The Iron Heel

J >> Jack London >> The Iron Heel


It was reported that the defection of the Mercenaries in California had
become so serious that half a dozen regiments had been disbanded and
broken, and that their members with their families had been driven
from their own city and on into the labor-ghettos. And the California
Mercenaries were in reality the most faithful of all to their salt!
But how was Chicago, shut off from the rest of the world, to know? Then
there was a ragged telegram describing an outbreak of the populace in
New York City, in which the labor castes were joining, concluding with
the statement (intended to be accepted as a bluff*) that the troops had
the situation in hand.

* A lie.

And as the oligarchs had done with the morning papers, so had they done
in a thousand other ways. These we learned afterward, as, for example,
the secret messages of the oligarchs, sent with the express purpose of
leaking to the ears of the revolutionists, that had come over the wires,
now and again, during the first part of the night.

"I guess the Iron Heel won't need our services," Hartman remarked,
putting down the paper he had been reading, when the train pulled into
the central depot. "They wasted their time sending us here. Their plans
have evidently prospered better than they expected. Hell will break
loose any second now."

He turned and looked down the train as we alighted.

"I thought so," he muttered. "They dropped that private car when the
papers came aboard."

Hartman was hopelessly depressed. I tried to cheer him up, but he
ignored my effort and suddenly began talking very hurriedly, in a
low voice, as we passed through the station. At first I could not
understand.

"I have not been sure," he was saying, "and I have told no one. I have
been working on it for weeks, and I cannot make sure. Watch out for
Knowlton. I suspect him. He knows the secrets of a score of our refuges.
He carries the lives of hundreds of us in his hands, and I think he is
a traitor. It's more a feeling on my part than anything else. But I
thought I marked a change in him a short while back. There is the danger
that he has sold us out, or is going to sell us out. I am almost sure
of it. I wouldn't whisper my suspicions to a soul, but, somehow, I don't
think I'll leave Chicago alive. Keep your eye on Knowlton. Trap him.
Find out. I don't know anything more. It is only an intuition, and so
far I have failed to find the slightest clew." We were just stepping out
upon the sidewalk. "Remember," Hartman concluded earnestly. "Keep your
eyes upon Knowlton."

And Hartman was right. Before a month went by Knowlton paid for his
treason with his life. He was formally executed by the comrades in
Milwaukee.

All was quiet on the streets--too quiet. Chicago lay dead. There was no
roar and rumble of traffic. There were not even cabs on the streets. The
surface cars and the elevated were not running. Only occasionally, on
the sidewalks, were there stray pedestrians, and these pedestrians did
not loiter. They went their ways with great haste and definiteness,
withal there was a curious indecision in their movements, as though they
expected the buildings to topple over on them or the sidewalks to sink
under their feet or fly up in the air. A few gamins, however, were
around, in their eyes a suppressed eagerness in anticipation of
wonderful and exciting things to happen.

From somewhere, far to the south, the dull sound of an explosion came to
our ears. That was all. Then quiet again, though the gamins had startled
and listened, like young deer, at the sound. The doorways to all the
buildings were closed; the shutters to the shops were up. But there
were many police and watchmen in evidence, and now and again automobile
patrols of the Mercenaries slipped swiftly past.

Hartman and I agreed that it was useless to report ourselves to the
local chiefs of the secret service. Our failure so to report would be
excused, we knew, in the light of subsequent events. So we headed for
the great labor-ghetto on the South Side in the hope of getting in
contact with some of the comrades. Too late! We knew it. But we could
not stand still and do nothing in those ghastly, silent streets. Where
was Ernest? I was wondering. What was happening in the cities of the
labor castes and Mercenaries? In the fortresses?

As if in answer, a great screaming roar went up, dim with distance,
punctuated with detonation after detonation.

"It's the fortresses," Hartman said. "God pity those three regiments!"

At a crossing we noticed, in the direction of the stockyards, a gigantic
pillar of smoke. At the next crossing several similar smoke pillars were
rising skyward in the direction of the West Side. Over the city of the
Mercenaries we saw a great captive war-balloon that burst even as we
looked at it, and fell in flaming wreckage toward the earth. There was
no clew to that tragedy of the air. We could not determine whether the
balloon had been manned by comrades or enemies. A vague sound came to
our ears, like the bubbling of a gigantic caldron a long way off, and
Hartman said it was machine-guns and automatic rifles.

And still we walked in immediate quietude. Nothing was happening where
we were. The police and the automobile patrols went by, and once half
a dozen fire-engines, returning evidently from some conflagration. A
question was called to the fireman by an officer in an automobile, and
we heard one shout in reply: "No water! They've blown up the mains!"

"We've smashed the water supply," Hartman cried excitedly to me. "If we
can do all this in a premature, isolated, abortive attempt, what can't
we do in a concerted, ripened effort all over the land?"

The automobile containing the officer who had asked the question darted
on. Suddenly there was a deafening roar. The machine, with its human
freight, lifted in an upburst of smoke, and sank down a mass of wreckage
and death.

Hartman was jubilant. "Well done! well done!" he was repeating, over
and over, in a whisper. "The proletariat gets its lesson to-day, but it
gives one, too."

Police were running for the spot. Also, another patrol machine had
halted. As for myself, I was in a daze. The suddenness of it was
stunning. How had it happened? I knew not how, and yet I had been
looking directly at it. So dazed was I for the moment that I was
scarcely aware of the fact that we were being held up by the police. I
abruptly saw that a policeman was in the act of shooting Hartman. But
Hartman was cool and was giving the proper passwords. I saw the levelled
revolver hesitate, then sink down, and heard the disgusted grunt of the
policeman. He was very angry, and was cursing the whole secret service.
It was always in the way, he was averring, while Hartman was talking
back to him and with fitting secret-service pride explaining to him the
clumsiness of the police.

The next moment I knew how it had happened. There was quite a group
about the wreck, and two men were just lifting up the wounded officer
to carry him to the other machine. A panic seized all of them, and
they scattered in every direction, running in blind terror, the wounded
officer, roughly dropped, being left behind. The cursing policeman
alongside of me also ran, and Hartman and I ran, too, we knew not why,
obsessed with the same blind terror to get away from that particular
spot.

Nothing really happened then, but everything was explained. The flying
men were sheepishly coming back, but all the while their eyes were
raised apprehensively to the many-windowed, lofty buildings that towered
like the sheer walls of a canyon on each side of the street. From one
of those countless windows the bomb had been thrown, but which window?
There had been no second bomb, only a fear of one.

Thereafter we looked with speculative comprehension at the windows.
Any of them contained possible death. Each building was a possible
ambuscade. This was warfare in that modern jungle, a great city. Every
street was a canyon, every building a mountain. We had not changed much
from primitive man, despite the war automobiles that were sliding by.

Turning a corner, we came upon a woman. She was lying on the pavement,
in a pool of blood. Hartman bent over and examined her. As for myself,
I turned deathly sick. I was to see many dead that day, but the total
carnage was not to affect me as did this first forlorn body lying
there at my feet abandoned on the pavement. "Shot in the breast," was
Hartman's report. Clasped in the hollow of her arm, as a child might be
clasped, was a bundle of printed matter. Even in death she seemed loath
to part with that which had caused her death; for when Hartman had
succeeded in withdrawing the bundle, we found that it consisted of large
printed sheets, the proclamations of the revolutionists.

"A comrade," I said.

But Hartman only cursed the Iron Heel, and we passed on. Often we
were halted by the police and patrols, but our passwords enabled us
to proceed. No more bombs fell from the windows, the last pedestrians
seemed to have vanished from the streets, and our immediate quietude
grew more profound; though the gigantic caldron continued to bubble in
the distance, dull roars of explosions came to us from all directions,
and the smoke-pillars were towering more ominously in the heavens.



CHAPTER XXIII

THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS


Suddenly a change came over the face of things. A tingle of excitement
ran along the air. Automobiles fled past, two, three, a dozen, and from
them warnings were shouted to us. One of the machines swerved wildly
at high speed half a block down, and the next moment, already left well
behind it, the pavement was torn into a great hole by a bursting bomb.
We saw the police disappearing down the cross-streets on the run, and
knew that something terrible was coming. We could hear the rising roar
of it.

"Our brave comrades are coming," Hartman said.

We could see the front of their column filling the street from gutter to
gutter, as the last war-automobile fled past. The machine stopped for a
moment just abreast of us. A soldier leaped from it, carrying something
carefully in his hands. This, with the same care, he deposited in the
gutter. Then he leaped back to his seat and the machine dashed on, took
the turn at the corner, and was gone from sight. Hartman ran to the
gutter and stooped over the object.

"Keep back," he warned me.

I could see he was working rapidly with his hands. When he returned to
me the sweat was heavy on his forehead.

"I disconnected it," he said, "and just in the nick of time. The soldier
was clumsy. He intended it for our comrades, but he didn't give it
enough time. It would have exploded prematurely. Now it won't explode at
all."

Everything was happening rapidly now. Across the street and half a block
down, high up in a building, I could see heads peering out. I had just
pointed them out to Hartman, when a sheet of flame and smoke ran along
that portion of the face of the building where the heads had appeared,
and the air was shaken by the explosion. In places the stone facing of
the building was torn away, exposing the iron construction beneath. The
next moment similar sheets of flame and smoke smote the front of the
building across the street opposite it. Between the explosions we could
hear the rattle of the automatic pistols and rifles. For several minutes
this mid-air battle continued, then died out. It was patent that our
comrades were in one building, that Mercenaries were in the other, and
that they were fighting across the street. But we could not tell
which was which--which building contained our comrades and which the
Mercenaries.

By this time the column on the street was almost on us. As the front of
it passed under the warring buildings, both went into action again--one
building dropping bombs into the street, being attacked from across the
street, and in return replying to that attack. Thus we learned which
building was held by our comrades, and they did good work, saving those
in the street from the bombs of the enemy.

Hartman gripped my arm and dragged me into a wide entrance.

"They're not our comrades," he shouted in my ear.

The inner doors to the entrance were locked and bolted. We could not
escape. The next moment the front of the column went by. It was not a
column, but a mob, an awful river that filled the street, the people
of the abyss, mad with drink and wrong, up at last and roaring for the
blood of their masters. I had seen the people of the abyss before, gone
through its ghettos, and thought I knew it; but I found that I was now
looking on it for the first time. Dumb apathy had vanished. It was now
dynamic--a fascinating spectacle of dread. It surged past my vision in
concrete waves of wrath, snarling and growling, carnivorous, drunk with
whiskey from pillaged warehouses, drunk with hatred, drunk with lust
for blood--men, women, and children, in rags and tatters, dim ferocious
intelligences with all the godlike blotted from their features and all
the fiendlike stamped in, apes and tigers, anaemic consumptives and
great hairy beasts of burden, wan faces from which vampire society had
sucked the juice of life, bloated forms swollen with physical grossness
and corruption, withered hags and death's-heads bearded like patriarchs,
festering youth and festering age, faces of fiends, crooked, twisted,
misshapen monsters blasted with the ravages of disease and all the
horrors of chronic innutrition--the refuse and the scum of life, a
raging, screaming, screeching, demoniacal horde.

And why not? The people of the abyss had nothing to lose but the misery
and pain of living. And to gain?--nothing, save one final, awful glut of
vengeance. And as I looked the thought came to me that in that rushing
stream of human lava were men, comrades and heroes, whose mission had
been to rouse the abysmal beast and to keep the enemy occupied in coping
with it.

And now a strange thing happened to me. A transformation came over me.
The fear of death, for myself and for others, left me. I was strangely
exalted, another being in another life. Nothing mattered. The Cause for
this one time was lost, but the Cause would be here to-morrow, the
same Cause, ever fresh and ever burning. And thereafter, in the orgy
of horror that raged through the succeeding hours, I was able to take
a calm interest. Death meant nothing, life meant nothing. I was an
interested spectator of events, and, sometimes swept on by the rush,
was myself a curious participant. For my mind had leaped to a star-cool
altitude and grasped a passionless transvaluation of values. Had it not
done this, I know that I should have died.

Half a mile of the mob had swept by when we were discovered. A woman
in fantastic rags, with cheeks cavernously hollow and with narrow black
eyes like burning gimlets, caught a glimpse of Hartman and me. She
let out a shrill shriek and bore in upon us. A section of the mob tore
itself loose and surged in after her. I can see her now, as I write
these lines, a leap in advance, her gray hair flying in thin tangled
strings, the blood dripping down her forehead from some wound in the
scalp, in her right hand a hatchet, her left hand, lean and wrinkled, a
yellow talon, gripping the air convulsively. Hartman sprang in front of
me. This was no time for explanations. We were well dressed, and that
was enough. His fist shot out, striking the woman between her burning
eyes. The impact of the blow drove her backward, but she struck the wall
of her on-coming fellows and bounced forward again, dazed and helpless,
the brandished hatchet falling feebly on Hartman's shoulder.

The next moment I knew not what was happening. I was overborne by the
crowd. The confined space was filled with shrieks and yells and curses.
Blows were falling on me. Hands were ripping and tearing at my flesh
and garments. I felt that I was being torn to pieces. I was being borne
down, suffocated. Some strong hand gripped my shoulder in the thick of
the press and was dragging fiercely at me. Between pain and pressure I
fainted. Hartman never came out of that entrance. He had shielded me and
received the first brunt of the attack. This had saved me, for the jam
had quickly become too dense for anything more than the mad gripping and
tearing of hands.

I came to in the midst of wild movement. All about me was the same
movement. I had been caught up in a monstrous flood that was sweeping me
I knew not whither. Fresh air was on my cheek and biting sweetly in my
lungs. Faint and dizzy, I was vaguely aware of a strong arm around my
body under the arms, and half-lifting me and dragging me along. Feebly
my own limbs were helping me. In front of me I could see the moving back
of a man's coat. It had been slit from top to bottom along the centre
seam, and it pulsed rhythmically, the slit opening and closing regularly
with every leap of the wearer. This phenomenon fascinated me for a time,
while my senses were coming back to me. Next I became aware of stinging
cheeks and nose, and could feel blood dripping on my face. My hat was
gone. My hair was down and flying, and from the stinging of the scalp I
managed to recollect a hand in the press of the entrance that had torn
at my hair. My chest and arms were bruised and aching in a score of
places.

My brain grew clearer, and I turned as I ran and looked at the man who
was holding me up. He it was who had dragged me out and saved me. He
noticed my movement.

"It's all right!" he shouted hoarsely. "I knew you on the instant."

I failed to recognize him, but before I could speak I trod upon
something that was alive and that squirmed under my foot. I was swept on
by those behind and could not look down and see, and yet I knew that it
was a woman who had fallen and who was being trampled into the pavement
by thousands of successive feet.

"It's all right," he repeated. "I'm Garthwaite."

He was bearded and gaunt and dirty, but I succeeded in remembering him
as the stalwart youth that had spent several months in our Glen Ellen
refuge three years before. He passed me the signals of the Iron Heel's
secret service, in token that he, too, was in its employ.

"I'll get you out of this as soon as I can get a chance," he assured me.
"But watch your footing. On your life don't stumble and go down."

All things happened abruptly on that day, and with an abruptness that
was sickening the mob checked itself. I came in violent collision with
a large woman in front of me (the man with the split coat had vanished),
while those behind collided against me. A devilish pandemonium
reigned,--shrieks, curses, and cries of death, while above all rose the
churning rattle of machine-guns and the put-a-put, put-a-put of rifles.
At first I could make out nothing. People were falling about me right
and left. The woman in front doubled up and went down, her hands on her
abdomen in a frenzied clutch. A man was quivering against my legs in a
death-struggle.

It came to me that we were at the head of the column. Half a mile of it
had disappeared--where or how I never learned. To this day I do not know
what became of that half-mile of humanity--whether it was blotted out
by some frightful bolt of war, whether it was scattered and destroyed
piecemeal, or whether it escaped. But there we were, at the head of the
column instead of in its middle, and we were being swept out of life by
a torrent of shrieking lead.

As soon as death had thinned the jam, Garthwaite, still grasping my arm,
led a rush of survivors into the wide entrance of an office building.
Here, at the rear, against the doors, we were pressed by a panting,
gasping mass of creatures. For some time we remained in this position
without a change in the situation.

"I did it beautifully," Garthwaite was lamenting to me. "Ran you right
into a trap. We had a gambler's chance in the street, but in here
there is no chance at all. It's all over but the shouting. Vive la
Revolution!"

Then, what he expected, began. The Mercenaries were killing without
quarter. At first, the surge back upon us was crushing, but as the
killing continued the pressure was eased. The dead and dying went down
and made room. Garthwaite put his mouth to my ear and shouted, but in
the frightful din I could not catch what he said. He did not wait. He
seized me and threw me down. Next he dragged a dying woman over on top
of me, and, with much squeezing and shoving, crawled in beside me and
partly over me. A mound of dead and dying began to pile up over us, and
over this mound, pawing and moaning, crept those that still survived.
But these, too, soon ceased, and a semi-silence settled down, broken by
groans and sobs and sounds of strangulation.

I should have been crushed had it not been for Garthwaite. As it was,
it seemed inconceivable that I could bear the weight I did and live. And
yet, outside of pain, the only feeling I possessed was one of curiosity.
How was it going to end? What would death be like? Thus did I receive
my red baptism in that Chicago shambles. Prior to that, death to me had
been a theory; but ever afterward death has been a simple fact that does
not matter, it is so easy.

But the Mercenaries were not content with what they had done. They
invaded the entrance, killing the wounded and searching out the unhurt
that, like ourselves, were playing dead. I remember one man they dragged
out of a heap, who pleaded abjectly until a revolver shot cut him short.
Then there was a woman who charged from a heap, snarling and shooting.
She fired six shots before they got her, though what damage she did we
could not know. We could follow these tragedies only by the sound. Every
little while flurries like this occurred, each flurry culminating in the
revolver shot that put an end to it. In the intervals we could hear
the soldiers talking and swearing as they rummaged among the carcasses,
urged on by their officers to hurry up.

At last they went to work on our heap, and we could feel the pressure
diminish as they dragged away the dead and wounded. Garthwaite began
uttering aloud the signals. At first he was not heard. Then he raised
his voice.

"Listen to that," we heard a soldier say. And next the sharp voice of an
officer. "Hold on there! Careful as you go!"

Oh, that first breath of air as we were dragged out! Garthwaite did the
talking at first, but I was compelled to undergo a brief examination to
prove service with the Iron Heel.

"Agents-provocateurs all right," was the officer's conclusion. He was
a beardless young fellow, a cadet, evidently, of some great oligarch
family.

"It's a hell of a job," Garthwaite grumbled. "I'm going to try and
resign and get into the army. You fellows have a snap."

"You've earned it," was the young officer's answer. "I've got some pull,
and I'll see if it can be managed. I can tell them how I found you."

He took Garthwaite's name and number, then turned to me.

"And you?"

"Oh, I'm going to be married," I answered lightly, "and then I'll be out
of it all."

And so we talked, while the killing of the wounded went on. It is all
a dream, now, as I look back on it; but at the time it was the most
natural thing in the world. Garthwaite and the young officer fell into
an animated conversation over the difference between so-called modern
warfare and the present street-fighting and sky-scraper fighting that
was taking place all over the city. I followed them intently, fixing up
my hair at the same time and pinning together my torn skirts. And all
the time the killing of the wounded went on. Sometimes the revolver
shots drowned the voices of Garthwaite and the officer, and they were
compelled to repeat what they had been saying.

I lived through three days of the Chicago Commune, and the vastness of
it and of the slaughter may be imagined when I say that in all that time
I saw practically nothing outside the killing of the people of the abyss
and the mid-air fighting between sky-scrapers. I really saw nothing of
the heroic work done by the comrades. I could hear the explosions of
their mines and bombs, and see the smoke of their conflagrations, and
that was all. The mid-air part of one great deed I saw, however, and
that was the balloon attacks made by our comrades on the fortresses.
That was on the second day. The three disloyal regiments had been
destroyed in the fortresses to the last man. The fortresses were crowded
with Mercenaries, the wind blew in the right direction, and up went our
balloons from one of the office buildings in the city.

Now Biedenbach, after he left Glen Ellen, had invented a most powerful
explosive--"expedite" he called it. This was the weapon the balloons
used. They were only hot-air balloons, clumsily and hastily made, but
they did the work. I saw it all from the top of an office building. The
first balloon missed the fortresses completely and disappeared into the
country; but we learned about it afterward. Burton and O'Sullivan were
in it. As they were descending they swept across a railroad directly
over a troop-train that was heading at full speed for Chicago. They
dropped their whole supply of expedite upon the locomotive. The
resulting wreck tied the line up for days. And the best of it was that,
released from the weight of expedite, the balloon shot up into the
air and did not come down for half a dozen miles, both heroes escaping
unharmed.