Thus I found myself in the very centre of the revolution, behind the barricades, of which there were, it seemed, six or seven. From the rear there was constant firing, and the streets in the vicinity were, I saw to my horror, already filled with dead and wounded. Women were wailing over husbands, lovers, brothers; men over their daughters and wives. Even children of tender age were lying helpless and wounded, some of them shattered and dead.
Ah! that sight was sickening. Never had I seen wholesale butchery such as that in which I was now in the midst. I was looking about to find the German agent provocateur, but I failed to find him. Perhaps, having bidden the people to rise, he had himself escaped. Most probably.
Above us bullets whistled as the Cossacks came suddenly round a side street and made a desperate attack upon the barricade I had entered only a few minutes before. A dozen of those fighting for their freedom fell back dead at my feet at the first volley. They had been on top of the barricade, offering a mark to the troops of the Czar. Before us and behind us there was firing, for at the rear of us was another barricade. We were, in fact, between two deadly fires.
Revolver in hand, I stood ready to defend my own life. In those exciting moments I disregarded the danger I ran from being struck in that veritable hail of lead. Men fell wounded all around me, and there was blood everywhere. A thin, dark-headed young fellow under thirty—a Moscow student, I subsequently heard—seemed to be the ringleader, for above the firing could be heard his shouts of encouragement.
"Fight! my comrades!" he cried, standing close to me and waving the red flag he carried—the emblem of the Terror—"Down with the Czar! Kill the vermin he sends to us! Long live Germany! Long live freedom! Kill them!" he shrieked. "They have killed your wives and daughters. Men of Ostrog—remember your duty to-day! Set an example to Russia. Do not let the Moscow fiasco be repeated here. Fight! Fight on as long as you have a drop of life-blood in you, and we shall win, we shall win! Down with the Autocrat! Down with the——"
His sentence was never finished, for at that instant he reeled backwards with half his face shot away by a Cossack bullet.
The situation was, for me, one of greatest peril. I had had no opportunity of finding the governor of the town to present my credentials, and thus obtain protection. The whole place was in open revolt, and when the troops broke down the defences, as I saw they must do sooner or later, then we should all be caught in a trap, and no quarter would be given.
The massacre would be the same as at Moscow and many other towns in Western Russia, wherein the populace had been shot down indiscriminately, and official telegrams had been sent to Petersburg reporting "order now reigns."
I sought shelter in a doorway, but scarcely had I done so than a bullet embedded itself in the woodwork a few inches from my head. At the barricade the women were helping the men, loading their rifles for them, shouting and encouraging them to fight gallantly for freedom. And suddenly I caught sight of Hartmann's evil face. He was calmly talking to a man who was no doubt also in the German employ. The rising was their work!
A yellow-haired young woman, not more than twenty, emerged from a house close by where I stood and ran past me to the barricade. As she passed I saw that she carried something in her hand. It looked like a small cylinder of metal.