Free Occasional Prose by Mary McCarthy Page A

flashing, came to pick up injured bobbies. We were not near enough to the actual fighting to see punches exchanged—only the results.
    It occurred to me that the more militant students might think of using an ambulance as a Trojan horse (or kamikaze ) to penetrate the police barrier, but this did not happen. Respect for the rules of war. On the other hand, quite early, some youths who did not look like demonstrators (more like fascists, someone said) scaled one of the surrounding buildings that was in scaffolding. The police declined the gambit, whereupon the idea caught on; soon agile boys from the march were swarming over the scaffolding, up to the roof, on to the neighboring balcony, pursued eventually by somewhat heavy-footed police. A handsome young black man in a brilliant red sweatshirt who was in the grip of a constable twirled free and leaped from the balcony to the next building; everybody cheered, and the cops gave up the chase. These human-fly acrobatics suggested that the demonstrators might have done well to employ a cat-burglar to enter the Embassy through the roof or a back window while police attention was focused on the front; despite its grim moat, the Embassy cannot be as impregnable as it looks, and with a little ingenuity plus possibly some inside help, a North Vietnamese or Viet Cong flag or a red-and-black Anarchist banner might have been planted on the roof or in a top-story window.
    What was wanted, clearly, was a symbolic victory of that sort, a miming of the Tet offensive when the Viet Cong briefly occupied a piece of American soil—the ground floor of the Saigon Embassy. Of course this Grosvenor Square assembly was powerless, just as preceding ones had been, to alter the foreign policy represented by the impersonal grey building flying the Stars and Stripes. Powerlessness, frustration, were what the Demo was about. Conceivably, power might have been momentarily outwitted by intelligence and daring, the natural guerrilla weapons of the weaker party. Home-made petrol bombs, even if Black Dwarfs had manufactured them in quantity, could not have blasted a way into the Embassy citadel. In any case, the point is not to imitate the violence of the enemy, which you are reprehending out of the other side of your mouth.
    Such a demonstration is a mock war, which should culminate in a mock triumph. Peaceful means—protests, vigils, handing in petitions, letters to the editor—have long ago been exhausted, and everyone feels this. Everyone, that is, who cares about stopping the slaughter in Vietnam. But though English youth, accepting the challenge, has declared all-out war on the U.S., it does not have the weapons to wage it single-handed. As Mr. Manchanda said, “We are too few.” Yet somewhere in between the old peaceful means and outright street battles or terrorism, there is an area worth study if your object is to harass and embarrass your enemy without terrifying the bulk of your own population, which in principle you are seeking to win over. The photograph which appeared in at least three London newspapers, of a demonstrator’s boot kicking a policeman in the jaw while two other demonstrators held him down, is not really calculated to popularize the anti-war effort. No doubt that is why the newspapers used it with such unanimity, and no doubt too a photo might have been taken of the unique instance of police brutality attested by the National Council for Civil Liberties (reported in the Guardian ), when an NCCL observer was kneed in the groin by one constable and then, when he objected and showed his accreditation card, he was beaten and kneed by “about” eight others. ... The fact, however, is that no cameraman was around when that happened—only a young woman who gave supporting testimony—and most amateur observers in the square agree that police behavior where they happened to be was impeccable.
    It was almost as if the bobbies, the more inactive ones, enjoyed it, were amused by the