He moved a little the arm he’d thought broken, it wasn’t, only clotted with bruises, the dryness had left his throat, he lay still with a strange mist boiling, blinding his eyes, not Ewan Tavendale at all any more but lost and be-bloodied in a hundred broken and tortured bodies all over the world, in Scotland, in England, in the torture-dens of the Nazis in Germany, in the torment-pits of the Polish Ukraine, a livid, twisted thing in the prisons where they tortured the Nanking Communists, a Negro boy in an Alabama cell while they thrust the razors into his flesh, castrating with a lingering cruelty and care. He was one with them all, a long wail of sobbing mouths and wrung flesh, tortured and tormented by the world’s Masters while those Masters lied about Progress through Peace, Democracy, Justice, the Heritage of Culture—even as they’d lied in the days of Spartacus, lying now through their hacks in pulpit and press, in the slobberings of middle-class pacifists, the tawdry promisings of Labourites, Douglasites…. And a kind of stinging bliss came upon him, knowledge that he was that army itself—that army of pain and blood and torment that was yet but the raggedest van of the hordes of the Last of the Classes, the Ancient Lowly, trampling the ways behind it unstayable: up and up, a dark sea of faces, banners red in the blood from the prisons, torn entrails of tortured workers their banners, the enslavement and oppression of six thousand years a cry and a singing that echoed to the stars. No retreat, no safety, no escape for them, no reward, thrust up by the black, blind tide to take the first brunt of impact, first glory, first death, first life as it never yet had been lived—

Trease said Ay, well, we’ll do what we can—and a wee thing more. But I wouldn’t advise you to come to the court.

Chris asked why, and the big man with the twinkling eyes in the great pudding face got up from the sofa in the sitting-room and looked at her as though passing a mild comment on the weather: I’m feared your Ewan’ll have been bashed a bit—all in bandages, you know, and a bit broken up.

Chris stared: But he didn’t try to resist! All the rest of the picket saw his arrest.

Trease twinkled his little eyes a bit, a mild joke: Oh ay, but he’s a Communist, you see, or he’ll be by now, for his fancy League was no more than the dream of an earnest lad. Anyway, the bobbies think him a Red and they aye get Reds to ‘resist’ at the Station, they generally mash them in No. 3 cell. And this is your Ewan’s first go, you know, they try to kill off the Red spirit right off.

Chris said that was daft, they couldn’t do things like that in this country, anybody knew the police were fair and anybody accused got a fair trial. Trease nodded, faith ay, if you were of the middle class and wore good clothes and weren’t a Communist. Och, anything else—a sodomist, a pervert, a white slave trafficker, a raper of wee queans—any damn thing that you liked to think of. But if you were a revolutionary worker you got hell. Fair enough, for the Reds weren’t out to cure the system, they were out to down it and cut its throat.