Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 111, No. 4, June 12, 1937

Two Against London by John Kobler

Merchants of death were they, with only their lives to sell!

When the late “Two Gun” Francis Crowley kept an attacking force of three hundred policemen at bay for three hours, spraying them from the top story of a New York apartment house with fast-spitting, hot lead, overseas commentators sneered, threw up their hands in disgust. English observers of the American scene particularly pointed to the boy desperado’s last stand as the sort of exhibition that could happen only in the United States. “Typical!” they cried.

And England’s sporting gentry, the huntin’ — shootin’ — fishin’ contingent, exclaimed in righteous horror: “Three hundred policemen to catch an eighteen-year-old boy and his sweetheart! Preposterous!”

In this, the English were inexcusably short of memory, for not so very long before the Crowley capture — twenty-seven years to be precise — there occurred in London a protracted gun-battle between two Russian thugs and Scotland Yard, the climax of a remarkable series of crimes, which made the Crowley shooting and, indeed, every other similar combat before or since, look like children playing cops and robbers.

On that historic occasion, six hundred constables, reinforced by the Scots Guard and the Royal Horse Artillery, pitted themselves against two killers trapped in an East End building. At one point, Mr. Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, personally directed the siege.

The affair has entered the annals of English crime as the Siege of Sidney Street.

At 11:30 on the night of Friday, December 16, 1910 — in a damp, fog-ridden night — a Houndsditch merchant sat up abruptly in bed. From Exchange Buildings, backing on his house, he heard rasping sounds.

The merchant hastily slipped into some clothes, dashed out into the murky street and hailed the constable patrolling the beat. “There’s burglars in Mr. Harris’s shop!” he exclaimed. He pointed at the gold and silversmith establishment across the way.

Together they approached it. The door was bolted, the shades drawn. They listened, holding their breaths. From deep within the darkened shop came the rasping of a file on steel.

The constable hurried to a telephone-box, put in an alarm call. Presently a riot squad composed of Sergeants Bentley, Bryant and Tucker, Constables Choate and Woodhams, drew up across the street from No. 11 Exchange Buildings, which was directly behind the goldsmith’s shop.

It was Sergeant Bentley who strode up to the bolted door, while his colleagues kept anxious eyes on the three converging streets.

Bentley knocked. Steps padded behind the door. The bolt was drawn back. The door swung open. In the jet blackness Bentley was aware of a woman’s presence, but it was impossible to distinguish her features. He called out gruffly: “Seems to be burglars about. Let us in!”

The woman jabbered something in a foreign tongue. She retreated into the black depths of the shop. Bentley saw her white-clad form grow dimmer, fuse with the darkness. He stepped over the threshold. He could hear nothing, see nothing. Across the street the others were watching him sharply.

Bentley hesitated a moment, then decided to go in. He fumbled in his breast-pocket for a match. At that instant, two spurts of flame slashed through the darkness. Bentley staggered back, crumpled on the threshold, two reddening holes gaping in his tunic.

For a split second his colleagues were paralyzed with shock and surprise. Then, as one man, they pressed forward, despite the fact that not one of them was armed. Before they were halfway across the street a hand gripping an automatic glowed whitely in the doorway. The finger of the hand tightened. Bullets raked the street from right to left. Almost simultaneously, the four officers were struck. The death-dealing hand came into full view now. A man dashed out of the shop. Two more men and a woman, the men pumping lead as they went, followed hard on his heels. Straight for the wounded, but still advancing officers, they went, scarlet flame and lead spitting from their guns with every step.

Sergeant Bentley lay dying in the doorway. Sergeant Bryant, hands outstretched, pitched forward into the gutter as a bullet smashed through his jaw. The three men and the woman pressed forward. Futilely, Sergeant Tucker tried to block their path. Three barking guns brought him to the street, dead before he struck the ground. A bullet from the same volley caught Constable Woodhams in the thigh.

Only Constable Choate remained standing. He dove fiercely for one of the men’s legs. Three bullets tore through his stomach. Five more splintered the bones of his legs.

Now no one remained to bar the killers’ murderous progress. The merchant had fled. Into the honeycomb of narrow streets and alleys the four plunged. But an accidental shot hit one of their own number. The man fell; the others carried him. The darkness, the fog swallowed them. And in the fog-moistened gutter lay five bleeding bodies, five unarmed officers, three dead or dying, two desperately wounded...

Never before in the history of Scotland Yard had so savage, so merciless a massacre taken a toll of police officers. An outraged populace howled for the heads of the gun-toting fugitives. What particularly embittered Londoners was the fact that the English police had always maintained a code of fair play. Constables were not then, nor are they now, allowed to carry arms and it is for this reason that armed burglary is so rare in Great Britain.

But for once, that spirit of extreme fair play — of gentleness even — had cost three gallant men their lives. Here was a personal challenge and there was not a member of the force who would rest before the slaughter of his colleagues had been avenged.

The small, tawdry section of London known as the East End comes within the jurisdiction of the City Police, not the Yard, but Chief Constable Frederick Wensley was called in to assist the City detectives. Head of the investigation was Detective John Stark; under him, Detective Superintendent Ottaway and Chief Inspector Willis. These four men plunged into the task of tracking the Houndsditch killers.

Their early efforts immediately uncovered a brilliantly conceived scheme to loot Mr. Harris’s shop, a scheme frustrated only by the deaths of the three officers. It was Inspector Wensley who discovered, by questioning real estate agents and shopkeepers near Exchange Buildings, that in December a foreigner calling himself Levi rented the shop known as No. 11 Exchange Buildings. This was the shop whence the killers had emerged.

A few days later, another foreigner, a man giving the name of Gardstein, rented the nearby shop, No. 9. Between was No. 10, a shop directly behind 118 A Houndsditch, which was the goldsmith’s establishment. But No. 10 was not immediately available. Only two days before the crime was it empty. This row of shops was separated by the Houndsditch buildings by a narrow alley bounded by a high wall.

Detectives searched No. 9 and made a number of curious finds. There was, for example, a huge cylinder of oxygen. This, neighbors reported, had been lugged up to the shop in a peddler’s cart on the afternoon preceeding the crime. In addition, a large number of hastily abandoned safebreaking tools were found in No. 9. Between No. 9 and No. 10 a hole had been cut through the separating wall, giving the cracksmen easy access to the rear of Mr. Harris’s place.

Two bottles bearing the stubs of tallow candles indicated that the cracksmen had operated by candlelight. The bottles were smeared with fingerprints, but the Yard’s fingerprint bureau was unable to make any identification.

While these clues were being sifted, a strange development broke in an entirely unexpected quarter.

The time was 3:30 Saturday morning. Dr. Scanlon, a young general practitioner of Commercial Road, was awakened by the sounds of frantic rapping on his front door. He trotted downstairs and opened to two young women, obviously foreign, obviously in a state of extreme agitation.

The older of the women gasped in broken English: “You must come. There is a man dying at Grove Street.”

Young Dr. Scanlon wasn’t sure whether he was dreaming or whether he had not simply stepped into the pages of an old-fashioned melodrama. However, he dressed quickly, snatched up his bag and followed the two women through the dim streets.

As they approached Grove Street, Dr. Scanlon was further baffled by the behavior of the younger woman. Abruptly she turned back and disappeared. The other woman expressed no surprise and Dr. Scanlon kept his bafflement to himself.

The address was No. 59 Grove Street. The ground floor was in complete blackness. A light glimmered in the topmost room. The woman, now panting heavily, led the way up a narrow, broken-down staircase. The doctor could barely see a foot ahead of him and twice stumbled. But at last they reached the top floor. The woman pointed to a room facing the landing and Dr. Scanlon went in.

A man lay on the bed. Between his tight-clinched teeth, gasps of agony escaped. Sweat beaded his stubbled, sallow face. Dr. Scanlon approached the bedside, deposited his bag and asked gently: “What’s the matter?”

The man groaned again, answered: “I was shot in the back by a friend. It was an accident. You must do something, doctor, the pain is unbearable.”

Dr. Scanlon was beyond mere surprise. There was no longer any doubt of it. He had walked straight into blood-and-thunder melodrama! The man was fully dressed even to his shoes.

The young doctor probed for the bullet. It had entered the man’s left side and inflicted dangerous injury. Both the stomach and lungs had been pierced and the man was vomiting blood. He dressed the wound as best he could, but saw that hospital equipment was required to extract the bullet.

“What is your name?” he asked the agonizing man.

“My name? Gardstein — George Gardstein.”

The woman made a sudden gesture with her extended hand as though she would stop Gardstein’s mouth, but in his pain he was beyond reasoning and caution.

“This man,” Dr. Scanlon told the woman, “is dangerously ill. He must be taken to the hospital.”

The woman’s eyes blazed. “No, never. Never will he go to the hospital.”

And the man, raising himself painfully on one elbow, echoed the woman’s words. “No, she is right. I will not — I cannot go to a hospital.”

Dr. Scanlon saw it was useless to argue with them. He remained with the wounded man an hour. Then he left, promising to return in the morning. The woman accompanied him so that he might give her some drugs to see Gardstein through the night.

It was unfortunate that Inspector Wensley’s discovery as to the identity of the lessee of No. 10 Exchange Buildings had not yet been made. Dr. Scanlon had never heard the name Gardstein before and it did not occur to him to report the matter to the police.

He returned to Grove Street the following morning, Sunday, at eleven. An even more startling set of events confronted him. For a long time, no one answered the door. When finally it did open, two scowling, unshaven men glowered at him.

“How is the man upstairs?” Dr. Scanlon asked.

The two men exchanged puzzled glances. “Man? What man? We know of no one.”

“Why, George Gardstein.”

Dr. Scanlon thought he detected a fleeting shadow of alarm in their faces, but they only shrugged. Impatiently he brushed them aside and dashed up the stairs. He tore open the door of Gardstein’s room, half expecting to find the man gone. But he was gone only in the spiritual sense. His body was still on the bed, cold, stiff. He had died sometime during the night.

When Dr. Scanlon descended to the lower floor, his mind racing with the mysterious events of the past twelve hours, the house was deserted. It was as empty and silent as a tomb. Alone was Dr. Scanlon with the stiffening corpse of George Gardstein.

This time, he wasted no instant reporting the strange death to the coroner. The coroner in turn reported to the police and it was then, and then only, that Detective John Stark and his assistants received the vital news of Gardstein’s hide-out. Had that news reached them six hours earlier, the ghastly blood-letting yet to come would have been avoided.

As it was, Inspector Wensley, accompanied by a squad of plain-clothes men, rushed to 59 Grove Street. They were admitted by an obese Russian woman, who either could not or would not understand a word they said. Wensley found that she had been destroying some papers in a back room and she was promptly arrested. She gave her name as Mrs. Rosa Trassjohnski.

Upstairs, in the squalid, stained bedroom, where Gardstein’s body still lay, there was evidence of a wild search having been made. Hidden in various parts of the room were daggers, rounds of ammunition. Under the dead man’s pillow was a black automatic. Wensley reasoned that it had been left by Gardstein’s colleagues to give him a chance to make a fight for it when the police came.

Wensley stepped into an adjoining bedroom and there saw a second woman, the young woman described by Dr. Scanlon, standing near the blazing fireplace, a sheaf of photographs in her hand. Wensley sprang forward, gripped her wrist, but too late to prevent her dropping the photographs into the flames. They were consumed in an instant. Like fat Rosa Trassjohnski, the girl feigned to be unable to understand Wensley’s questions. Nevertheless, the famous sleuth felt that he was measurably nearer the identity of the men who had butchered his colleagues. That Gardstein was one of them he had no doubt.

The Inspector was not far wrong. Arrested and taken back to the Yard, the two women were persuaded by gentle, but effective methods of third degree to talk in their native Russian to an interpreter.

From their statements the first important leads on what was ultimately found to be a giant ring of anarchist-gangsters developed. After days of questioning, searching, employing police “informers,” publishing Gardstein’s photograph and offering rewards, the police were able to piece together a story surpassing in fantasy the wildest concoctions of Mr. E. Phillips Oppenheim.

The dead man had been known variously as Gardstein, Morin, Morountzeff and a great number of other aliases. Russian police informed the Yard that a year previously this man had fled from Moscow, a fugitive from the law. He made straight for London.

There was at this time in the British capital a secret society calling itself the Anarchist Club. It was composed of a desperate, sinister brood of foreigners, misfits in their own country, homeless wanderers, ready for any deed of violence. Gardstein joined this society and by force of his dominating personality became the ringleader of ten particularly bloody-minded ruffians.

The Yard’s toughest task was determining the identities of these ten men. Ordinary detective work was unavailing here. Mere questioning among the Russian element in the East End met only with a wall of silence, of thinly veiled hostility. Subtler methods were required. Stool pigeons became invaluable allies.

Eventually another name came to the Yard’s attention, Fritz Svaars, another Russian criminal who, like Gardstein, had left Russia a step ahead of the police. From a description given by Dr. Scanlon of the two men he saw at 59 Grove Street the morning following Gardstein’s death, it was clear that one of these was Svaars, the other an odd character, an artist, Peter Piatkoff, known as “Peter the Painter.” Then there was Fritz’s girl, Luba Milstein. She was the one whom Wensley had caught destroying photographs. Were these the three who with Gardstein had escaped from the goldsmith’s shop, scattering lead death as they went?

Other names entered the investigation. It appeared that a meeting had been held in Fritz’s rooms at 59 Grove Street on the very afternoon of the crime. Those who were seen to enter the house were Gardstein, Svaars, Peter the Painter, and Russians named Joseph, Zourka Duboff. John Rosen, Jacob Peters, Ossip Federoff, the brothers Max and Karl Hoffman, the two women, Rosa Trassjohnski and Luba Milstein. The meeting of these men so close to the hour of the crime was too strong a juxtaposition to pass as mere coincidence. Wensley was hot on the trail.

It was at this point that he discovered the probable cause of Gardstein’s death. The Russian terrorist had been something of a chemist, experimenting with oxygen and blow-pipes. But he had little experience with the mechanical side of safe-breaking. And so he persuaded the gang to hire a thug called Max. Max may have known everything about safe-breaking, but he was a beginner when it came to handling firearms. He was working at the safe, as Wensley learned, when the alarm sounded. A gun was lying on the table. He picked it up and ran out after the others, firing wildly. By mistake he struck Gardstein in the back.

Miraculously the three men and the woman managed literally to carry their colleague to Svaar’s place on Grove Street one mile away without arousing attention. For that feat, Wensley grudgingly extended his admiration. It would have been safer and simpler to let Gardstein die in the street.

The police now had a fairly accurate picture of the ten men who composed the shock-troops of the Anarchist Club, their descriptions, their characters. But laying them by the heels was another matter.

The first break, a minor one, came on December 22nd, exactly eight days after the Houndsditch massacre. A constable patrolling Galloway Road in the suburb of Shepherd’s Bush spied a man answering to the description of Zourka Duboff. He nabbed him, dragged him to the nearest police station and detained him for further questioning.

That same evening, Inspector Wensley received word that another of the terrible ten, Jacob Peters, had been seen to leave a lodging on Turner Street. Presumably the man lived there. Accompanied by Detective Inspector Collinson, Wensley went to the house, waited. At 8:30, Peters walked unsuspectingly into the arms of the law. Wensley smiled, counted off two men on his proscription list.

Grilling Peters resulted in the revelation of a second address, a tenement in Romford Street. This was supposed to be the home of the man known as Federoff.

Wensley burst in upon him towards midnight. The Russian turned pale, admitted under examination that he had visited Svaars and Peter the Painter from time to time in Grove Street. “You realize,” Wensley warned him, “that these men are suspected of the murder of three police officers.”

“I can’t help that,” the Russian replied in halting English. “I had nothing whatever to do with it.”

Duboff, Peters, Federoff and the two were then charged with complicity in the triple murder. The hunt for the others went on. Here the detectives were not so fortunate. At least three of the ten had succeeded in escaping to France. Many years later, one of them was to hold a prominent place in the Russian Government. Rosen and Hoffman were still laying low. No trace of them could be found.

The interlocking statements of the apprehended anarchists now led the detectives to Gold Street, near Stepney, where a Russian using the name of Morin had maintained lodgings. Morin was one of the many aliases employed by the dead Gardstein. A raid upon his room disclosed some amazing findings.

There was a vast armory of weapons and ammunition, enough to arm a small army. It was ammunition of a type found in Gardstein’s death chamber at Grove Street. The very bullets were of the same caliber and manufacture as those extracted from the slaughtered policeman. Inspector Wensley’s hands were twitching to clap handcuffs on the last of the ten. Among them were the three who had pumped blazing death into London’s “finest.” But which ones? Gardstein undoubtedly. He was beyond jurisdiction? Who were the other two? There was not yet a definite answer to that question.

The hunt dragged on into February. Rosen, alias Zelin, tumbled into the police dragnet. His hide-out in Hackney had been spotted. He surrendered meekly. Fast upon this triumph came news of another house in Canon Street. It was thought to be the house of Karl Hoffman, the man with whom at least two of the assassins had taken refuge after the massacre. At two o’clock in the morning, a cordon was thrown around the house. Hoffman was upstairs in bed. A policeman went up, roused him, arrested him.

One of the most intiguing suspects arrested at this time was a tall, beautiful, sloe-eyed Russian Jewess whose name had been linked romantically in the Whitechapel underworld with that of Gardstein. Cool, self-possessed Nina Vassileva had been Gardstein’s sweetheart. She disappeared from her old haunts after the murders, dyed her hair black. Once she decided to escape to Paris. She got no further than the corner. She felt she was being watched, which she was, and returned to the house of the Jewish folk on Burros Street where she had been hiding.

Inspector Wensley found her, hiding, half-dressed, her black hair in striking disarray, in a back room. She was reading her own fortune by cards. “I’m a Russian and I make cigarettes for a living,” she stated haughtily in answer to Wensley’s questions.

“Do you deny that you are a member of a certain club on Jubilee Street?” Wensley asked.

“I was. Yes.”

“Good. Then perhaps you know that some of the men who committed the Houndsditch murders were members of that club. Do you know who they were?”

“Perhaps I do and perhaps I don’t!”

That was all that could be got from Nina Vassileva, but a clue, almost forgot since the early days of the investigation, cropped up to destroy her innocense. The fingerprints on the candle-holders found at No. 9 Exchange Buildings matched the girl’s! At last one of the fatal foursome who had escaped from that building!

The beautiful Jewess was eventually tried and sentenced to two years’ hard labor. But the verdict was quashed on appeal. After all, there was no proof that she had fired a single shot. Her only sin had been consorting with the killers who had. She was freed.

As for the others, Rosa Trassjohnski, Luba Milstein, and the five men, nothing could be proved against them beyond the fact that they had known and associated with the killers. And only Rosa would identify them. For the first time the names of Gardstein’s two murderous mates were definitely linked with the murders. They were Fritz Svaars and the man known only as Joseph! Shortly after making this important revelation, the Trassjohnski woman went mad, had to be put under restraint.

The six others were released. Max, Joe Levi, the man who had rented No. 9, and Peter the Painter dropped out of the picture altogether. There remained only the two human savages, Svaars and Joseph. By a process of elimination these appeared to be the two wanted men.

Had they, too, fled? Were they still alive? Who was protecting them and how long could they escape the avenging arms of the police?

The answer came abruptly, startlingly. It was the first act in the incredible Siege of Sidney Street.

The chiefs of the City Police and New Scotland Yard were summoned suddenly to a conference at the Old Jewry Police Station. When they were all assembled, Detective Stark rose, uttered the news they had all been waiting for.

“The two murderers, Svaars and Joseph, were seen to enter No. 100 Sidney Street last night!” A hum of excited voices interrupted him. He lifted his hands for silence. “Wait! It is also known that they are armed with Mauser pistols and an unlimited supply of ammunition. You all know the fate of three of our colleagues. I don’t want another man to lose his life at the hands of those assassins. They’re desperate, savage men. They have nothing to lose by killing again. They must be caught without loss of life!”

A map was spread on the table and methods were discussed as to how best to attain that goal. No. 100 Sidney Street was a chunky, perfectly square block of tenement dwellings. It stood in the center of a square, isolated, easily surrounded. From this point of view it was highly vulnerable to attack. But there were innocent men and women in that tenement. In the event of a gun battle, their lives would be in danger.

The first problem, then, was to get those men and women out without alarming the killers. It was Superintendent Ottaway who suggested that the entire block be surrounded by policemen, the dwellers to be quietly warned of the danger after dark.

Accordingly a large body of men, more than one hundred, fully armed this time, prepared themselves. At two in the morning, when Svaars and Joseph might be expected to be sleeping, they marched quietly to Sidney Street, dispersed themselves about the block. It was part of the original plan to get the dwellers out, then capture the two desperadoes in their bedroom before they could reach for their Mausers.

The occupants of the ground floor at No. 100 were an elderly married couple. A plainsclothesman awakened them quietly, explained the danger and persuaded them to dress immediately. Unfortunately there was a more difficult problem ahead. The woman explained that on the first floor there was a two-room apartment, shared between the two killers and a young woman. That made it awkward. If fighting broke out she might be killed, certainly she would be wounded.

Faced with this predicament, Inspector Wensley propounded a ruse. He suggested that the woman on the ground floor go upstairs, call to the girl and ask her to come down to help her with her husband, who was to feign illness. The woman swallowed hard, marshalled her nerve and went upstairs. The little ruse worked. It began to look as though everything would work out.

All the occupants of that section of the tenement were at last routed, all except one couple, a very old gentleman of ninety and his wife. When they were suddenly awakened, they made an outcry. At that very moment, by another incredible mischance, a policeman tooted his whistle. All hope of trapping the killers in their sleep was gone. Wensley cursed bitterly. Now, there’d be the devil to pay! But how steep that payment would be even the Inspector never dreamed.

One hardy policeman offered to take the stairs by storm and break in on the killers. It was pointed out to him that such a course was plain suicide. The stairs were steep and narrow. At the least sound, the landing would be manned by a pair of Conscienceless killers with rapid-firing Mausers.

The leading police officers put their heads together in a brief parley. It was decided to bring the two men to the window by flinging pebbles against it, warn them that the house was surrounded and ask them to surrender without spilling any fresh blood.

The tenement had been evacuated now. The old couple were got down the stairs by a neighbor. The killers were in there alone, pacing their room like tigers, their claws unsheathed, ready to strike.

Inspectors Wensley and Hallam and Sergeant Leeson advanced into the roadway and tossed a number of stones at the first floor window. A reply, decisive, violent, followed immediately. The window was flung wide. Out of the darkness of the room a Mauser belched flame. Another joined it in devilish duet. A cannonade of shots volleyed from that window. Leeson, furthest in front, reeled backwards, collapsed into Wensley’s arms.

“Mr. Wensley,” he gasped, “I’m dying! They’ve shot me through the heart.”

He fainted. But there was still life in him and for the moment all else was abandoned in the effort to get Leeson to a hospital. The entire street was now under the range of the Mausers. They were silent, but no one knew when they would bark again.

As it was they dared not carry the wounded man down the street. A crude stretcher was fashioned from officers’ coats and Leeson was carried up a ladder and over a roof to safety. Although badly wounded, he was deposited at the hospital in time to save his life.

Just as the stretcher-bearers reached the center of the roof, a second fusillade of shots broke out. It was so fierce, so heavy that Wensley, who had helped Leeson up to the roof, was forced to remain there for the next half hour, sheltering himself from the rain of lead as best he could. Only when answering shots from the other side of the tenement drew the killers’ attention away was Wensley able to descend. He took his last close-range look at the pair, Svaars and Joseph, snarling, teeth bared in the savage grimace of trapped hounds, they stood shoulder to shoulder at the window, firing away as fast as they could reload.

A fresh detachment of police had been sent for. The thousands now drawn to the scene of battle required attention as well as the killers. Panic seemed to have descended on all London. The wildest rumors filled the air. Word had got about that London had been attacked by an enemy country, that the militia had been called out, that thousands were engaged in pitched battle.

The crowd became so violent that more and more policemen had to be summoned. They stood four and six deep.

The vicious firing from the tenement now doubled in swiftness and volume. As soon as one of the attackers came within hailing distance of the house, one of the Mausers were leveled at him, spat its deadly message. A young constable took the chance. He stepped boldly out, gun in hand. The gaping crowd saw the curtain of one of the windows stir, a blinding explosion. The constable’s fingers clapped his forehead. Blood poured through them, over his eyes. He fell face forwards on the pavement.

Another was shot down in the same way. Then another. In all four policemen felt the cold bite of lead in their flesh before that infernal night was done.

The officers in charge realized at last that it was hopeless to try to rush the house without incurring serious loss of life. The killers were not only crack marksmen, but equipped with the most up-to-date guns as well, while the attackers were armed with out-moded makes of pistols such as had not been used since an emergency twenty years before.

It was decided to apply to the Tower of London for a detachment of Scots Guards armed with service rifles. This was an unprecedented, a wholly amazing thing for members of the City Police to do. But it was done and towards ten in the morning, three hours after the siege had begun, the Guards marched through a madly cheering crowd. It was at this point that the Home Secretary himself, Mr. Winston Churchill, appeared, clad in a black derby and carrying an umbrella. He stood on the side lines, directing the ensuing operations.

The guns of the killers had been silent for some time now. The newly arrived Guards took advantage of the breathing spell to place themselves at strategic points about the square. Some climbed to the roofs of surrounding buildings; others crouched in alleys. Scores of rifles were trained on the shattered windows behind which Svaars and Joseph were reloading once more.

Again the firing broke out and this time never let up until the bitter end. The Scots Guards were reinforced by still another detachment, this time the Royal Horse Artillery. Close to a thousand men were devoting all their powers to destroying the two possessed demons within the tenement. The deafening noise was like a weird symphony of war by a mad, modernist composer. The sharp, hard crack of the Mausers furnished the leitmotif, almost drowned by the contra-puntal theme of the chattering automatics, the loud, echoing bang of the old-fashioned pistols. And with this, the ceaseless smashing of glass, the brittle crack-crack as bullets struck against the stone ledges of the tenement.

Farther and farther the crowds were shoved back, but not soon enough to save four of them. The ever widening arc of the bullets’ struck three men, an old woman...

The killers fought a deadly battle. Only the mouths of their guns showed in the windows, their hands jerking on the triggers.

For five hours that grim, merciless duel raged. At 12:30 a woman in the crowd suddenly screamed: “The house is on fire!”

The men held their fire an instant. The woman was right. At first it was no more than a plume of smoke curling along the bullet-scarred sill. Then a tongue of flame showed itself, dancing wickedly along the sides of the window. Presently a thick column of flame and smoke billowed upwards. The entire first floor appeared to have burst into flame. But the killers continued to blaze away at the police.

The clang of fire bells sounded above the din. Firemen leaped from their engines, dragging at thick hoses. But the hail of lead kept them from approaching the burning house. They were forced to stand by while the flames leaped ever higher and higher.

A particularly fierce blast of flame swept through the first story window. It was followed by six shots fired in quick succession. They were the last shots to be fired from that doomed house. For a moment, no one could believe it. The firing had lasted so long, had kept up so steadily that the attackers’ ears were unaccustomed to the sudden pall of silence. Only the crackling of burning wood could be heard.

So they had decided to make a break for it, after all! There was only one way and that was through the front door and on that door a score of service revolvers, a score of rifles were trained. They waited with tense expectancy. The killers made no move. Had a bullet found its mark at last?

The house was now a raging inferno. From cellar to attic, thick, twisting pillars of smoke and flame soared skyward. And then for the first time in seven hours a policeman ventured straight across the street to the door of No. 100. He kicked it open, staggering back as a bank of flame leaped at him. The crowds waited, holding their breaths. But there was no shot, no sound.

Before the police could determine what had happened to the two killers, the fire had to be quenched. The firemen attacked it with hose and ax. In the ensuing confusion, a wall, cracked by the fierce heat, toppled over, burying two firemen under its scalding stones. One died, the other was seriously burned. Thus the two killers had taken a toll of four lives, caused severe injury to dozens.

But at last, the besieged house could be entered. Inspector Wensley was the first to dash up the charred stairs. Turning into the bedroom on the landing, his eyes fell on what was left of Fritz Svaars and the man called Joseph. Both had been burned beyond recognition. Their blackened bodies lay under a mass of gutted debris. Svaars, untouched by bullets, had been suffocated. Joseph’s skull had been torn open by lead. Beneath the bodies lay the twisted, melted remains of the two Mausers.

The Siege of Sidney Street was over.

There was a curious sequel. Three years later, the Yard received information that in 1908 three desperados entered a saloon near Boston, Massachusetts, held up every man present at the point of guns, and looted the cash register. One man tried to escape and was shot dead before he could reach the door in his effort to escape.

The three bandits then fled to a nearby cemetery. One of them, considerably older than his companions, became winded, could run no further. So the younger two brutally shot him down to make their getaway easier.

A posse composed of 400 state troopers pursued the bandits, but they got away. A long investigation finally revealed that these two were the same who later held almost 1000 London policemen and guards at bay in the Sidney Street affray.