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Roy Glashan's Library
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THE first-class carriage we were in was heated by steam, we had each abundance of coats and rugs, our feet were on a fresh foot-warmer, but the draught of the hurricane crept in by a score of chinks, and the vehemence of the cold made us ache. At Doncaster we moved across to the Pullman car, and found that a trifle more endurable; but still I noted that Gerard's moustache continued to glisten with icicles.
At Grantham we had still further evidence (if such a thing were needed) of the lowness of the temperature. The express, which is timed to stop there only three minutes at the outside, made a wait that seemed interminable. The conductor, I saw, was getting uneasy. At length he buttoned his coat and went out into the freezing gale on the platform. In a minute he returned, purple-cheeked and blowing his fingers. He came to us with the tidings. Both driver and stoker of our engine were, it seemed, half perished with the exposure to that bitter cold; it was with difficulty they had brought the express to a standstill in the station; and they were utterly unfit to proceed further. It was doubtful, the conductor said, whether one of them, but I forgot which it was, would recover; and meanwhile the railway authorities were seeking substitutes to take us on to London. He said, too, that news had been brought down of a colossal fire in Hammersmith, but could add no details.
"Nice weather this for getting married in," said I; "if we'd had warning of this blizzard beforehand, I should either have shirked being your best man, or suggested having the affair postponed."
"If to-morrow's like this," said Gerard, the wedding can't take place till the weather changes. It would be brutal to drag any woman out into such a nipping cold."
We saw men filling the engine with buckets from a well outside the station, because the ordinary water supply was frozen solid; and then the train began to move again, and slid out of Grantham into the open country. The south-westerly hurricane beat upon it till the flanges of the lee wheels grated upon the rails with a roar of sound; and in some of the heavier squalls I thought we should have been upset. A queer, lurid light hung in the sky. But with dogged slowness we crawled on, and drew up under the shelter of King's Cross station.
It was four o'clock, and we were three hours late. There was a bellow of life from the departure side of the station. I don't think I ever heard such a noise of trains and passengers; but where we were, the place seemed deserted. Half the roof was off, and there was not a porter to be seen. The platform was littered with dirty, trodden snow.
We got out, and I noticed that there were only two other passengers in the train. The conductor of the Pullman put out our luggage, and Gerard told him to order a hansom. There was only one on the rank—a thing that had never been known before since King's Cross station was built.
We got into that lonely cab, and told the muffled driver to take us to Queen's Gate, in Kensington. As the glass door was clattering down, a boy came out of some sheltered corner, and thrust in a paper.
"Evening paper, sir?" he cried. "There's half Chelsea on fire."
"Give him a penny, Methuen," said Gerard.
"No, sir," said the boy, "Five bob or nothing. I've only two papers left, and there's ten firemen killed. They say half London will be burnt."
I fumbled out two half-crowns, and the window closed down with a clash, and the cab drove off. Then I bent my head over the fluttering sheet and scanned the headlines:
DISASTROUS FIRE
FANNED BY THE FURIOUS GALE
ALL HYDRANTS FROZEN!
EVERY DROP OF WATER IN LONDON SOLID ICE
NOTHING TO CHECK THE FLAMES!
METROPOLIS IN TERRIBLE DANGER
SUICIDE OF THE CHIEF OF THE FIRE BRIGADE.
The sky above us was full of driving blackness, but a strange yellow glare hung beneath it, and the print stood out clearly:
"The fire in Hammersmith, which we reported in our last edition," I read, " has since assumed gigantic proportions. The united fire brigades of London are helpless to cope with it. The unprecedented severity of the frost, and the fury of the hurricane, which is now upon us, have set at derision all our vaunted precautions.
"It is with water alone that our fire-extinguishing services have been hitherto armed to fight devouring flames; and now in this moment of our desperate need even a trickle of water is denied them. They are as helpless as the lay citizens.
"The fire in its awful majesty has beat down all resistance. Hammersmith is a burnt-out rubbish heap. West Kensington is a furnace. Amongst the dwellers in South Kensington and Chelsea there is more panic than an invading army could produce. So far as human eye can see, nothing but a change of wind or an act of God can save the greatest city ever built by man from being in the next few hours changed to twisted, smoking ruins."
Gerard dropped the paper with a cry of horror, and thrust up the hatch, "A fiver if you keep your horse at a gallop," he shouted to the cabman. "My God, Methuen," he said to me, "what an awful thing this is."
"The newspaper has made the worst of it for the sake of the sensation," I answered, "London is not built of wood; it is an impossible thing for the whole of it to burn."
"I'm thinking of Queen's Gate, and my little girl there. She'll have expected me three hours ago, and I'm here now."
The cab stopped with a jar against the curb. I scraped the frost rime from a window, and peered out. Five great dray-loads of household goods were coming thundering past us, with the horses at a gallop. We got beyond them, and entered Piccadilly. The street was one solid block of every imaginable kind of vehicle, bearing salvage and fugitives eastwards. With infinite trouble, our cabman wormed his way across the struggling mass, and tried to take us on our road by the smaller streets to southward; but these were one and all brim-filled by the traffic, or blocked by broken-down vehicles.
Gerard's impatience grew too great to be held in check any longer. He sprang from the cab, gave the man a ten-pound note, with orders to follow as best he could, and started off through the hurrying crowds on foot.
He sprang from the cab, gave the man a ten-pound
note, with orders to follow as best he could.
Then for the first time we began fully to realise the fright which had bitten into five millions of people. The most orderly city on earth had turned into a seething nest of anarchy. Even the police made no effort to quell the terror or curb its lashings: they had their own houses and their own lives to think about. And as we went on, with the gale beating in our faces, we ourselves became smitten with the prevailing spirit.
We jostled and thrust at everyone that came in our way; we climbed over broken-down loads of rarities which lay in the roadways as though they had been so much coal. Three times I saw bodies lying motionless in my path, and the passers-by cursed as they stumbled against them, but no one stopped to help.
And once I saw a woman of elegant dress, who was driving a landau filled with trunks and boxes, drop the reins when a heavy dray cut off one of her wheels, and pull out a pistol and kill herself before a thousand lookers-on. But no one gave her more than a cursory glance. Each one looked ahead on his own path, and hurried away about his business, wrestling and thrusting amongst the others. And every minute the crush thickened, and every by-street vomited people.
The air grew warmer as we pressed on westwards. There was no glimpse of flame apparent yet; nothing but fat, black rolls of smoke could be seen overhead, with an underlining of yellow reflected from the distant blaze. And everywhere hung icicles, and the lines of the bursted water-mains glistened in the roadways. We were in an Arctic city more like St. Petersburg than the London we had known before.
There was the taint of burning in every breath we drew, and from the inky sky above fell a constant patter of charred embers. As we drew on, these embers grew bright, and by the time we were through Brompton (and seven had clanged out from some clock in the neighbourhood), live sparks were falling on the seething mobs in the streets, and the air grew sour with the smell of singeing cloth.
But by the time we got abreast of the South Kensington Museum, the glow of the flames was beginning to smear more lurid yellows against the amorphous black of the driving smoke clouds; and soon the thunder of the blaze and the crash of the trundling masonry came to us in a dim roar above the booming and swishing of the gale. The great warren of dwelling-houses to westward of us yielded up its thousand emigrants every minute. The fugitives had started out of home hugging their dearest possessions; but the din of that awful enemy which was sacking the city at their heels thrust terror into their hearts; and they had it taught them that to each one naked life is dearer than all else the world contains. So the streets were paved with the cream of the household goods, and we smashed with our feet a Jew's ransom with every mile we went.
The fire was advancing whole streets by the hour. Earl's Court was already half burnt out; the houses in a line with Cornwall Gardens and Emperor's Gate were beginning to yield up trickles of fire through their windows. The bright scoriae from the volcano of fire fell around and on us more thickly as we pressed on. The mob thinned as we drew towards the seat of the blaze, and when we turned up Queen's Gate, the street, though half filled by furniture and débris, was almost deserted by human beings. The population had fled already. The gale was sending the flames horizontally, like the jet from a blow-pipe, across the house-tops.
Gerard by this time was nearly beside himself with anxiety and foreboding. But at last we reached the house, and Gerard dashed up the steps. The girl whom that morning he had thought to make his bride within the next thirty hours stood waiting for him in the doorway.
"Oh, my love," I heard her say, as she leant on his shoulder, "I am here alone. They have all gone. But you said you would come for me; and I knew you would if you were alive; and if you were not, I did not wish to live either."
But meanwhile the heat was growing upon us, and whilst I stood and watched, I saw flames beginning to spout from the upper windows of a house near the Cromwell Road.
Whilst I stood and watched, I saw flames beginning to spout
from the upper windows of a house near the Cromwell Road.
A swirl of smoke came up and stung my eyes like nettles, "Look," I said, "we must go. This house will be burning in another ten minutes;" and at the word Miss Vivian picked up a jewel-case from a table in the hall, and came with Gerard down the steps. We were walking quickly northwards, and as we were passing Queen's Gate-terrace a man joined us whom I knew. His name is an old and an honoured one, but I omit it here for the sake of others who have borne the title.
"Oh!" he cried, "I am beggared! Fifty-five and beggared! What is that you have?" said he. "Jewels?" He snatched the morocco box from Miss Vivian's hands. "I must have something," he cried. "I refuse to starve." And he ran off howling.
A van stood in the roadway, with horses trembling and snorting. "The law is dead," I said. "Every man takes what he wants now. Jump in."
My friend and his promised wife got under the tilt of the van, away from the fiery shower which was raining on us, and I mounted the box. The horses sprang away at a gallop. At the end of the road was a tangled block. The furniture of two houses had been pitched out helter-skelter, and lay there in wild confusion. A hansom had tried to cross it, and the horse had broken a leg, and lay deserted, and moving feebly. But it was no time for hesitation. I charged my team at the barrier, and with a crash and a bang and a rattle we were over.
We crossed the Knightsbridge-road, and entered Kensington Gardens by the Queen's Gate. A water main had burst in the middle of the roadway, and thrust up an ice-fountain twenty feet in height. I headed across for the Marble Arch, intending to get to one of the railway stations, where we could run away north out of this horrible city of fire and terror. But before we were half-way across the parks the scent of fire came to us anew, and the horses began to snort with fresh terror. Bayswater was blazing, Paddington was on fire, and soon the fingers of the flames would be seizing Oxford Street in their awful grip.
There seemed no chance of a respite. The gale raged more furiously than ever. I turned and made for Hyde Park Corner, and as we drove I saw no fewer than ten huge trees crash down before the straining of the wind.
But past Hyde Park Corner I could get the van no farther. The roadways were piled up to the doors of the houses on either side with a mass of vehicles, and alive with madly plunging horses. Never was known such a scene since the world began. And there they were doomed to wait, in that inextricable tangle, till the flames swept up and ground them into smoke.
We deserted our van, and hand-in-hand we skirted that awful block. We rounded Buckingham Palace Gardens, and got down to Victoria Street; but that was impassable, and we were forced to make our way through unconsidered bye-paths where the crowds were less densely wedged.
Only once was our slow struggle onward interrupted. Of a sudden the air was split by a terrific roar; another followed; and another. The pavement beneath us shook, and the tall houses on either side shed dust. The gale for a moment stopped; then hit us with a fresh blast which there was no standing against; and then a tornado of dust and fragments swept down so thick that we could barely catch a breath. They were blowing up a line of houses along the forefront of the fire, in the desperate hope that the flames would not leap the gap.
The crowd realised what had happened, and began to surge onward again. We fought our way along in its eddies. The exertion was something tearful, and for long enough I struggled on like a man in a dream, with one hand dragging at Miss Vivian, and the other wrestling with the people who thronged us. By a sort of dull instinct I was heading for the eastward. Hours must have passed—though they seemed like years—and when my weariness had grown so great that it seemed I could not drag myself a yard further, I became dimly conscious that we were in Northumberland Avenue.
By a sort of natural impulse, and without a word being said, we turned into the Metropole. The hall of the hotel was filled with a rabble which would have done credit to the Ratcliffe Highway, and I duly wondered what they were doing there. But then I caught a glimpse of my own self in a mirror. My clothes were burnt full of holes; with the smoke and the falling soot I was black as a man who had worked a week in coal; I looked a greater outcast than any of them.
It seemed useless to ask for a room; in fact, there were no officials visible; each bedroom was overflowing, and in the corridors the grimy tenants made a human carpet. At length, up in the attics (where fewer of the crowd had dared to go through dread of the fire) we found a tiny room with only half a dozen occupants. Miss Vivian shared the bed with two other women, and Gerard and I threw ourselves on the floor and huddled against the others for warmth.
Sour-mouthed from want of sleep, I woke to the tune of splintering glass. Once more the fire was upon us. The gap of blown-up houses had done nothing to check its march. We roused the sleepers, and rushed to the stairways. Gleaming ice lay everywhere in the track of the bursted water pipes. The wind shook the great building as we ran towards the entrance, and the roar of the advancing fire re-echoed in the passages. A torrent of humanity was pouring out into Northumberland Avenue.
But I had no wish that we should be driven further eastward in that frightened sheep-pack before the wolves of flame. Retreat to the north was barred; we must get to the Surrey side; we must run somehow from this horrible city, where each in his blind terror was trampling down his neighbour.
We thrust our way through the crowds into Charing Cross Station, but the press was so great that the lines were blocked with writhing humanity, and no train could get in across the bridge. Then a thought occurred to me: The river was frozen, and we could make passage across the ice. We struggled back again, setting to the Embankment by Villiers-street, and feeling the breath of the advancing flames hot upon our faces. We went down the steps by Cleopatra's Needle, and got on the frozen surface without so much as a shoe wet. Under that intense frost even the tide of the Thames could not keep a patch of open water.
There were thousands of other people with us on the ice, and with them we made our way across to the southern bank.
We made our way across to the southern shore.
The buildings there had escaped the conflagration, and stood out in cold black silhouette against the windy sky. Men were standing on the white roofs to keep any flying embers from finding a lodgment. But of the other side, which we had left, who could put in mere words the grandeur and awfulness of the sight which it presented then? It seemed as though the great city had been first gripped by a polar winter, and was now being snatched back again by the powers of hell. And against that raid, human resistance was a puny derision.
Chelsea yielded now only a thin smoke; the Houses of Parliament and Westminster were skeletons outlined in flame. The Clock Tower was a great torch, lighting heaven. Whitehall was a furnace, where yellows and reds struggled for the mastery, and no trace of building could be seen. The great hotels of Northumberland Avenue, and the National Gallery beyond, were oozing reek and fire. And the drift of burning fragments drove over the icy roofs in front of the fire, and lit two score new streets every hour.
We watched on as the blaze drove eastwards, and saw it bite the end of the Strand, and then from the great shelter of Charing Cross Station there came a stream of shrieks which made us shudder. That, too, had been ravished by the flames, and of the thousands within it, all who could not escape were being baked alive, or crushed by the falling roof.
But meanwhile the freezing gale sweeping down the reaches of the river was nipping us with a more real kind of chill, and I saw that Miss Vivian was almost fainting with the exposure. Gerard said we must try and find some shelter, so we got ashore through a merchant's yard, and made our way to Waterloo-road. This, too, was crammed with fugitives, but the terrifying scent of the fire was farther away, and the retreat was more orderly. We found a cab, and had nearly chartered it when two other men came up and bid against us. But we had the more gold, and the ride was ours. We were driven away to Dulwich, where Gerard had friend.
And that is the last I saw of the actual burning of London. We were bruised, all three of us, from face to foot; we were badly scorched in many places; we were bone-weary; and once a hospitable door closed behind us, our limbs stiffened, and we were incapable of further struggle. For five awful days the fire strode on and gutted the whole of the City and almost all North London; and the glare of it was seen on the Cheviot Hills.
It turned into crumbling ruins the Bank England and the Tower; it blasted out of existence the slums which lie between Wapping High Street and the Mile End Road It burnt the shipping and the warehouses, the shops, and the offices, the private dwellings, and the wooden pavement of the streets; and by one means and another it had caused the death of five hundred thousand of the population.
Yes; half a million human beings perished in that awful tornado of flame, or died of the subsequent exposure and want; three thousand thousand were changed from house-holders into homeless outcasts; but figures will give no idea of the vast amount of the property that was blotted out of existence.
Not only was solid, visible wealth wafted away in smoke, but that mysterious asset, paper money, shrank from milliards into nothingness. The national credit was blasted, and the bourses of the outside world were smitten to their foundations. Civilisation has received no such shock since old Atlantis sank beneath the ocean waves.
* * * * *
And now we are face to face with the result. The awe-struck outer world had recovered its self-possession; we are still paralysed. The starving hordes of London have spread over the whole face of the fair land, and our towns bristle with riot. The other nations, forgetting their momentary pity, remember only their old hate. Shameful treaties are thrust upon us. Our colonies are being invaded. Trade has been reft from us. We are a nation with a glorious history, of but no future.
New Chicago arose like a phoenix from the ashes of the old. But our London was no flimsy place of wooden joists and weather-boarding. It was a monument of centuries, and the nation is too heart-sick to begin again to build it on the old scale. The Government sits at Manchester, and the world mocks at it.
In the hour of our pride we boasted that no nation on earth could lay us low. But the elements were set to war against our might, and they have humbled the British Empire even unto the ground.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.