"Go on!" I shouted. "Go on! Why the devil ain't you firing?"
"We'll hit the telegraph people, sir!" they called.
"Don't worry about them--fire--fire--carry on the Maxims," I yelled, "or
they'll be inside in a moment."
I cared not a rap whether we killed all the telegraph people, so long as
we kept the Baluchis outside. Miss Borsen wouldn't be anywhere near the
wall, so we should not hurt her.
The Maxims began pumping out more lead--by good fortune they worked
splendidly, the belts jerking through like lightning--and in less time
than it has taken me to write this the Baluchis had begun to fall back.
Once they were clear of the wall Moore opened on them with shell, and
though these shells do very little damage in the open they kept them on
the run whilst more Maxim belts were being slipped in.
They fled back to the huts almost too quickly for the guns to follow
them. From the rear of the huts they burst forth, trying to keep out of
sight; but as they came to the wire-fence they had to climb over it, and
one of the Maxims was waiting for them and played terrible havoc. The
remnant simply flew down--their heads showing beyond the contour of the
slope--till they disappeared among the date-palm trees round the Old
Fort.
My fellows began to cheer--they had been too busy before--and the
lascars and all the other natives danced about and cheered too--Percy
wildly excited; all except of course the cook and his mate, who were
busy preparing the men's cocoa, and were apparently still contemplating
their usual early suicide directly the saucepans had been cleaned again.
Jaffa, left to himself, had been firing a rifle. He looked pleased and
happy. As for Mr. Scarlett, he was beaming.
"Drove 'em 'Balooks' back all right, sir!" he said, rubbing his hands.
"They've learnt a lesson or two, those poor wretched devils," and he
jerked his thumb towards the open sloping ground, which now looked as if
a fierce gust had blown the washing out of a laundry and distributed it
unevenly over the ground.
I asked him what had been the matter at first, and why he had broken
down the doors of the magazine. He told me that as Moore had run aft
with the key he had dropped it overboard in his excitement. This was
Moore all over. Just like the idiot he was!
We now had time to look towards the village and the New Fort.
Only a very occasional shot came from that direction, and through our
glasses we saw that the parapets and battlements were black with
figures, so knew that the Baluchis had captured it. The trading dhows
were being hauled off-shore and were putting to sea, their crews working
desperately to save them from falling into the hands of the Baluchis;
the bay was full of their frightened cries as they hoisted their clumsy
sails and tried to gain safety.
Just then bullets began to fall round us, and soon we were under a
brisk, long-range fire--apparently from the fugitives round the Old
Fort. It was so badly aimed that it was hardly enough to disturb us but
a badly-aimed bullet is just as dangerous as a well-aimed one--if it
happens to find a billet. So whilst the Maxim crews were getting up
more ammunition and reloading belts, I made Moore throw a few shells
close to the Old Fort. The first few they stood but at the seventh we
had the gratification of seeing them bolt back into a fold of the ground
close to the landing-place on the other side of the peninsula. They
drove their frightened camels into this shelter and were safe from any
tokens of "esteem" we could send them.
Just then someone called my attention to the telegraph buildings. I
looked and saw the door in the loopholed wall thrown open, and men began
filing out and racing down the slope--a man in pyjamas leading them. It
was Mr. Fisher. Why they were coming out goodness only knows; but down
they ran, apparently with the idea of manning the trench and breastwork.
They had almost reached it before I remembered that some of the enemy
might possibly be there still; and, sure enough, as the leading ones
leapt into the trench on one side, I saw thirty or forty Baluchis, who
had been hidden from us on the other side, spring up, fire point-blank,
and leap over, dropping their rifles and slashing with swords as they
jumped down among them. We could not possibly give assistance; we could
not fire into the melee, and stood stock-still, holding our breath,
watching the hand-to-hand struggle. It probably did not last fifty
seconds, though it seemed more like fifty minutes, and at last the
telegraph staff began to retreat uphill. Luckily very few--not half a
dozen--followed them; the rest contenting themselves with lying down and
firing.
Mr. Scarlett, without orders, took the risk and fired a shell among this
lot, and made them scramble over the breastwork again out of sight. The
others stopped as well and came back.
Mr. Fisher, in his pyjamas, tried to lead his people to charge down once
more; but they would not follow him. Instead, they fell back inside the
loopholed wall--the white figure being the last to enter--and I breathed
again when the door was once more closed.
We now had all we could do to prevent the _Bunder Abbas_ being damaged
by the fleeing dhows. Their crews had quite lost their heads. One
fouled us amidships and tore a stanchion out before she drifted clear;
another, having cut her "grass" hawser cable, drifted helplessly right
across our bows, with our little cable tautening under her bottom. Every
single soul of us was trying to shove her free, and I had to veer cable
before she eventually scraped past, hanging up for a moment as her
projecting stern caught in the stem-post and carried away another
stanchion, which let the whole fore part of the awning fall over the
six-pounder gun--and over us too. If only the Baluchis had taken
advantage of this moment we could have done nothing. Luckily the poor
wretches were disheartened, or perhaps they never even saw their chance.
Away inshore, by the New Fort, there was much yelling and screaming.
The whole village was humming like a hive of bees disturbed--the
inhabitants fleeing along the beach and staggering under their
valuables, until some shots, apparently from the New Fort, fell among
them, when they dropped their burdens and fled all the faster. The
enemy in that fort commanded the track to Old Jask, and these poor
wretches had to make a great circuit before they could hope to reach
safety.
Honestly, I had not imagined that an attack would have been delivered
with so little warning. As Mr. Scarlett said: "It was not at all like
their usual way of doing things." They ought to have come along in the
daylight, settled themselves across the base of the peninsula, and then
sent in a messenger to ask for a ransom, failing which they would storm
the place. That had always been the custom in this part of the world, so
both Jaffa and Mr. Scarlett assured me.
It was not very flattering to our own military instincts and preparation
for defence to realize that if they had not begun firing their rifles
almost before they had reached the neck of the peninsula, and long
before they ever commenced to dismount from their camels to charge up
the slope, they must have taken the telegraph-station by surprise. We
should have heard or seen nothing until too late; and I really went cold
"all over", to think what would have happened inside those walls with
the _Bunder Abbas_ absolutely powerless to interfere. I knew now,
though I did not know it before, that none of these people can control
themselves; they must let off their rifles to work up their courage to
the charging-point, and must continue wasting ammunition to keep it
there.
The extraordinary thing was that Jaffa had ridden nearly twenty miles
inland only yesterday, and had actually visited several villages at the
foot of the mountains, without obtaining any warning whatever.
Hartley began signalling again from the top of the roof.
"Two men killed and two missing," I read. "Mr. Fisher wishes to know if
you can clear the trench. There are fifty or sixty of the enemy still
there?"
I'd forgotten them.
I called out to Mr. Scarlett and asked him whether he thought we could
turn them out with shell and Maxims. We both agreed that we could not
do so without expending more ammunition than we could afford.
"Right oh! We shall have to land and drive 'em out!" I said.
He was very anxious to come with me.
"Don't leave me this time, sir," he pleaded, and I could not help but
wonder at the change which had come over him.
He saw my look of surprise and burst out with: "I am a different man
now, sir; I feel a different being altogether since I got rid of that,"
and he touched his left arm. I shook my head and told him that he would
have all he could do to keep the main body back if they had the heart to
come along again.
I semaphored to Hartley to tell Mr. Fisher to keep up a fire on the
trench, so as to occupy the minds of those chaps still there, and in
half an hour landed in the dinghy, just below some rocks at the end of
the barbed-wire fences, with Webster, Jones, and Gamble. Sending the
dinghy back for Ellis, Andrews, and Griffiths, we dashed to the top of
the beach and lay down between the end of the fence and the breastwork.
Until they came it was a very ticklish position to be in; for if those
fifty or so "Balooks" had spotted us, and had the "heart of a worm",
they might have "done for" all three of us.
We lay there absolutely motionless, glued to the ground, whilst the
noise of casual firing from above told us that the telegraph people were
doing what I'd asked them--firing at the trench farther along. Not a
hundred yards from us rifles began answering them. It was a great
relief when the dinghy came back and Ellis, Griffiths, and Andrews
joined us.
Then we rose, fixing bayonets and rushing up and across the open to the
wretched breastwork, much too excited to worry about how many chaps we
should find there. I knew that the trench had no traverses--we had
never thought them necessary; so once we scrambled over and into it we
should be able to sweep the whole length of it with our rifles.
We just caught sight of the ghastly heaps of dead lying at the foot of
the fence a little farther along, some actually leaning over as if they
were alive. Then we saw some live Baluchis lying down on our side of the
breastwork, too busily engaged plugging at the loopholed wall to think
of danger behind them.
Directly we saw them we yelled--we could not restrain ourselves any
longer--and as we rushed for them they saw our bayonets, squealed with
fright, and leapt across the breastwork into the trench. We were after
them in a moment, each racing to be first, jumping the breastwork with a
bound, and seeing them flying helter-skelter to the far end. I jumped
clean on a wounded man, who wriggled up and tried to slash at me with a
sword; but I was away before the blow touched me. We simply emptied our
magazines into these chaps and they never gave us a chance to close. A
few fell, but our aim was too wild to account for many, and most of them
scrambled out, over, and down towards the barbed-wire, like a lot of
rabbits making for their "bury". We knocked over one or two as they
flung themselves over the wires, and the rest simply dashed down the
slope to join the main body hidden in the hollow.
A faint cheer came from the loopholed wall, and I heard a cry of disgust
from my own men. Looking back I saw them bending over the corpse of
what had been one of the Eurasian telegraph people. It was horribly
mutilated.
A little farther on another lay dead, mutilated in the same hideous
manner. It made me sick to look at them.
In fact the whole place was a shambles. There must have been nearly a
hundred--perhaps more--bodies dotted about in little white heaps near
the fence and the breastwork, the heaps being more scattered between the
breastwork and the wall where the Maxim had caught them in their final
rush. Along the foot of the wall corpses lay singly. What grand-looking
men they were, too, with fierce high-bred faces. It was a horrid
business.
The edge of civilization! Yes! I was there again, and the only
satisfaction this slaughter gave was the knowledge of what the fate of
those two poor frightened women would have been had the attack
succeeded.
I don't want, in this yarn, to worry anyone with the thoughts which
flashed through my head on this or that occasion, but I should like to
write just this and have done with it. To stand quietly, as I was doing
then, on that slope where not many minutes previously four or five
hundred raging men in the prime of life had rushed up with the one idea
in their souls to "kill or die", "kill or die", and to see now the
huddled, white-cloaked figures lying all round, so calm and still and
dignified by death, made me feel wearily sad.
It was my duty to kill them--I was sent there, on the edge of
civilization, to do so--and it had fallen to my lot to do it. "Kismet!"
It was only one more wave of fanatical, unthinking, misdirected
barbarism broken again as it tried to wash back the advance of
civilization, and civilization cannot and must not cease to roll back
such waves, in the eternal progress of the world. I remembered the day
I had walked so jauntily out of the Admiralty with every contempt for
the roar and bustle of traffic and trade, and every nerve tingling with
delight at soon leaving it for the edge of civilization; and now that I
was there, and had done a man's work with the tools and engines of war
which civilization had put in my hand, I was neither pleased nor proud.
It was all too cruel, too brutal, all so meaningless and useless a waste
of life. These men had died because we prevented them, by every means
in our power, from obtaining more rifles. They only wanted them to
carry on their family and tribal blood feuds, to raid other tribes, and
to shoot our own soldiers across the Indian frontier. But to these poor
wretches this was their whole duty in life, and they knew that the
telegraph-cable was one of their chief enemies--it could give warning of
attempts to land arms; it could summon ships from below the horizon to
prevent them being landed: so they had laid down their lives in the
endeavour to destroy it, and had left their waiting wives to teach their
fatherless children black hatred of the white man, and to bring them up
with the one idea, later on, when they were big enough to hold a rifle,
of trying to revenge their fathers' deaths and beat back--in their
turn--advancing civilization.
Standing among all these heaped-up corpses I could not help thinking
what a wailing there would be when these grand men did not return to
their village fastnesses in those grim mountains standing up like a huge
wall against the horizon.
A rifle suddenly went off close to me. Turning, I saw Webster open his
breech and jerk out a cartridge.
"A wounded chap tried to stab me, sir," he said in explanation.
That was the worst part of it. The wounded never expected anything but
death, and wanted revenge before they died. It was not the slightest
use trying to attend to their wounds, in fact it was dangerous to go
anywhere near a man, even though he looked as dead as a stone--he might
only be pretending to be dead and waiting his opportunity for you to get
close. I ought to have given orders for my men to go round and shoot
every one with any sign of life in him, but this I absolutely refused to
do. The poor, ignorant wretches should have the chance of crawling down
among their own people--if they could.
I called my men away, and, carefully avoiding every patch of tumbled,
distorted bodies, went up to speak to Mr. Fisher, whom I saw coming
towards me--still in his pyjamas--a revolver in his hand.
He was quite cool. "Thank you very much!" he said simply.
"How is Miss Borsen," I asked eagerly, "and your wife?" but he did not
know. He had not seen them since the first alarm.
"What will these Baluchi chaps do now?" I asked.
"Baluchis!" he said. "Most of them are Afghans, the real fighting
Afghan; there are only a sprinkling of Baluchis. I don't know what they
will do, but they've had such a lesson that they'll probably be off
again to the hills to-night. I've sent off a wire to Duckworth to tell
him that we've been attacked and that you beat them off by fire from
your launch."
He seemed undecided what to do. He still hesitated about burning those
confounded huts which had already caused so much trouble. He did not
want to irritate the employees who lived there, and kept on saying:
"We'll wait till the morning; there probably won't be a sign of them
then."
But he gladly accepted my offer to mount one of my Maxims on top of the
station, and I went back to the _Bunder Abbas_ with my people to send it
ashore as quickly as possible.
Already some at least of the Afghans were recovering their fright, for
as we marched down to the beach we came in for a sharp "sniping", and
Jones the marine was shot through the arm. He dropped his rifle and
swore at Gamble, thinking he had struck him; then he looked at the
place, shook his fist towards the Old Fort, picked up his rifle with the
other hand, and came on.
It was the same arm which had been hit during the engagement with the
Afghans at Bungi whilst we were trying to get old Popple Opstein out of
his trap.
Once aboard the _Bunder Abbas_ I took charge and sent Mr. Scarlett
ashore with the Maxim.
He was delighted to go, unshipped it and lowered it, with two thousand
rounds of ammunition, into the dinghy, and set off ashore with Jackson
and Ellis to help him.
Some of the telegraph coolies were waiting to carry it up the slope, and
as I ate some breakfast which Percy had ready for me, and afterwards
smoked my pipe, I watched the three of them busy mounting it at the
corner of the parapet.
Before leaving the _Bunder Abbas_ I had ordered steam to be raised, and
directly the lascar first-driver reported the engines ready I signalled
to Mr. Fisher that I intended to steam round to the other side of the
peninsula and try to teach the enemy another lesson.
This I did, and, as I expected, found them totally unprepared for my
approach. They must have seen the _Bunder Abbas_ getting under way and
steaming out, but possibly imagined that she was going to sea. At any
rate, as I suddenly appeared round the head of the peninsula and the
rocks there, I found them crowded together, almost on the shore, among
their camels.
They appeared to be asleep, but woke with a fright when Moore let rip a
shell among them.
As they rose to their feet I turned the _Bunder Abbas_ round and gave
them a taste of the Maxim as well.
They had had one lesson at daybreak; they now, at midday, had a still
harder one. It was pure, undiluted slaughter; but, though sickening,
was absolutely necessary. They fled helter-skelter inland, leaving
their camels to fend for themselves, rushing behind the ruins of the Old
Fort, and, when a couple of shells drove them out of that, flying
panic-stricken in a long straggling line--the devil take the
hindmost--through the sand-dunes towards the mainland, many of them
making a long detour in the direction of the New Fort. What I did hate
to see was the poor, wretched, wounded camels hobbling about, falling
down, and struggling to their feet again.
Having cleared this side of the peninsula I went back and anchored at my
old billet. From there I could see the remnant of the enemy huddled
round the walls of the New Fort. I might have stirred them with a few
more shells, but did not. Mr. Scarlett signalled presently that the
Maxim was mounted and ready, so I ordered him to bring Jackson back to
the ship; Ellis and Hartley between them would be able to work it, and I
was too short-handed already to spare anyone else. Mr. Scarlett was
very pleased with himself and with the splendid fire zone which the
Maxim he had just mounted could sweep. He had seen the ladies, and said
that though they were very white they seemed fairly cheerful.