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Colonel Van der Tympel, commandant of the city, had been beforehand with him, had got his troops under arms, and now secured the rebellious detachment. Meantime, the alarm had spread. Armed burghers came from every house, and barricades were hastily thrown up across every one of the narrow streets leading to the square. Every issue was closed.
The Reds stopped our force after we had pushed them back into their fortifications and we had to retire to Peligora, where barbed wire, barricades, trenches and fortified log houses had been prepared for this rather expected last stand before the city of Pinega. For weeks it had looked dubious for the city.
Interior barricades were pouring their combatants to the spot; Count Lenkenstein was plunged upon the door-steps. Wilfrid gained half-a-minute's parley by shouting in his foreign accent, "Would you hurt an Englishman?" Some one took him by the arm, and helping to raise the count, hurried them both into the house. "You must make excuses for popular fury in times like these," the stranger observed.
He placed barricades in the suburbs, opened doors of communication from house to house, and pierced their walls with loopholes for the discharge of crossbows, arquebuses, and other missiles. King Ferdinand arrived before the place with all his forces; he stationed himself upon the hill of Encinilla, and distributed the other encampments in various situations so as to invest the fortress.
The old-clothes dealers of Valencia had in their storehouses dozens of the same kind of remnants and when the festival of Corpus Christi approached they used them to cover the natural barricades formed by the ground, instead of building new ones in the street followed by the processions. At other times, Ulysses repeated the same game under the name of "Indians and Conquerors."
But beneath that wave of consternation a fiercer note steadily rose the note of revolt against the decrees of eleven men. I cannot describe to you what an intensity of passion was suddenly revealed. Muttering first, this revolt became quite open and almost unanimous. All of us would have a fair fight behind barricades and entrenchments, but no massacre of a long, unending convoy.
The shells occasionally fly low and take you on the head; the bullets flick through loopholes or as often take you in the back from some enfilading barricades, and thus through two agencies you can be hastened towards the Unknown. As far as I am personally concerned, it is largely a matter of food whether this affects one acutely or not.
By that time barricades without number, it was said, had been thrown up in the streets. The suburbs of Paris were cut off from the capital. During the previous night, arms had been everywhere demanded from private houses; but in obtaining them the insurgents endeavored to inspire no unnecessary terror. One lady in the English quarter was found kneeling by the bedside of her dying child.
"Well, then," said I, "the moment may come when our duty will be to join in the combat." "Without doubt." I resumed, "You who are on the barricades will be better judges than we shall of that moment. Give me your word of honor that you will treat me as you would wish me to treat you, and that you will come and fetch us." "I give it you," he answered, and he pressed my two hands in his own.
A lingering plan for defending Brussels by throwing up barricades and constructing wire entanglements, to be manned by the Civic Guard, was abandoned in the face of wiser counsel. It would merely have resulted in a bombardment, with needless destruction of life and property. Brussels was defenseless.
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