The article about pianos was, strangely enough, strictly kept. It was a striking sight at the end of a "wrecking" to see the piano standing unhurt and immaculate amid a chaos of torn flooring and broken plaster.
The matriculation and class tickets of a student are what make him eligible to vote, and would cost at least four guineas to replace. To make war on these would be a shabby way of winning an election.
Though it was the "open season," so to speak, after October 25th very little fighting was done by the rank and file except at the battles. The clubs concentrated all their energies on these. The occasions were arranged beforehand, and there were four altogether.
On the evening of the first battle students arrived in the oldest rags they could lay hands on. A great crowd of spectators also turned up, the time of the engagement having leaked out. The crowd was kept back by a force of policemen. Inside the rooms busy preparations were going on. Boxes of pease-meal bags were hauled up from the cellar and served out to all hands—if you were clever you might manage to carry ten of these most effective missiles. The hoses were fixed up and tested, while men who were not willing to submit even the worst clothes they had to the combined effect of pease-meal and water stripped until they were clad only in the sparsest of underwear.
The Liberals—of whom I may as well confess at once I was one—divided their force. About two-thirds were detailed for attack, and the remainder had to stay by the rooms and defend them in case of need. This boldness was because we had been assured by our scouts that we were largely in the majority. The Conservatives, realizing their weakness, only threw perhaps a quarter of their number outside.
A few minutes before the hour the attacking forces lined up opposite their doors, facing one another. They looked a queer lot, in most grotesque attire—the first pease-meal bag ready in each man's right hand, their figures bulging with the remainder. In the rooms the defending forces were massed at the open doors, while at each loophole were two men controlling the nozzle of a hose. These waited anxiously, for the result of the collision of the outside forces determined whose rooms were to be attacked.
On this occasion, however, there was little doubt. The odds were so clearly against the Conservatives that, unless they had some stratagem up their sleeve (which was always very possible), it was decidedly to be the Liberals' night.
The good-natured and even sympathetic police-inspector in charge capped the official sanction by consenting to blow his whistle to start us. He stood, watch in hand, with the whistle between his lips and his eyes on the minute-hand. Dead silence prevailed all around.
Suddenly the whistle shrilled out, the crowd shouted, and the two forces rushed at one another, the narrowing space between them netted with the parabolas of pease-meal bags, which burst like shells where they struck. The concussion of the adversaries took place somewhere in the midst of a dense cloud of fine yellow dust. But out of that cloud, in the direction of the Blue rooms, there emerged a writhing bulk of men. It was body to body now; there was throwing only on the outskirts.