Crowds soon collected to watch the ship burn, and grew until at evening the whole town was on the quay--little suspecting that this was the day for the long-promised dynamiting. The plot was well planned.
An ‘infernal machine’ placed under a viaduct which carried the gas main over a little gulley, exploded promptly at eight o’clock, and this was the signal for the general attack. Before the lights of the city had finished flickering, a carriage dashed up to each of the principal open-air cafés along the water-front, and several drew up before the bank. In each of them were two or more desperate men, who in some cases jumped out and threaded their way to the midst of the wondering crowds, before hurling their deadly missiles. They made for the places where their bombs would do damage among the foreign element and the most prominent citizens, and attempted to throw them into the thickest groups. But the people, already alarmed, were on the _qui vive_, and few of the explosions in the cafés did really effective work. The Macedonians are well drilled in scurrying into their houses, and, recognising the attack at last, they did not linger till the troops came. The dynamiters tried to catch some ‘on the wing,’ but a bomb is a poor weapon for use against the individual.
The proprietor of the Alhambra personally pointed out to us the holes made in his curtains and his stage, and gave us pieces of shell he had gathered in his yard; but two tables and three coffee-cups and one man was the complete record of the destruction wrought at his establishment.
Dynamite requires confinement to be thoroughly effective. The destruction of the Imperial Ottoman Bank was thorough. The Bulgarians who had this work in charge were evidently the pick of the band. Four of them alighted from their carriage in front of the building and several others behind it. Those attacking the front, in the guise of gentlemen, succeeded in getting near enough to the two soldiers on guard to overpower them and cut their throats. Then they began casting bombs at the windows. The other insurgents entered the courtyard of the Hôtel Colombo and hurled bombs into the doors of the German skittle club, a low building at the back of the bank. While these two divisions of dynamiters were at this work, and their confederates were elsewhere attacking various places, the charge beneath the bank was set off. A vast hole was rent in the rear wall of the building, the skittle club was demolished and the front of the Hôtel Colombo shattered. The manager of the bank, who lived above the offices, escaped with his family before the building succumbed to the fire, and all but one of thirty Germans who were in the skittle club at the time got out with their lives.