so terrific was the explosion that the space between these converging thoroughfares was blown away as a man’s hand is blown away by the bursting of a gun.
The buildings in the immediate neighbourhood, including parts of St. Paul’s station on the London, Chatham, and Dover railway, the offices over Blackfriars station, and De Keyser’s Hotel on the opposite side of the way, were wrecked, and the long arm of Blackfriars Bridge lay idle across the river like a limb which has been rudely hacked from a body.
But it is not my intention to attempt any realistic description of the scene, or of the awful sights which were witnessed when, after the first paralysing moment of panic was over, the search for the injured, the dying, and the dead was commenced. The number of lives lost, including those who perished in Blackfriars station, in the two trains, in the street, and in the surrounding buildings, was enormous. Several columns of the papers next morning were filled with lists of the missing and the dead. One name on the list had a terrible significance. It was the name of the man to achieve whose murder the lives of so many innocent men and women had been ruthlessly sacrificed; the name of a man whose remains were never found, but whose funeral pyre was built of the broken bodies of hundreds of his fellow creatures,—the name of the Chief Secretary for Ireland.
CHAPTER II
CAPTAIN SHANNON’S MANIFESTO
On the day of the outrage upon the Metropolitan railway a manifesto from Captain Shannon, of which the following is a copy, was received by the Prime Minister at his official residence in Downing Street. It was written as usual in roughly printed capitals, and, as it bore the Dublin postmark of the preceding day, must have been posted before the explosion had taken place.