WILLIAM LE QUEUX: 15 Dystopian Novels & Espionage Thrillers (Illustrated Edition). William Le Queux

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      The great League of Defenders was in course of rapid formation. Its proclamations were upon every wall. When the time was ripe, London would rise. The day of revenge was fast approaching.

      London, north of the Thames, though shattered and wrecked, began, by slow degrees, to grow more calm.

      One half of the populace seemed to have accepted the inevitable; the other half being still terrified and appalled at the havoc wrought on every hand. In the case of Paris, forty years before, when the Germans had bombarded the city, their shells had done but little damage. In those days neither guns nor ammunition were at such perfection as they now were, the enemy’s high-power explosives accounting for the fearful destruction caused.

      A very curious fact about the bombardment must here be noted. Londoners, though terrified beyond measure when the shells began to fall among them and explode, grew, in the space of a couple of hours, to be quite callous, and seemed to regard the cannonade in the light of a pyrotechnical display. They climbed to every point of vantage, and regarded the continuous flashes and explosions with the same open-mouthed wonder as they would exhibit at the Crystal Palace on a firework night.

      The City proper was still held by the Xth Corps under General von Wilburg, who had placed a strong cordon around it, no unauthorised person being allowed to enter or leave. In some of the main roads in Islington, Hoxton, Whitechapel, Clapton, and Kingsland, a few shops that had not been seized by the Germans had courageously opened their doors. Provision shops, bakers, greengrocers, dairies, and butchers were, however, for the most part closed, for in the Central Markets there was neither meat nor vegetables, every ounce of food having been commandeered by German foraging parties.

      As far as possible, however, the enemy were, with the aid of the English Advisory Board, endeavouring to calm the popular excitement and encourage trade in other branches. At certain points such as at Aldgate, at Oxford Circus, at Hyde Park Corner, in Vincent Square, Westminster, at St. James’s Park near Queen Anne’s Gate, and in front of Hackney Church, the German soldiers distributed soup once a day to all comers, Von Kronhelm being careful to pretend a parental regard for the metropolis he had occupied.

      The population north of the Thames was not, however, more than one quarter what it usually was, for most of the inhabitants had fled across the bridges during the bombardment, and there remained on the Surrey side in defiance of the invader.

      Night and day the barricade-builders were working at the bridges in order to make each defence a veritable redoubt. They did not intend that the disasters of the northern suburbs — where the bullets had cut through the overturned carts and household furniture as through butter — should be repeated. Therefore at each bridge, behind the first hastily-constructed defence, there were being thrown up huge walls of sacks filled with earth, and in some places where more earth was obtainable earthworks themselves with embrasures. Waterloo, Blackfriars, Southwark, London, and Cannon Street bridges were all defended by enormous earthworks, and by explosives already placed for instant use if necessary. Hungerford Bridge had, of course, been destroyed by the Germans themselves, huge iron girders having fallen into the river; but Vauxhall, Lambeth, Battersea, Hammersmith, and Kew and other bridges were equally strongly defended as those nearer the centre of London. Many other barricades had been constructed at various points in South London, such as across the Bridge End Road, Wandsworth, several across the converging roads at St. George’s Circus, and again at the Elephant and Castle, in Bankside, in Tooley Street, where it joins Bermondsey Street, at the approach to the Tower Bridge, in Waterloo Road at its junction with Lower Marsh, across the Westminster Bridge and Kennington Roads, across the Lambeth Road where it joins the Kennington Road, at the junction of Upper Kennington Lane with Harleyford Road, in Victoria Road at the approach to Chelsea Bridge, and in a hundred other smaller thoroughfares. Most of these barricades were being built for the protection of certain districts rather than for the general strategic defence of South London. In fact, most of the larger open spaces were barricaded, and points of entrance carefully blocked. In some places exposed barricades were connected with one another by a covered way, the neighbouring houses being crenellated and their windows protected with coal sacks filled with earth. Cannon now being brought in by Artillery from the south were being mounted everywhere, and as each hour went by the position of South London became strengthened by both men and guns.

      CHAPTER XI

       DEFENCES OF SOUTH LONDON

       Table of Contents

      Preparations were being continued night and day to place the working-class districts in Southwark and Lambeth in a state of strong defence, and the constant meetings convened in public halls and chapels by the newly-formed League of Defenders incited the people to their work. Everybody lent a willing hand, rich and poor alike. People who had hitherto lived in comfort in Regent’s Park, Hampstead, or one or other of the better-class northern suburbs, now found themselves herded among all sorts and conditions of men and women, and living as best they could in those dull, drab streets of Lambeth, Walworth, Battersea, and Kennington. It was, indeed, a strange experience for them. In the sudden flight from the north parents had become separated from their children and husbands from their wives, so that in many cases haggard and forlorn mothers were in frantic search of their little ones, fearing that they might have already died of starvation or been trampled under foot by the panic-stricken multitudes. The dense population of South London had already been trebled. They were penned in by the barricades in many instances, for each district seemed to be now placing itself in a state of defence, independent of any other.

      Kennington, for instance, was practically surrounded by barricades, tons upon tons of earth being dug from the “Oval” and the “Park.” Besides the barricades in Harleyford Road and Kennington Lane, all the streets converging on the “Oval” were blocked up, a huge defence arm just being completed across the junction of Kennington and Kennington Park roads, and all the streets running into the latter thoroughfare from that point to the big obstruction at the “Elephant” were blocked by paving stones, bags of sand, barrels of cement, bricks, and such-like odds and ends impervious to bullets. In addition to this, there was a double fortification in Lambeth Road — a veritable redoubt — as well as the barricade at Lambeth Bridge, while all the roads leading from Kennington into the Lambeth Road, such as St. George’s Road, Kennington Road, High Street, and the rest, had been rendered impassable and the neighbouring houses placed in a state of defence. Thus the whole district of Kennington became therefore a fortress in itself.

      This was only a typical instance of the scientific methods of defence now resorted to. Mistakes made in North London were not now repeated. Day and night every able-bodied man, and woman too, worked on with increasing zeal and patriotism. The defences in Haverstock Hill, Holloway Road, and Edgware Road, which had been composed of overturned tramcars, motor ’buses, household furniture, etc., had been riddled by the enemy’s bullets. The lesson had been heeded, and now earth, sand, tiles, paving stones, and bricks were very largely used.

      From nearly all the principal thoroughfares south of the river, the paving-stones were being rapidly torn up by great gangs of men, and whenever the artillery brought up a fresh Maxim or field-gun the wildest demonstrations were made. The clergy held special services in churches and chapels, and prayer-meetings for the emancipation of London were held twice daily in the Metropolitan Tabernacle at Newington. In Kennington Park, Camberwell Green, the Oval, Vauxhall Park, Lambeth Palace Gardens, Camberwell Park, Peckham Rye, and Southwark Park a division of Lord Byfield’s army was encamped. They held the Waterloo terminus of the South-Western Railway strongly, the Chatham Railway from the Borough Road Station — now the terminus — the South-Eastern from Bricklayers’ Arms, which had been converted into another terminus, as well as the Brighton line, both at Battersea СКАЧАТЬ