On top of the wall Trumpelman’s wife dropped her veil over her head. Like a hangman. Trumpelman raised his cane; then, as a signal, let it down.

“Feuer!” said Grundtripp, in his native tongue.

Both Gatling guns started to fire. The first one was aimed incorrectly, too low, so that the bullets merely struck the ground. But the shells from the other one, on the right-hand side of the gate, went into a group of carpet workers. Some women fell. The rest ran in all directions. But in spite of the shouts, the screaming, the bodies underfoot, the march was not over. The veterans had been under fire before. With their banners aloft, they continued to parade out of the fog.

On the wall, the leftward gunner raised his weapon higher, and a whole series of bullets came out of it, one of which struck poor Marbled right in the head. That was not all: Sheftelowitz was shot, fatally it developed, and so was Mister Kemp. A bullet struck Edmund Trilling in the knee, and while he was sitting a second shell pierced his neck, snapping it. Wherever you looked people were tumbling down. Blood came from the veterans’ wounds. What could they do? They retreated. They ran into the arms of the misty cloud. Then the automatic guns stopped shooting. Eighty or so of the hunger marchers lay behind on the ground.

One or two Jews dared to race forward again. One was Zam, who had a red cross sewn on his sleeve. He found Sheftelowitz propped up on an elbow. Lipsky also ran out, with his false nose dangling from his false eyeglass frames. He bent over the body of Marbled. The buttonhole maker was already cold. We demand politeness and consideration: those had been his wonderful words. The living lawyer, the leader of the underground forces, looked up past the still, stony figures on the distant wall, to the top-floor windows of the mansion. The window glass was filled with children, screaming through the holes of their mouths, pulling the strings of their hair.

III

That was the end of the March of the Jewish War Veterans; but it was not the finish, quite, of the Five Day General Strike. The reason there wasn’t a sixth day had little to do with the massacre of Tsarskoye Selo. What’s a few dozen Jews in a Ghetto of tens of thousands? Hundreds die anyhow every day. What stopped the strike was the weather. It got colder and colder all morning, all noon, and then, at dusk, within a matter of moments, the temperature dropped another thirteen degrees.

Suddenly there was a pinging sound in the air, like a huge string being plucked. It sounded as if the sky itself, blue, brittle, were cracking, as if the hot metal ball at the world’s center were changing to ice. It turned out that the sound was that of the river Dolna, freezing from bank to bank in two seconds flat. Here is a true story: The Blond Ones, the Masters, were at that moment fording the Dolna with a herd of twenty-two horses, each one of which became trapped in the grip of the ice. What an attraction! For the rest of the winter the Poles came out of the city to see the thrown-back heads, the glazed, glittering hooves, the manes which had crystallized. They were like the horses that had lived in Pompeii.