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 attachés 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.
Soldiers ground arms and become revolutionists.
When we left the Embassy, Captain McCulley, the American Naval Attaché, 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.
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.
Thunder of motor trucks.
I walked rapidly back to the Morskaya and down to the cable office, which I found closed, not encountering on the whole two miles a single soldier or policeman until I reached St. Isaac's Cathedral, where a regiment of marines turned up the Morskaya toward the Nevsky, swinging along behind a band. Five minutes later I followed them up the Morskaya, but before I reached the Gorokawaya, half the distance, I could hear the thunder of the revolutionary motor trucks and the glad howls of the revolutionists. They had run the length of the Nevsky, and the city, except this little corner, was theirs. The shooting began at once, and for the next three hours on both the Morskaya and the Moika there was steady firing. This was still going on when, at nine in the evening, I passed around the edge of the fight, crossed Winter Palace Square, deserted except for a company of Cossacks dimly outlined against the Winter Palace across the square. By passing under the arch into the head of Morskaya again I was once more with the revolutionists.
I have since asked Mr. Milukoff, now Minister of Foreign Affairs, at that moment a member of the Duma's Committee of Safety, how much of an organization there was behind the events of that day.
The organization a spontaneous growth.