"Oh, no," he said. "It was the Kornilovitz
before him. He is not to blame.
"The devil!" cried the Red Guard. "He is Kerensky's man, I tell you.
If _you_ won't arrest him, then _we_ will, and we'll take him to
Petrograd and put him in Peter-Paul, where he belongs!" At this the
other Red Guards growled assent. With a piteous glance at us the
Colonel was led away....
Down in front of the Soviet palace an auto-truck was going to the
front. Half a dozen Red Guards, some sailors, and a soldier or two,
under command of a huge workman, clambered in, and shouted to me to
come along. Red Guards issued from headquarters, each of them
staggering under an arm-load of small, corrugated-iron bombs, filled
with _grubit_-which, they say, is ten times as strong, and five
times as sensitive as dynamite; these they threw into the truck. A
three-inch cannon was loaded and then tied onto the tail of the
truck with bits of rope and wire.
We started with a shout, at top speed of course; the heavy truck
swaying from side to side. The cannon leaped from one wheel to the
other, and the _grubit_ bombs went rolling back and forth over our
feet, fetching up against the sides of the car with a crash.
The big Red Guard, whose name was Vladimir Nicolaievitch, plied me
with questions about America. "Why did America come into the war?
Are the American workers ready to throw over the capitalists? What
is the situation in the Mooney case now? Will they extradite Berkman
to San Francisco?" and other, very difficult to answer, all
delivered in a shout above the roaring of the truck, while we held
on to each other and danced amid the caroming bombs.
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