Along the great west road, ten thousand Monmouth colliers were streaming towards London, in every stage of famine and discomfort. What they intended to do when they reached the Capital they had no clearer idea than had the fifteen thousand Midlanders at Barnet. All they knew was that they were starving at home, and they could be no worse off in London. Also in London there was to be found the Government, the Government that had betrayed them.
The conception of the march had been wild, the execution was lamentable. The leaders might have taken Napoleon's descent on Moscow as their model. Ten hand-carts exhausted their commissariat. They were to live on the land they passed through; but the land was agricultural and poor, the populace regarded the Monmouth colliers as foreigners, and the response was scanty. Only one circumstance saved the march from becoming a tragedy of hundreds instead of merely, as it was, a tragedy of scores.
The men were being fed from London. By whom, and why, not even their leaders knew, but each night a railway truck full of provisions was awaiting their arrival at a station on their route, and each day the men's leader-in-chief was informed where the next supply would be. It influenced them to continue their journey pacifically when they must otherwise, sooner or later, have abandoned all restraint and marched through anarchy. It enabled them to reach London. It added another element to the Government's distraction in their day of reckoning. It was a Detail.
But at Windsor there were no provisions waiting. No one knew why. The station authorities had nothing to suggest. After a week's regular supply the leaders had come to expect their daily truck-load, had come to rely implicitly upon it, and had made no other arrangements. They conferred together anxiously; it was all there was for them to do. Windsor was not sympathetic towards them. They had not expected it to be, but they had expected to be independent of Windsor's friendship. Two thousand special constables escorted them in and shepherded them assiduously. Otherwise there might have been disturbances, for a Castle guard comprised the extent of Windsor's military resources then. As it was, the miners reached the Royal Borough hungry, and left it famished. A rumour spread along the ranks as they set out that an unfortunate mistake had been made, but that supplies would be awaiting them in Hyde Park.
If that was a detail, as it might well have been, it was not wholly successful. The men were hungry and dispirited, but London was not their immediate goal. For weeks they had been telling the vacillating Cabinet what ought to be done with the oil at Hanwood, and as they set out they had boasted to their brothers across the Rhymney that before they returned they would show them how to fire a beacon that would singe the hair of five million Leaguers. Midway between Windsor and London they proceeded to turn off from the highway under the direction of their leaders, and debouching from the narrow lanes on to the fields beyond, they began to advance across the country in a straggling, far-flung wave.
On the previous day both the Home Office and the War Office had received applications for protection from the Company at Hanwood, backed by evidence which left no possible doubt that the Monmouth unemployed contemplated an organised attack on the oil store. The two departments replied distantly, that in view of the existing conditions within the Metropolis and the forces at their disposal, it was impossible to despatch either troops or constabulary to protect private property in isolated districts. Hanwood acknowledged these replies, and gave notice with equal punctilio that they would take the best means within their power for safeguarding their interests, and at the same time formally notified the Government that they held them responsible, through their failure to carry out the obligations of their office, for all the developments that the situation might lead to—an exchange of civilities which in private life is sometimes attained much more simply by two disputants consigning each other to the society of the Prince of Darkness in four words.
Whatever there might be behind the intimation, there was little to indicate it at dusk that afternoon. The stranger or the native passing along Miss Lisle's secluded lane would have noticed only two circumstances to suggest anything unusual in the air.
A few hundred feet above the trees within the wall, a box-kite was straining at its rope in the rising gale. From the basket car a man watched every movement of the countryside through his field-glasses, and conversed from time to time through a telephone with the kite section down below. A second wire ran from the field telephone to a room of the offices where Salt was engaged with half a dozen of the chiefs of the Council of the League. Sir John Hampden was not present. He was remaining in London to afford the Government every facility for negotiating a settlement whenever they might desire it.
In the lane, a group of men with tickets in their hats were loitering about the bridge. They comprised a Peaceful Picket within the meaning of the Act. They had been there since daybreak, and so far no one had shown any wish to dispute their position.
The war-kite and the picket in the lane were the "eyes" of the opposing belligerents.