TRAINING AN ARMY
After Challis's adventure with the lions, the villagers, as the way
of negroes is, were just as eager to help the white man as they had
formerly been reluctant.
A man who, unaided, could kill two lions was surely a very wonderful
person. Not even the dreaded Tubus could stand against him. It
would be a blessing to the whole countryside if the power of the
Tubus were broken. The white man asked their help--he should have it.
The chief ordered all the males of the community to assemble in front
of the cave. His eighty fighting-men, splendid specimens of muscular
humanity, gathered in a disorderly crowd on one side. Some were
almost naked, others wore a sort of shawl folded about them as a
Scots shepherd folds his plaid; it left one shoulder bare, and
descended to the knee. All carried spears about four feet long.
The other group comprised the boys, the elderly men, and the few
weaklings of the tribe.
"I will make Boy Scouts of some of them," said Challis to himself as
he viewed them.
The chief led him in and out among the crowd of warriors, pointing to
one man as a famous hunter, to another as a mighty thrower of the
spear, to a third whose body was scarred with wounds received in
fight. He was evidently proud of his men.
"Let the white man take them at once," he said, John interpreting.
"They are well fed; they have eaten the flesh of oxen; they are ready
even now to follow the killer of lions."
He was as much astonished as disappointed when Challis explained, as
tactfully as he could, that he did not yet consider them ready to
accompany him back to the fort.
"What more does the white man need?" he asked, somewhat huffily.
Challis reflected for a few moments before replying. He did not
quite know how to deal with these ignorant natives, so prompt to take
offence and sulk like children. But he was clear in his own mind.
To render effective service against experienced warriors like the
Tubus, dashing horsemen armed with guns, accustomed to carry all
before them in a wild charge, something more than muscle and goodwill
was required.
It was plain that these natives were wholly undisciplined. Challis
felt sure that in battle every man acted for himself, without any
relation to his comrades, and he had already resolved that they must
undergo some sort of elementary training before they could be of any
real use.
The matter that worried him was the shortness of time. Royce's
provisions might be eked out over a fortnight--what could be done in
a fortnight towards training these wild, untutored children of nature?
"You know the Tubus, chief," he said, making up his mind to be frank.
"Your people have suffered at their hands--even now you have fled
from them. They have horses and guns--you know how helpless your
best warriors have been before them. We must change all that. Your
men must learn how to fight in such a way that the Tubus' advantages
over them are lessened."
This was the gist of his speech, which was very much longer, and
expressed in simple words that John could translate. The chief, in
spite of the fact that his men had recently run away from the Tubus,
seemed annoyed that any doubt was cast on their capacity. But, after
a while, he asked sullenly what the white man wished to do.
"First of all, I want you to send messengers to all the friendly
villages round about, asking the chiefs to send their best fighting
men to join us. Tell them that we are going to fight the Tubus, and
put a stop to their evil deeds."
"That shall be done, O white man!"
"Then I want to see what your own men can do with the spear, how they
march, and how they attack."
"That shall be done, O white man!"
He gave an order. The warriors formed up, as Challis expected, in
single file, and marched thus, lithely as wild animals, before him.
At another order they started to run, uttering fierce yells, crowding
into an unwieldy mob, and flinging their spears high into the air.
The chief watched them proudly, and glanced at Challis as if to say:
"Can you wish for anything better than that?"
"It is very good," said Challis, to the chief's great contentment.
"Now bring them back; I want to find out which are the best spearmen."
The men, gathering their spears, came running back in a scattered
crowd, and collected again in their former shapeless array.
Asking permission from the chief, Challis ordered John to form the
men up in line. It was a long and difficult business. No sooner
were a few of the negroes placed shoulder to shoulder than one man
would step out to see what a particular friend of his was doing some
distance away, and showed a good deal of resentment when John hauled
him back and explained vigorously that he must not move without leave.
Then another man would find that he had something urgent to say to
his mother, among the crowd of women watching the scene curiously,
and he would sprint across the ground, engage in animated dialogue
with the old woman, and return at his leisure.
John was reduced to despair.
"Silly fellas, sure 'nuff, sah!" he said in dudgeon. "Dey no
good--too much fools, all same!"
An idea occurred to Challis. Knowing from his past experience with
the Hausas how keenly negroes enter into competition one with
another, he ordered John to explain that, if the men kept the line,
he would give prizes to the best spearmen as soon as they reached the
fort, and make them his own bodyguard.
After the men had gathered into a crowd and squabbled noisily for
several minutes, this offer had the desired effect. They allowed
themselves to be formed into a line, which, however, all John's
efforts could not prevent from gradually assuming a crescent shape.
Then, one by one, after several failures to make them act in turn,
they threw their spears at the word of command. In this way, Challis
selected the twenty men whose cast was the longest and straightest,
and they immediately rushed across to the spectators to proclaim
their merits.
By this time Challis was very tired.
"Drilling my platoon in the O.T.C. was nothing to this," he said to
himself. "How in the world can I make anything of them in a
fortnight?"
But after rest and food, he was ready to tackle the work again, and
he took heart when he found that the negroes were much more amenable.
The spirit of emulation he had excited among them lightened the task.
Every man seemed anxious to win praise from the white man. The idea
had got abroad among them that the exercises to which he put them
were so much "white man's medicine," something that would have a
mystic efficacy when they came in contact with the enemy. As this
idea implied unquestioning faith, it was all that Challis required.
He was careful not to keep them too long at one thing. When they had
at last seized the idea of a straight line, though still far from
successful in achieving it, he set the twenty selected spearmen to
compete among themselves, and devoted his attention to the sixty less
proficient.
These he determined to turn into pikemen. He got them to cut longer
shafts for their spear heads and to sharpen the lower end, so that by
the close of the day they were provided with serviceable pikes eight
feet long.
The end of the day brought its disappointment. The messengers
dispatched by the chief to neighbouring villages returned and
reported the complete failure of their mission. Such was the
universal dread of the Tubus that no chief was willing to send his
men to encounter them. Not even the messengers' report of the
lion-killing sufficed to overcome their fears.
"They will sit on the fence," thought Challis. "If we have any
success, they'll come tumbling over each other to help. Well, we
haven't done so badly for the first day. I must make plans for
to-morrow."
He spent that night, not in the fœtid cave, but in the open,
protected from wild beasts by a ring of bonfires. After all, he
thought, they were too far from the Tubus' camps to attract attention.
Next morning, after repeating the lessons of the previous day, and
finding that the men gave much less trouble, he taught them how to
extend, moving them up and down with fair success. With John's
assistance, he got them to turn right or left at the word of command.
At first they laughed so heartily at the sight of one another moving
like teetotums that discipline was in danger of breaking down.
Challis himself was amused, thinking how wrathful the loud-voiced
drill-instructor at his old school would have been if the boys had
taken their drill as lightheartedly as these negroes. But after a
time they settled down to learn their new prescription in "white
man's medicine," and made the proper movements with creditable
smartness.
The next operation was to form three sides of a square--their numbers
did not suffice for a full square of any considerable size. This was
difficult.
"Do their minds work in curves?" thought Challis despairingly, as the
men tended persistently to round the angles and join the ends of the
lines.
But even this difficulty was surmounted with patience, and the close
of the second day saw him one step nearer the accomplishment of his
aim--to train the negroes to sustain the assaults of a mounted enemy.
It was the next stage that he found most difficult of all. A good
shot himself, he sighed for rifles, that he might teach the men to
shoot. With such obsolete weapons as spears and pikes he felt
himself at a loss.
But common sense and recollections of what he had read about
Cromwell's army came to his aid. He taught the men forming the
three-sided square to stand fast with their pikes planted obliquely
in the ground, supported with the left hand, while they held in the
right their short stabbing spears.
Meanwhile he practised the twenty selected men in pushing out in
advance, casting their spears, and then running back for refuge into
the square. The whole force learnt to lie down at the word of
command, to rise, to advance, to retire.
In order to accustom them as much as possible to the conditions they
would have to meet, he got the chief to send into the neighbourhood
to hunt up or purchase horses. Such of the men as could ride he
mounted, and he organised sham charges, so that the men on foot grew
used to the approach of horses at the gallop.
By the end of the fifth day the negroes had entered into all these
exercises with spirit and enjoyment. Nothing pleased them better
than the charges of the few horsemen. The spearmen would advance
some twenty paces in front of the pikemen, pretend to discharge their
spears when the horsemen came within range, then turn and run back
between the open ranks of the pikemen, whose weapons were planted at
an angle calculated to transfix the oncoming horses and men.
When the spearmen had run behind the pikemen, they would wheel round
and discharge another flight of spears. The horsemen carried their
sham charge to within a few yards of the spears before they reined
up. In their ardour, indeed, they sometimes failed to obey promptly
the order to halt, and one or two of them received ugly wounds. But
they took these in good part, and, when the day's work was done, were
to be seen proudly displaying their injuries to their relatives.
"I only hope they will be as cheerful in the real thing," thought
Challis.