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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE EXODUS FROM LONDON
So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the
greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning--the stream of
flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round
the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the
shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel
northward and eastward. By ten o'clock the police organisation, and
by midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency,
losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in
that swift liquefaction of the social body.
All the railway lines north of the Thames and the South-Eastern
people at Cannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday, and
trains were being filled. People were fighting savagely for
standing-room in the carriages even at two o'clock. By three, people
were being trampled and crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple
of hundred yards or more from Liverpool Street station; revolvers were
fired, people stabbed, and the policemen who had been sent to direct
the traffic, exhausted and infuriated, were breaking the heads of the
people they were called out to protect.
And as the day advanced and the engine drivers and stokers refused
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