Free Occasional Prose by Mary McCarthy

almost floated. Some firecrackers were thrown, causing the police horses to rear. Pennies were hurled at the police and at windows of flats, but no window I saw was broken except a big plate-glass one on South Audley Street, which looked as if it had been smashed in a charge. Once there was an incident that for a moment looked like trouble: when a fat, short, middle-aged woman wearing a bright-green embroidered mandarin coat began prowling along her balcony, somebody threw an object at her which proved to be a cardboard disc; a middle-aged man, probably her husband, came out from the flat and twice inspected it with a concerned, moral air. It was impossible to feel sympathy for people like that, who were making a parade of looking down in a figurative and literal sense on the crowd of protesters below, nor for the spectators in the windows of the American Embassy, out of range of any missiles. One man in a left Embassy window was busy photographing throughout; even when night came, his lens, evidently infra-red, was pointed at us—impossible to guess whether he was an Embassy security officer duly identifying the “troublemakers” or just a camera nut, like the G.I.s in Vietnam who are said to go into combat snapping pictures to send home as souvenirs.
    But it was not hard to sympathize with the police and their frightened, rearing horses. It was Sunday, a day off for most of them, and it is not pleasant to have things thrown at you, harmless or not, and to have your helmet knocked off and tossed about as a trophy, when you are only doing your duty. Guarding an embassy is not a wicked action per se , but just routine in all countries when circumstances call for it, and if the demonstrators had broken through the police cordons, they might have met something decidedly worse inside: a chief inspector from Scotland Yard assured us that the Marine guards were armed with Mace and machine guns—a recurring rumor strongly denied by the Embassy, which can point to the fact that even in Moscow, when the U.S. Embassy has been besieged by crowds, the Marine guard has not had machine guns. Only the regulation pistols.
    There is no doubt that the British police behaved with amazing self-control and good humor, under a certain amount of provocation. It is stupid to deny this and to assign the credit to the order and “discipline” of the demonstrators, who, at least in Grosvenor Square, were not especially orderly, even in terms of their own aims. They could probably have broken through the police lines if they had had better organization and leadership. The majority plainly did not wish to or only half-heartedly, but they would have followed if a breach had been made. As it was, only the Anarchists were serious about mounting charges, from the direction of South Audley Street, one of which was nearly successful. The Anarchists that afternoon were the best fighters, and among them must have been some of the young unemployed workmen who got sentenced in the magistrates’ court; they were fairly easy to pick out in the crowd, which was mainly middle class or upper middle and student, by the Rocker-style leather jackets they wore and by their expressions of intent, concentrated fury. “If you’re just here to look, push off,” one of them said to me.
    They were angry not just with “the fuzz” (their term) but with the whole demonstration for its idle and frivolous affability. We older people laughed and joked a good deal, greeted friends; some pretty women exchanged fashion notes: “No, it’s not new. I wore it in the last demonstration.” Gravity succeeded as a fair-haired boy, retreating from the police lines, bent double and retched; he had evidently been punched in the stomach. A respectful space was cleared for him, but he staggered off toward the rear of the square. Improvised ambulances drove through, with students riding on the top, from the LSE, to pick up the wounded. An occasional regular ambulance, with a blue light