Surely Fyatt couldn’t have realized what this firing of blanks would mean.
They were trampling themselves to death already. This wasn’t English humor. It was more like the fool who yells, “Fire!” in a packed theater.
The great open place was walled. There were no broad exits. The several narrow vents had locked of themselves by the pressing of bodies against them. “Why,” Dicky thought, with a wrench and shiver at the sight of the monster throng in the process of constricting itself, “why, this is a womb of death!”
Cries were sustained at the end of this April holiday—cries of battle and accident and pestilence, the cries from a great ship going down.
Dicky thought of a pot beginning to boil. He thought of a yard of leaves suddenly caught in a swirling wind. He thought of all the old stale similes used and over-used since bloodshed began, and his mind sank back in the hollow of hopelessness. It couldn’t be told, but his faculties tried again and again, even though his heart sobbed with the people.
A great square of colored cloths in the sunlight—from twelve to fifteen thousand human beings listening to a man who cried out against violence, who cried out that Sarkar couldn’t hurt his children—suddenly being ground in the great crush of Fear, being sprayed with rifle fire—blanks, of course—but to a result almost as deadly, for the people were destroying each other. They didn’t mean to, but they were trampling each other to death. Thus his mind viewed and reviewed—all this in a matter of seconds.
Now Mr. Cobden saw something he didn’t understand. Down in the maidan on the ground, not fifty feet away—a giant Sikh in white turban, running forward with raised hands, like a messenger—a close-up possibly for Dicky’s eyes alone—suddenly halted, spun and slapped limply to the ground with a curving fling. A glorious fall, if it had been a bit of acting—the fall a man makes when a bullet hits him.
But Dicky was quite possessed with the idea that the soldiers were firing blanks.
At this point, an English officer roared at his Gurkhas, who apparently had been firing high. His words were in vernacular, but the American saw the little dark men shorten their range.
Thus it dawned upon him slowly, as if he were a very stupid man, that Fyatt was punishing Amritsar indeed—in fact, that the General was making a day of it. Also at the same time it dawned upon him that the public square was walled. He had seen the wall before, partly formed of buildings, but it hadn’t properly registered in connection with the words of the twisted ascetic of Cawnpore.