The supposed gas attack on Upstairs happened at 2.17 on the Saturday morning. By 3.15 Mew had been stripped naked, had escaped torture and rape by the skin of her teeth, and had been tumbled down the laundry chute to join her ‘friends’. A ferocious discharge of CS gas from Baf’s miniaturised cylinder went after her.
This is the timetable of what happened:
2.20 Mew goes upstairs to change out of her heels and flounces and back into donkey jacket, jeans and boots. She is feeling distinctly unsafe and the atmosphere downstairs is not good.
2.30 Baf recognises Mew as person who refused lift.
2.35 Joan Lumb accuses Mew of being an enemy agent. She refused Baf’s lift because she had a rendezvous with the servants. She had posed as a journalist from The Times; then changed her story when she thought she might be rumbled. Had anyone there read the Woman’s Times? No? Obviously, it did not exist. She had spent time the wrong side of the Green Baize Door.
2.50 Muffin attests that Acorn had been in Mew’s room, and that Mew had been taking photographs, including one of Baf’s knife box.
2.55 Mew is stripped and body-searched – a task delegated to Sergei and Panza, and threatened with rape and torture if she does not reveal the whereabouts of the camera. She has been trying to tell them for some time. Only when Victor appears, tut-tutting, do Sergei and Panza seem able to hear.
3.00 Camera discovered and destroyed. Shirley, weeping, intercedes with Council for Mew’s life, and succeeds. ‘We are not barbarians. We leave that to the enemy.’ Which of them said that? Could have been any of them.
3.05 Mew is frogmarched to the top of the laundry chute and tumbled down.
‘What are you doing?’ asks Ivor, horrified. He has been dozing at his post and escaped war fever. He sees Baf open the knife box, take out the cylinder and, with the General’s approval and that of the entire Council, direct it down the laundry chute after Mew.
‘Keep back,’ says Baf to Ivor. ‘This stuff is really heavy.’ Ivor dives down the chute to save Mew if he can. Baf hesitates. But the General nods, and Baf discharges the cylinder and all retire back to the dining-room to consider their next move.
‘He is obviously one of them,’ says the General to Shirley, who is most upset. ‘Now you must toughen up, my dear. This is war.’
Bella really seems to be enjoying herself. How bright her eyes are, and she has her lipstick with her, so that her mouth becomes darker and more garish hour by hour, and her white skin is almost translucent in the candlelight.
Sometimes weapons work. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they go off with less power than expected; sometimes a great deal more. Baf’s cylinder of CS gas misfired. He was, after all, a salesman, not a technician. He succeeded only in aiming the device, not in actually firing it, but who was to know that? Mew and Ivor ended up a good deal safer in the servants’ quarters than either of them had been Upstairs, Mew tainted as she was by feminism, and Ivor by his membership of the servant classes.
The episode at Fort York in 1813 was one of those memorable ones, when there’s a far bigger bang than anyone expects.
Fort York today stands on what must be one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in Canada. It is an open, flat, grassed square, in the centre of Toronto. It has agreeable Georgian proportions, and is surrounded by a wooden palisade. Here tourists, visitors to the city, and school parties go to discover what the past was like and how their antecedents lived. They can taste turkey pie and flummery in the cook-house, served by wenches in low-cut dresses, look over the officers’ living quarters, admire the still ticking grandfather clocks, and have demonstrated to them just how this and that worked by lolloping, healthy, tall young Canadians dressed in the uniform of the York Queen Rangers or of the 16 US Infantry, it seems now to make little difference. The War of Independence is all long ago, and quite who was fighting whom, and why, is best forgotten by adult and child alike. For are we not all now at peace? This place, pleasant enough in sunlight, becomes quite grim and haunted when the sun goes behind a cloud. It is a phenomenon observable at the sites of other spectacular disasters: Juhu Beach, outside Bombay, where the first 707 crashed: the sports stadium at Brussels; the Firth of Tay, where the bridge collapsed – places don’t seem to recover; it is the human race which just goes blithely on.
Now what happened at Fort York was this. The American army, under the command of Brigadier Zebudon Montgomery Pike, invaded the Fort. They sailed across the harbour towards the fort clearing, in a formidable force. The British commander eventually ordered the retreat: the garrison was to be abandoned: the men were to blow up the arsenal. A fuse was set, lighted, the men withdrew, the expected explosion happened. The York magazine went up. But they had underestimated what was in there. The whole ground shook for miles around; a cloud rose, in a most majestic manner, assuming the shape of a vast balloon. It was the nearest thing to a nuclear explosion the world had seen before Big Boy in New Mexico in 1945. Timber, stones, debris, rained down from the sky upon British and American alike. Pike was killed, so were 368 of his men, and 222 were injured, many later to die. A party of forty British regulars was killed outright. Both sides sat down together and wept. This was not what they had meant at all. Officers fell in the same way as soldiers: it was not war, it was disaster. It was not planned, it was an accident. But all that’s another story.
It was now time for the Council of War to look at the situation in the light of the timeless verities of combat. Joan Lumb thought this showed cold feet, a retreat from action into theory; and shivered and sulked a little when they took no notice. The snow had begun again: it beat with such ferocity against the window panes the glass seemed to tremble and there was a kind of disagreeable, inexorable beat in the wind, a thud, thud, thud. Was it quickening, building to some kind of climax? She couldn’t bear it. She wanted to cry, but how could she? She, Joan Lumb.
These were the headings the General and his team worked to:
No. 1 Offensive action is essential to positive combat results.
Exactly! Pumping CS gas down the laundry chute had been exactly that. Now the strategy had to be followed through. The plan was to pierce the Green Baize Door, and lob Baf’s grenades down, thus destroying the enemy outright.
No. 2 Defensive strength is greater than offensive strength.
True: and Downstairs are certainly superior in numbers. But not in weapons! The servants still lived in the Age of Muscle: thanks to the Knife Box, Upstairs is in the Age of Technology. (Doubts as to the morality of Baf’s Knife Box had simply evaporated. It was as if they had never been.)
No. 3 Defensive posture is necessary when successful offence is impossible.
Should the offence fail for any reason, fall-back positions would be on the stairs. The Academy would be defended floor by floor, to the death, if necessary.
No. 4 Flank or rear attack is more likely to succeed than frontal attack.
Since the gas attack had been down the laundry chute, and that would be seen by the enemy as frontal, the next attack should be down the stairs. That was what the Council had in mind.
No. 5 Initiative permits application of preponderant combat power.
One gas attack had equalled another, but now the Council wrested the initiative out of the hands of the enemy.
No. 6 Defenders’ chance of success is directly proportional to fortification strength.
An unknown factor, this. The Council rather regretted having disposed of Mew. Further interrogation might have yielded necessary information. However, what was done was done.
No. 7 An attacker willing to pay the price can always penetrate the strongest defences.
Nothing is for nothing. There might well be a price to pay. That price might even be death. There was no doubt that the pumping of the CS gas, the flushing out of the vermin, would be construed by Downstairs as an escalation of the conflict, and retaliation must be expected, of the undisciplined, individual kind. The General hoped the Council were aware of this. They were. And prepared to pay the price! Baf revealed that the new form of CS gas used in the cylinders could cause death to women and children in some circumstances: that is to say, anyone below a certain body weight. More harmful, on the whole, to foreign nationals than Western Europeans, in whom, of course, it could cause wasting, paralysis, and other side effects…
No. 8 Successful defence requires depth and reserves.
Should the gas attack have for any reason failed, should the servants retaliate before offensive action could be accomplished, and come welling up the stairs like a host of cockroaches, Baf’s weapons would be waiting to challenge them, wipe them out. Baf was to set them up, in readiness.
‘Look here,’ said Baf, ‘that’s something of a risk. I’m a salesman, not a technician.’
The General said the risk was acceptable. Weaponry should not be kept idle in reserve position.
Napoleon’s two greatest defeats – at Leipzig and Waterloo – were the result of this failure to give proper credence to Verity No. 8. Baf was to get going. The bureau bookcase was moved aside. The grenade rocket on its silver matchbox was positioned outside the green baize door, to mow down possible attackers surging up the staircase. The tiny, tiny machine-gun was placed at the Council’s fall-back position on the first landing, for use in the unlikely event of the first defensive barrage failing. It looked just like a child’s toy, left idly on the stairs. Piers stirred in his sleep on the dining-room sofa. He had just such a toy at home.
‘Interesting to see if it works,’ said the General.
‘Quite,’ said Baf.
No. 9 Superior strength always wins.
It was possible, the General said, that agitators and subversives had provided the servants with weaponry, but he had not had that impression from Mew. The Council would win! Defeat was unthinkable.
No. 10 Surprise substantially enhances combat power.
‘Let’s not hang about,’ said Victor. ‘Let’s just go in and get ’em! I have a meeting on Monday morning. When Gloabal send the helicopter, I don’t want any unnecessary delays.’
But the General continued, relentlessly, with his checklist.
No. 11 Firepower kills, disrupts, suppresses and causes dispersion.
The advantage of a grenade attack through the door would be that the dispersion of the enemy forces would then be no problem. They’d all be dead. So powerful were the grenades, Baf claimed, although only the size of a cherry each – the Knife Box carried six in all – that what explosive power did not destroy, shock would. Burial would be an eventual problem, and the prevention of disease, and so forth, but these problems could be deferred until later Council meetings.
No. 12 Combat activities are often slower, less productive and less efficient than anticipated.
The overkill factor of the grenades was great enough for Upstairs not to worry too much about lack of efficiency. These were, in fact, ideal field conditions in which to test the weapons.
No. 13 Combat is too complex to be described in a single, simple aphorism.
‘I think we’ve got it licked this time,’ said the General. ‘I think for once the single, simple aphorism will be ours. “We wiped ’em out!’”
The thirteen verities having been checked and discussed, there was no way of avoiding action.
While Panza, Sergei, Victor and Murray removed the bureau bookcase from its protective position in front of the Green Baize Door, Baf took out his knife box and prepared the grenade attachment. The six grenades were to follow one another down the launcher, a thin, sleek, shiny tube. Baf set the notch for maximum effectiveness. Set lower down the scale – according to the PR handout – the weapon could be used merely to deafen and stun, and so was invaluable for the control of certain crowds. But this was war! Should the enemy come rushing up the stairs, should any survive the onslaught of Baf’s grenades, they would encounter the machine-gun or bullet sprayer, which, when armed and directed, issued a spray of tiny pressurised bullets which grew larger and larger as they flew through the liberty and lightness of air. These would penetrate and explode, so great was the force behind them, when they struck solid matter or flesh and blood. If any survived this, they would then have to face the righteous anger of their attackers, which all believed would be invincible.
Baf chipped away at the green baize door with an ordinary penknife. It took him a full half hour to make a hole big enough for the insertion of his firing tube.
The General looked at the six cherry-sized metal balls and wished to God he had a proper, solid, old-fashioned machine-gun: a tilt of Baf’s hand and he was as likely to get his own forces as the enemy’s but it couldn’t be helped. The proper way to use the grenade launcher was to embed it in the wall – unnoticeable to the casual eye – and activate it electronically from a distance, but needs must, and there was an emergency manual activator, and this Baf must use. Still, he would be interested to see what happened. If the weapons were as effective as Baf suggested, he might well make representations to the Ministry of Defence, on their behalf.
‘Ready,’ said Baf. He looked around the faces which crowded around him. Their future, their safety, was in his hands. He was frightened: an emotion he had never felt in his life before – too young for the responsibility of life and death. Supposing it went wrong? ‘Go in there and get ’em!’ said Joan Lumb.
‘Blast them to hell!’ said Victor, her true brother in the end. Breeding will out.
‘Baf, darling, do what you must,’ cried Muffin. ‘I’m with you all the way.’
‘Get ’em quick,’ said Murray, roused from his nauseous stupor, ‘before they get us!’
And there were other, more pompous, remarks from Sergei and Panza: ‘Their foul and aggressive deeds must not go unpunished. This riff-raff must be taught a lesson—’
‘But supposing there are children?’ ventured Shirley. Victor was finally irritated with his wife. She was hopelessly domestic.
‘If there are children,’ said Joan Lumb briskly, ‘they are not there legally, and the sooner they aren’t there the better.’
And Bella spoke at last, ‘Children? So what? They would only grow up to be criminals and murderers, like their parents. Fire, Baf! What’s the matter? Chicken?’
So Baf overcame his hesitation – pure superstition – and let the cherries fall into the dark on the other side of the green baize, and pushed the button in what he thought was the correct way – one, two, three, four, five, six times – and on the sixth press that was the end of everything, so suddenly no one had time to say or think anything at all. Baf was, after all – and he was the first to admit it – a salesman and not a technician. The armed, but not fired, CS gas cylinder was activated by the grenade blast and sparked an explosion in the napalm thrower and the tiny howitzer and the strategic nuclear cannon and in the space of seconds that was that. Baf had neglected to close the knife box, as when a child he had once neglected to put the lid back on the carton of fireworks on November 5th. Trouble was bound to ensue.