The Impregnable Women, page 26
The men were uneasy, but their doubtful minds were still in subjection to their loyalty. Their blood was thicker than logic, and England’s cause was still theirs though the politicians had taken England down a crooked road. They would grumble but they would not rebel, because they felt that England, in so far as they were England, stood for peace and toleration and a kind of unassuming decency. That was the root of their deeper loyalty. But they were also loyal to their regiments and their own officers, because such loyalty is a natural thing and many of their officers were very fine men. It was, in part, this secondary loyalty that made them dislike the thought of a pitched battle against women; for they feared it would impair the dignity of their regiments. Their colours were glorious with honours won in every quarter of the globe. They had been dyed in the heroism of centuries and brocaded with victories that overstrode the world and filled the pages of Britain’s history with such chords of glory as made a music like the supernal harmony of the spheres. Here were regiments that carried on their colours France and India, and there a man whose crest was Egypt. A pair of others pulled red roses from a bush, and stuck the memory of Minden in their coats. They had fought with Clive at Plassey and Wellington at Talavera. They had left their dead in Kabul and Kandahar, they had carried their memory into Africa, they had crossed the desert and taken Jerusalem. Their last, their bitter and most splendid honours, they had won against Germany, who was now their ally . . . And now all this heritage of glory was to be carried into action against a pack of women! They did not like the idea at all, and no one could have persuaded them that the battle for Edinburgh Castle would be of far greater importance than Plassey or Talavera or bloody contests on the Aisne and the Lys and the Somme.
Whistles blew. The soldiers knocked out their pipes and got up. They fell in on their markers, trampling the warm grass, and dressed their ranks. They stood to attention and with disciplined unwatching eyes stared straight in front of them while General Scrymgeour, impassive as they but seeing everything, rode past their unmoving lines. Despite their uneasy hearts and troubled dignity, they could be trusted to obey and do their best. They were loyal, and therefore they would fight a battle of which they were already ashamed, and suffer in a cause they gravely doubted.
II
In the Castle there was neither doubting heart nor any mind that feared the betraying of its dignity. The rebel women were afire with zeal and exultant resolution. The skirmish of the previous morning had given them confidence, and they were determined not only to fight to the utmost of their strength, but to be victorious. They were passionately convinced of the importance of the coming battle. It would be a battle new in history, and Lysistrata had told them it might be more decisive than any storied or stricken field since Marathon.
She had spoken to them on the steepness of the causeway where it turns uphill from the lower part of the Castle to the Citadel. The whole garrison, except the sentries on the wall, had gathered in a great crowd below her. She had told them of the Highland army that was on its way to join them, and charged them to hold the Castle, no matter at what cost, till the Highlanders should come. Then she spoke of the greatness of their cause, and declared her faith in their power to bring happiness and reason to the world.
‘From the earliest days of recorded history,’ she said, ‘of all the many battles that have been fought for one thing or another, those that are remembered with the greatest honour were fought for liberty. And that is what we are fighting for now. You may say that we are free already, and certainly we are not subject to a foreign people, nor do we pay tribute to a conquering enemy. But we are subject to a thing more powerful than any nation, more humiliating than any conquest; and that is error. Though all our faculties were designed for life, we have allowed them to be perverted in the cause of death. Though the right to happiness is surely implicit in the creation of humankind, yet we have allowed that right to be neglected, and suffered our energy to be used in the pursuit of power and wealth, by which the happiness of the many is sacrificed to the doubtful satisfaction of a few. Though beauty and kindness, though justice and the arts flourish only in time of peace, yet our country went willingly into war against France and is devoting all its mind and vigour to the destruction of both these peoples. We are subject to error, and this war is an expression of that error. And so I say that now we women are fighting for freedom, because we are resolved to strike off the shackles of war, and throw down the prison-house of error.
‘Most of you, I know, regard our struggle merely as a war against the men. And in its immediate aspect, so it is. I would be justified in calling upon you to fight as women against the stupidity and the crimes of this generation of men. I would be justified in saying to you: Six and twenty years ago our mothers brought forth in this country a new womanhood, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that men and women are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that womanhood, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. And we here highly resolve that our mothers shall not have lived in vain, that the people shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of women, by women, and for women, shall be established upon earth.
‘I would be justified in calling upon you to fight for such a cause, but I am the more justified in naming to you a greater cause. It is not dominion for ourselves, nor the rule of women, that we seek. It is the dominion of love and the rule of sense. Go to these ramparts and look out upon the land of Britain. You realize her power, but feed your eyes upon her from day to day, till love of her shall fill your hearts. And then when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must first reflect that it was by courage, a sense of duty, and a feeling of honour in action that men were enabled to win all this. But you must also reflect that now greatness has its obligations. It may not stand still, but must always work to some new benevolence, and the world is waiting for the leadership that we can give. The world is in slavery to that same error to which we are subject, and by winning freedom for ourselves we shall teach freedom to others. This land of Britain has been given greatness by many generations of brave and gallant men, and now, by first fighting and defeating error, let women put that greatness to its proper use. We must have courage as they had courage, and the sense of duty and the feeling of honour that ennobled them. But our purpose shall be different. It shall not be wealth nor power, but the establishment of love, and the securing of peace upon earth, and the enthronement of good sense.
‘Now all this happiness shall be the fruit of freedom, of that freedom from error which is the only true liberty. But freedom is first the fruit of valour, and so you may decline none of the dangers of this war, but seek them out and fight with courage, and all your strength, and unfailing resolution. So long as there shall but a hundred of you remain alive, you must never give consent to subject yourselves again to the dominion of error. For it is not glory, it is not riches nor honours, but liberty that we fight and contend for, which no honest woman will lose but with her life!’
Neither Lysistrata nor her officers had any illusions about the difficulty of holding the Castle and the magnitude of their necessary effort. From dawn they had watched the slow concentration of the army below them, and though they had been warned that the odds against them would be two to one, it was now clear that they would be a lot heavier than that.
In the Gardens where the bulk of the army was gathered the grass was hidden by the mass of khaki, and because the soldiers had trodden down the flower-beds, its drab hue was almost unrelieved. From above it looked as if the ground had been newly ploughed, but among the upturned earth ten thousand points of brass glittered where the sun struck reflection from buttons and buckles and cap-badges.
At about nine o’clock a mission approached the Castle and formally demanded its surrender. It consisted of Mr PelhamBlair, a Staff Officer, and a sergeant who carried a white flag. They were not admitted. The drawbridge had been lowered, and the Main Gate was blocked and buttressed with baulks of timber. Mr Pelham-Blair had to shout his demand to the ramparts. Lysistrata’s reply was drowned in a general cry of ‘No surrender!’ Hundreds of women, yelling defiance, rose suddenly from behind the battlements with a flourish of white arms like a breaking wave. They stood for more than a minute, wildly hallooing. Three times Lysistrata answered without a chance of being heard. Then the cheering and shouting died away, and Lysistrata called loudly down: ‘Until you have stopped the war, we shall never surrender.’ Under a new storm of cheering, the mission retired.
Ten minutes later there was a general movement of the troops, and the attack began.
The outermost defence of the Castle was a dry ditch, deep and broad, but in the middle partly spanned by an abutment or mole, from which the drawbridge had given access to a long archway under the Guardhouse. The interval left by the lowering of the drawbridge was not great, and if it could be crossed the arch beyond would shelter a considerable body of men while they attacked the Main Gate. The assault was therefore initiated by a party of Engineers.
Carrying bridging material on to the mole, they first endeavoured to throw a duckboard across the gap, but were assailed from above with such a variety of missiles that they retreated almost immediately. An officer rallied them and again led them forward. From the parapets above and the roof of the Guardhouse they were pelted with hot ashes and kitchen-refuse, and cobble-stones which the women had dug from causeways in the Castle. Much of this bombardment was very wildly directed and did little damage, but the furious shouting and constant shrill crying with which it was accompanied were unnerving, and the Engineers were further disconcerted when two of their number were almost simultaneously stunned by flying cobbles. This success evoked from the women such a demoniacal chorus of delight that the Engineers again retreated.
At their third attempt, however, they managed temporarily to bridge the gap, and three volunteers, running swiftly across the duckboard, reached the safety of the archway beyond. A fourth, attempting to follow them, was not so lucky. He was blinded by a shower of potato peelings, and before he could recover a beef-bone struck him on the head, so that he lost his balance, and falling, clutched at the duckboard, which he dislodged. They fell together into the dry moat.
But the three on the other side were now under shelter, and by means of ropes which were thrown to them began to haul across heavy joists of timber. Meanwhile a flank attack was being made with ladders against the curtain of wall that connected the Guardhouse and the old Portcullis Gate; and in a number of places to the north and west men were attempting, either singly or in small parties, to climb the Rock. But they made little progress. Trundling cobble-stones from the ramparts above them, the women drove them down again, and within half an hour from the start of the engagement the attack had apparently failed. The moat was still unbridged, and the trio of volunteers was isolated under the archway. Three strong joists lay across the gap, but every attempt to plank them had been defeated. Lysistrata had had a score of braziers made out of buckets, and from these, burning on the ramparts above, the unhappy bridge-builders were thickly pelted with red coals. The defenders had also thrown a few bottles of aerated water, which on impact burst like bombs.
The stalemate that threatened was overcome by Scrymgeour himself. Arriving on the Esplanade, he personally directed operations, and by his instruction shields were fashioned out of doors and lengths of corrugated iron, under which the Engineers once more set to work. The bridge was finished, and despite a furious bombardment from above, a dozen men crossed it, armed with axes and sledge-hammers, and set to work on the heavy iron-bolted doors. The attack on the curtain wall was also renewed, and in the Gardens an officer was instigating and encouraging numerous fresh attempts to scale the Rock. None of the climbers progressed far, however, and Lady Oriole, watching from above, began to suspect they were not trying to. She decided that this half-hearted assault was meant only to engage part of the garrison while the main attack took place at the Gate; and she gave orders that ammunition was not to be wasted on it.
The Gate, reinforced by a couple of up-turned lorries and baulks of thick timber, resisted for some time both axe and sledge-hammer. Scrymgeour grew impatient. He ordered a battering-ram to be brought up, the twenty-foot butt-end of a ship’s mast, two feet or more in diameter, carried on rope-slings. He himself crossed the bridge scatheless, but the ram was nearly lost in the moat when a flaming brazier was dropped on its crew. One man was badly burnt, and several others, though apparently uninjured, were disconcerted when a few minutes later they found themselves on fire.
In the long archway the thud of the ram echoed softly like the rolling of distant thunder. Presently it was seen that the lower part of the Gate was weakening, for most of the buttressing timbers lay high against the upper half. The great iron hinges were loosened, and the two halves of the Gate met awry. Again and again the ram swung ponderously against the failing door, and then with a tearing protesting sound the one half of it fell gradually outward.
Within the door the stone causeway wound uphill to the Portcullis Gate. To the left the rock, a sheer precipice, rose to the upper part of the Castle; on the other side was the high curtain wall. In this confined space stood a dense horde of women, waiting for the invaders and prepared to resist them by force of numbers. A dozen or so were busy with the defences of the Gate. With blistered hands they held the quivering buttresses in position, and when the up-turned lorries that strengthened the doors were shaken by repeated blows, they thrust new timbers against them, and keenly watched for any weakness. Then they saw, on the one side, the leaning baulks of timber come slowly down, when that half of the Gate fell forward. One of the lorries, up-ended against it, collapsed with the Gate. There was a renewed assault with axe and heavy hammer, and through the confusion of splintered wood and buttresses asprawl, a couple of men came creeping.
From the dense array of the defenders rose a moan of anger, like the thirsty cry of a wolf-pack waiting. Of the women who had been watching the Gate, there was one within a yard of the invaders. She was a Yorkshire woman, red-armed, tow-haired, the mother of a thankless family. She grappled with the soldiers as they got up, both together, and falling with them knocked the wind from the one and thumped the head of the other soundly on the stony road. But following them came a little dark nimble man, who, before she knew what was happening, had stunned her with a blow of his felt club, and dodging among the timber-baulks he quickly accounted for three others, of whom the last was the gallant Miss McNulty. But her fate did not long go unavenged. McNab, her faithful friend, was standing near. She was unarmed, her hands were torn and bleeding. But like a wildcat she leapt at the little dark man, who, retreating from a storm of blows, stumbled and fell. McNab stooped and gripped him by his belt and loosened collar. She exerted her strength and lifted him from the ground. She began to turn, slowly and with short steps, in a close circle. The sweat ran down her face, her eyes were staring and shot with blood. But her pace quickened; her arms, it seemed, grew longer; and the dark man swung round in widening circles. Then with a gasp and a final lift she hurled him against a group of his advancing comrades and scattered them like ninepins. Still sobbing for breath, she took Mc-Nulty’s limp hand – two other women were carrying her – and a passage was made for them through the mass of waiting defenders.
By now some thirty men had come through the shattered gate, and every minute others were pouring in. The first arrivals cleared away the sprawling timbers and the broken lorries, and the others assembled in close order on the causeway. There was a space of about twenty yards between them and the horde of women, and the women stood irresolute. They had been told that their obligation was to defend the Castle, but they did not realize that defence may often be ensured only by swift attack. They had the advantage in numbers, and a vigorous advance might have enabled them to hold and repair the broken Gate; but they failed to see their opportunity and waited till the men had gathered their strength. Then, too late, a tall ungainly girl summoned and led a strong sortie.
Her name was Hepburn, a daughter of the old reiving Border house. A morose and solitary girl, she had been till a week before remarkable only for her gaunt and sturdy frame, and a surly manner that concealed virtues of which no one knew. She was not beautiful and no man had ever loved her. For this failure she had always blamed herself and her appearance; but the love-strike had given her a different view of it. From Lysistrata she had learnt that men were not the inerrable judges she had always been taught to think, but fallible and short-sighted beings who rarely knew what was good for them; and for this revelation of their stupidity she now very earnestly hated them all. . . . She had a capacity for affection, she desired children and was clever enough to bring them up sensibly; she was practical and could manage a house; she had taste and education and could, if anyone desired, talk of Auden and Roualt; she had a sweet temper and a sense of duty – but all these riches had gone unnoticed by men because her figure was gaunt and her face plain. Till a week ago she had thought them justified in this neglect, and bitterly resented her ungainly looks; but now she knew it was men’s stupidity, their bony lack of understanding and bemused ineptitude, that left her loveless and unfriended.... The blood of her reiving fathers grew hot in her veins, and her spirit rose in the flame that had lighted many a Border peel. She turned to the women about her, and they caught her fire. She whipped them to the assault, and laughed as she led them to the fight. The Hep-burns were riding again, with Bauld Buccleugh and Kinmont Willie, and four-score ranting troopers from Teviothead and Bemersyde.
