A roar went up as the crowd surged forward. Napier, carried with it, saw men near the foot of the platform gesticulating wildly with clenched fists above their heads:
"Liar! Pro-German!"
And still the penny-whistle voice shrilled clear a moment over the turgid outpouring of muddy minds:
"The vast crime, the unparalleled lunacy of war! If I have a private quarrel and I kill my opponent, I am hanged for a felon. If the Government I live under has a public quarrel, and at their bidding I kill some man I never saw before, I am a patriot. No! I am a murderer."
That was more than the soldiers could stand. They joined in the rush for the column. Yet, as Napier remembered afterward, the soldiers who by implication had been called murderers were less like wild beasts in their fury than the men who had stayed at home. The men weren't in khaki who strove, vainly at the first essay, by dint of climbing on other men's shoulders, to storm the platform.
As for Napier, he would never have been able to get anywhere near the speaker but that his precipitation was taken by those about him for uncontrollable rage. Even with the aid of hatred to forge him a way, he found getting to the front a cursedly impeded business. Then came that moment of sheer physical sickness at his closer vision of the pack of wolves ravening below the unfriended figure. Julian, facing the onset, facing the hate-inflamed eyes in heads just appearing above the platform; Julian still crying peace in that appalling loneliness which typified his yet greater loneliness in a nation and a time given up to war.
Ruffians with villainous faces, and simpletons fired with the responsibility of standing up for England, doing it so safely, too, by means of breaking the head of one young gentleman—up the platform they scrambled after their ringleaders and closed round the speaker.
In those last few hard-won yards Napier had collected a policeman. But above the attackers had fought Julian, to the edge of the platform. Napier had an instant's glimpse of him with a splash of scarlet down his face before they threw him over.
Upon that, a new emotion seized the crowd—a panic born of the consciousness of limits to police indifference. The mass swayed and broke away from where the figure had fallen. There were plenty of policemen, now that the need for their intervention was past.
Napier shouted to them for an ambulance, as he ran forward. Of the faces bent over the figure lying limp at the foot of the platform, one was lifted—Nan Ellis's.