THE FLOOD
All that morning Britain was rent by a civil war of placards, “Too
Ill,” “An Hour Will Decide,” “He Will Be Present—Special,” “The Doctors
Forbid,” “Hope Abandoned,” “Prince Leaving Waterloo,” “For Her Skipper
was Ted!”—this last a _Star_ 4th edition placard before noon, which the
widow’s mite was spent to buy.
It was a bright spring morning, breezy: but for him in that compartment
the sun was black in eclipse behind a shadow “like unto the son of
man”: for he had come out of prison to a world perfectly new, in which
the chess-game of Europe that day to be decided, so momentously in
others’ eyes, was to him child’s-play.
“_China!_” he breathed: “how queer! how abstruse!”
When laughter among his suite behind reached his ear in snatches, it
touched him with a sense of astonishment that men should laugh under
the sun. But they did it in ignorance.
He was as surprised as at finding himself straying on a planet where
every plant is saffron, and the heavens a heavy yellow, and stared
before him, smiling with a child’s amaze, his “well-dead” Eulalia
pushed into the back of this brain by Li Ku Yu in the front: for that
shadow like unto the son of man eclipsing the sun dangled a pigtail.
Always, from boyhood, he had thought that Li Ku Yu was born to modify
things—would invade India and Siberia—and that he, the Prince, was
somehow ordained to checkmate him; but his heart had never really
conceived that the stars some night in time might look down upon a
yellow Europe.
Some words of the Japanese girl heard in his confinement had caused him
to start and shy; but it was not that which now bent his head.
He held in his hand a document, that day translated by the Private
Secretary, addressed to him as President of the P.C.N.S. by a certain
Oberstwachtmeister Bergmann, a refugee from Kiao-Chau, just arrived in
Europe, and his eyes read and reread of themselves....
“This my Memorial, which at the same time I venture to address to my
Imperial Master and to your Royal Highness....
“The Memorialist’s escape was due alone to his disguise in the costume
of a Mongolian camel-driver, and to the good graces of the said Hsi,
the junkman.... The Memorialist cannot think that any other European
has been so favoured by Divine Providence.... The scanty European
garrisons were overpowered without difficulty in the same night....
“He has divided the Chinese Empire into 240 corps regions, each
containing a population of two millions, each region being subdivided
into 150 sections, each section to provide one line infantry regiment,
twenty sections forming an infantry-brigade-command, forty an
infantry-divisional-command, the latter under Japanese generals, the
former under both Japanese and Chinese....
“In each region have been quartered the field army-corps elements,
the staffs, recruiting _dépôts_, _dépôts_ of artillery, transport,
clothing, and camp-equipment, and supplies of food and forage.
“Each corps has been provided with a corps-cavalry-brigade of
great dimensions, whose weapon in the main is the “long spear” of
the Daimios, and the animals camels and mules mainly; the regular
organisation of a corps being completed by eighteen batteries of
cannon, six artillery parks, six sections of artificers, six telegraph
sections, twenty-five companies of pontooners, and forty-five
field-bakeries.
“The Memorialist estimates that during the past four months some
30,000 rifles and 20,000,000 rounds per month have poured from Japan
into China, in addition to artillery, swords and spears.
“Many of the conscripts seem to be still armed with nothing but a poker
or a club, which may be considered a sufficient equipment for some of
the elements of a war-host which includes many classes of women, and
may more resemble a locust-swarm than an army.
“For each peloton is provided an armoured cart of considerable length
and weight, making a kind of locomotive shelter-trench with loopholes,
to serve the purposes of transport, of travel, and of defence.
“The Memorialist considers that the China of the moment little
resembles the China habitually conceived by Europeans....
“He regards it as a country characterised by much unrest, and impelled
by a very remarkable tendency toward migration.... The presence and
personality of this one man appears to have acted as an intoxicant, or
goad, upon the masses of the people, goading them to a vague angriness
and a very extravagant adventurousness....
“The load of new taxation is borne with a patience due to their daily
expectation of Messianic marvels.... Li Ku Yu is everywhere regarded as
a sort of angelic juggler....
“The exploitation of the mineral mines of Manchuria, Quang-tung,
Heilung-Chiang and the Kirin Provinces, have yielded to so exact and
administrative an intellect an adequate exchequer.... The results of
all which the Memorialist holds to be at hand....”
The results were present: for a _Times_ paragraph had it that on the
previous evening a yellow regiment had entered Europe, and put to the
sword the Ural _volost_ round Mount Iremel.
He, for his part, so ill, felt his back bend under this thing.
Moreover, a wireless telephone to the train gave the rumour of three
German brigades having quietly occupied Brussels overnight, of a German
squadron engaging the forts of La Floride and de l’Heure in artillery
duels, seeking to effect a landing at Havre or Honfleur.
The French, then, and the British on the French frontier, were to
be taken in the back—that seemed the meaning: this, indeed, being
Germany’s week, in which, if she failed, she failed—perhaps failed
anyway: and now like a gambler staggery and callous, was throwing her
last throw.
The crowd, therefore, of captains and commanders, summoned to
Government House on the Prince’s arrival, met with a flush of
excitement at this German tidings; but a mood of excitement new to
their nerves awaited them there.
The Prince, standing near a window, as the room filled, could see a sea
of heads without, and his face-muscles suddenly convulsed toward tears,
seeing them, he thinking that there are tears in things, and that lives
are like waves, and like leaves....
All that region of England, in fact, had been pouring itself for two
days into Southsea, Portsea, Gosport, Portsmouth, and a bustle of
“them that go down to the sea,” mixed with the other multitude, gave
the day an air of gala. From the Portsea quays, the Cumber, the Hard,
the harbour had an aspect of preparation for some great day and date,
the Portsmouth inner harbour pregnant with craft, with a rattle of
anchor-chains, a chaos of smokes and sails, scouts outgoing, incoming,
and gulls that were aeroplanes playing in the air. But it was not
holiday that was in men’s minds.
The Prince by this time had had copies of the Memorial handed round;
and, as he rose, four-striped now and banded, the others hung on his
face, his manner, his phrases in a hunger of curiosity, with criticism,
with question and wondering.
“After what you have read, gentlemen,” he said, “little need be said
now, for if this destiny is incredible to you to-day, I prophesy that
to-morrow you will see it. In which case, what to do? The P.C.N.S.,
you see, have conspired with Admiral of the Fleet, Sir John Shepherd,
to tempt me into accepting command, and no doubt you wonder, like me,
what sin I have committed: however, here we are—weather winky—sick
skipper at the wheel. Thank God, we belong to a lot who may be a common
enough mob in easy years, but will be well groomed on Judgment Day.
I don’t think we are going to be afraid—even of throwing off our old
modes of doing and thinking in the face of this new day: for we in this
room are the rulers; Civil Power, Navy Staff, are out of it now; and so
I say, since this thing is on our backs, and we may be bitterly wanting
the ships which we shall sink to-day, let us beg the enemy to go back,
and not bother. What do you say to it?”
He sat: and from half, perhaps, a sound of approval surrounded the
table; but others, hardly yet grasping the reality of the Dragon
Antichrist’s advance, sat silent, their eyes bent upon the papers;
and when Sir John Shepherd, an old gentleman, spoke, it was to read a
memorandum of the enemy tonnages, from which it appeared that Britain’s
tough tussle over the ocean had left the allies a preponderance of
32,000 tons in newest-type capital ships.
But it was the Prince’s words that more and more filled the mind....
His flag had been hoisted on the _Queen Mary_; and by 3 o’clock the
Cumberland and Southsea Castle guns were gonging god-speeds to the
double column going at six cables down the flood.
Already at that hour a big-ship battle was in progress with the raiders
on the Havre forts, though the forts themselves had previously been
stilled, and a landing of infantry affected.
But the enemy’s main body was away in lat. 52 between Harwich and
Rotterdam, though their _objectif_ was understood to be our south
coast, the whole east being very thickly patrolled by mosquito
flotillas.
However, about five o’clock, when opposite Brighton, the Prince
received tidings that the enemy’s fleet had turned northward, and he
then signalled eighteen knots—forced draught for his slowest units.
A little later the three ships, _Antrim_, _Argyll_ and _Cæsar_, all
very lame, were sighted southward, as the sun went down, these steering
apparently for Newhaven from the _fracas_ round Havre.
Off Beachy Head the Frenchmen _Jean Bart_ and _Danton_ came up to take
their place in the port British column, these being said to be the only
sound capital ships now left to France.
At the fall of darkness the Germans were still turned northward, and
the British, two interminable processions of searchlights, worked on
at the chase until eleven in the night, when (nigh the Thames-mouth)
the Prince heard by wireless that the Germans had turned south; and he
then changed his formation to single column line ahead at sixty-six
revolutions.
However, the night being rather gloomy, gusty (though the sea was
smooth), the enemy apparently gave the slip somewhere about Long Sand,
and were found to be some miles south at one o’clock. The British,
pretty well in touch, put down the helm to come at them.
It was ten minutes later that a scout-cruiser came in with the news
that probably all along the east coast of England and Scotland a battle
of destroyers and submarines was then raging; and the Prince’s head
fell upon a table to consider it. His thought was: “I wish I was only
well....”
In the midst of which his flag-captain pushed in his head to say: “Here
comes the comet, Sir!” and the Prince rushed to see what was already a
_chose vue_ to everyone else—a brightness sheening on the sea’s eastern
horizon.
It soon had the night alight, and yonder to the south-west, a crowd of
toys, lay the enemy.
And now the Prince wrapped up in oilskins, signalled his departure down
to the ninth in the line (Sir John Shepherd, the _Lion_), and was away
with a sub in a hydroplane of high speed, a night-glass eager at his
eyes.
Within sixteen minutes he was in the cabin of Grand-Admiral von
Bachberg, the _Donnernde_; in thirty he was spurting back to the
British, his blood up, his proposals of peace having been coldly
received; and now his illness was in the background of his being.
He immediately ordered the fleet northward, calling a meeting in his
wardroom, where, speaking very quickly, he said: “Gentlemen, we have
to fight, and the thing now is to do it a little trickily. Their
object, of course, is to destroy our resistance to invasion; all
along the coast the attempt is now going on in detail; and, whether
they themselves are destroyed in the attempt or not, the attempt is a
success, if they destroy _us_. Well, then, since fight we must, let’s
fight shy and fly; let’s kill them without dying ourselves (“_Bravo!_”
and laughter). We _can_: for I’ve seen people snatch up glowing coals
and juggle them trickily on their palms without a scorch, and people
prettily handle nettles without ever a sting. This, then, I recommend
as your primary object—not to be sunk by them; and this, as your
secondary—not to sink them; but to capture them; for I tell you that
you may be wanting ships in Europe.
“And now you want to know—in two ticks—how I think these two objects
can be accomplished.”
He proceeded to lay before them a plan of battle.
By this plan, every British ship was to present a broadside to the
enemy; and every enemy ship was to present herself end-on (whichever
way she turned), to be raked fore and aft by some British.
And the method was quite simple!
The British were to fight in two lines ahead at right angles—along too
sides of a square—with the enemy between.
One British line was to lie east and west, one, a mile eastward of
this, was to lie north and south. He read lists of the ships which he
designed to fill each line.
If an enemy ship turned her broadside to the British ship attacking
her, the British ship was to desist from that particular ship, leaving
her to be raked fore and aft by some ship in the other British line,
to which she would then be end-on: the British aim being, not to kill
ships, but to kill guns and crews, not to shoot at hulls, but to shoot
at decks.
Some other hurried instructions, and the throng of captains were
darting back over the ocean to their various vessels, a blaze raging
in breasts where depression had reigned; instantly the new mood was
pervading the navy; the flagship signalled the battle word: “Sausage
and Smashed”; far over the vast of the ocean the laugh, the challenge,
passed; and Jack, conscious whose gallantry had him now in hand,
buckled to the trouble with an alacrity glad to the galaxy.
And the instant the fleet was out of the enemy’s sight it split into
two: the flagship with 1st and 3rd battle and cruiser squadrons moved
east, south-east, south; the Second-in-Command, mainly with 2nd and 4th
squadrons waited, then went south.
And before the enemy could realise the plan, the Battle of Margate
was upon them—a big ship drama, though all the North Sea fought that
morning in smaller combats; and the comet’s searchlight, urgently
journeying, solemn in the morning, saw.
For three minutes the two flagships were engaged: for when the
_Donnernde_—the behemoth of the Germania Yard, 35,000 tons, the largest
warship yet launched to load the ocean, the men of whose stern were as
foreign to her for’ard crew as Holborn men do not know what Strand men
do—when she, reserved by Germany for this day, turned her broadside
to the _Prince of Wales_ in the British north, she faced the _Queen
Mary_ in the British east, and from the frying-pan was in the fire. An
outbreak of a thousand thunders struck her suddenly dumb, strewed her
superstructure, funnels, masts, guns, steering-gear, bow-works, all in
the shout of one sharp shower; and she lay a flagrant log on a crimson
sea, after lodging three shells in the _Queen Mary’s_ engines.
When, twenty minutes later, the _Queen Mary_ went down by the bow, a
boat that carried the Prince and sixteen sank; but by swimming they
got to the _St Vincent_; and when the _St Vincent_ was sinking, as day
broke, he boarded the _Britannia_ in a boat, having nine lives that
night.
By which time the fight was all but done; the sea a reddish scene of
wreckage wherever the eye could reach; and the dawn came strangely that
morning.
By now results could be estimated. A third more British had sunk
than German, Russian, Italian: the fact being, that the British, in
presenting broadsides, had presented a greater area to fire than the
enemy to them, so that the enemy’s more numerous hits had hulled many
British; and some naval criticism has blamed the Prince, his plan being
what it was, for not engaging at closer quarters than he did.
Be that as it may, the enemy’s more numerous hits proved to have
wrought far less havoc each than the British: so that the thirty
remaining British were still mainly battle-worthy, while the
thirty-four remaining enemy were gunless, some capable of repair, but
shaved of upper-works, and British captures.
The destruction, meantime, among the smaller craft in that vast battle
along the coast had been enormous; but, as to the Margate Battle,
such a result, when the country heard it that forenoon, without quite
troubling about how the trick could be done, was heard as a wonder, the
work of a wizard with a switch which he whirls.
Hodge at the hedge-side, the jobber at the station, the Queen in her
chamber, stood astare at this news, then crazily flew to proclaim that
the Prince of Wales was again bringing Germany in chains, and the war
was warred, and wire-gun had finally beaten Krupp, and comfortable
peace and the day of plenty come again, for ever.
The war, however, was hardly ended: for while the treble of British
bells were again singing to glen and city, German brigades were surging
toward Paris from the west, and three regions of Eastern Europe were
putrid with yelling yellow troops—though during that forenoon this
fact was not known in western Europe, for everywhere the first work of
the yellow men was to destroy the telegraph; and precisely like the
night-floods of African rivers they sprang up to roll over Europe.
But before nine in the night, when the Prince landed at Dover, planning
how best to call warning to western Man, the shriek which was already
rushing through Europe, as of a woman fleeing with shrieks in the pangs
of travail, had reached to British ears. No bell greeted his coming
that evening.
He, for his part, though the heavens fell, felt that he must see yet
once that face which he supposed to be now four days dead; and, as
he could not go himself to get her—again ill in a reaction from the
battle-night, and gashed in the chest—a young man, a certain Lord Percy
Burnett, an aide-de-camp, left Dover at midnight on the mission, with
the 2nd Somersetshires in his mind’s eye.
A fortnight of appalling haps was to be his lot in that howling anarchy
that he now found the Continent to be.
He was shot in the leg by a squad of flying patrols while riding by
night through a pine-wood between Rouen and St-Pierre-les-Elbœuf, in
which a German brigade had an examining-post posted; and he was kept
prisoner as a spy five days and taken to Vaux near Paris: for, as may
be conceived, the momentum of the new German incursion needed _time_ to
check itself, just as the machinery for recalling the British troops
from Europe needed time to be put in motion; so that while Europe was
fleeing in tens of millions to her western and southern ports before
those spread wings of the yellow pestilence, and while the world’s
mercantile marine was churning the seas toward their screaming, German
troops on the back and front of British were getting into touch on a
front of fifty miles over the plain of Picardy, blind to all but this
one last cast of the dice, one last orgy of carnage, and then to fly.
They met on a day when every Russian roadside between Archangel and
Bessarabia was already red with butchered moujiks, when Mongolian flesh
had glutted the guns of Königsberg, and overflowed them; the next day
yellow was on the glacis of Coblenz, in the gardens and bedrooms of
Metz; it swarmed over the European combatants like a wall that falls
upon three battling boys; and what the Europeans mutually slew the
yellow men mutilated.
When Lord Percy Burnett, after many adventures, arrived in sight of
Bar-le-Duc castle, where he had hopes of coming in touch with the
2nd Somersetshires, no battalion of Somersetshires was any longer in
existence, and Bar-le-Duc was a smouldering ruin. The same night he was
flying westward with a banefuller stain of yellow on the brain than
Eulalia’s remains.
These North-French hordes were a portion of the central tentacle of
the three great tentacles which the Mongolian race stretched over
Europe—Midland tribesmen, these, of Shansi, Shensi, Kansu, who, after
reaching the borders of Chinese Turkestan by train, had trailed itself
in interminable caravan through Tarim and those desert stretches of
Siu-Kiang and Chinese Turkestan which, in his earlier day, Li Ku Yu had
strewn with masses of Mohammedan dead.
These were they whose front had been reported on the Caspian foreshore
while nightly the stars still marked their five corps camped from
Kashgar to Bokhara, marked the bakeries’ blaze, the lament of the
baby at the breast, the tethered camels’ clamouring—corps that had
very little resemblance in extent and organisation to the corps in
which men had yet gone to war, since the units of a corps would have
occupied 1200 miles of road (supposing it could have moved over one
road), and have occupied thirteen days in passing any one point: the
administrative convoys and regimental trains occupying by themselves
more territory than is customary for all an ordinary corps.
Of a sallower hue, true Hans, with little Manchu admixture, were the
sinews of the second tentacle, Hunanese, tribesmen of Fukien, Kuantung,
industrious blades, hard-handed by habit, short of stature, sturdy,
who had furnished washermen to Sydney and ’Frisco, and diggers to the
Zootpansberg: men to whom a li, or a pinch of salt, was much, who now
already on the march saw salt squandered round them, with rice, dried
vegetables, tea, sausages, pressed meats, fresh meats, a foretaste of
the Hopeland they are pressing to.
These in seven corps, separated sometimes by quite short distances of
thirty or forty miles, drop half-a-corps for Bengal, as they go working
in interminable worms up to the “Roof of the World” by the caravan
routes betwixt the sources of the Mekong and Yangtsekiang; and under
heavens that weep ceaseless rains, by great swollen streams, they go
pouring, through groves of the mulberry-tree, by priest-cities droll as
a Gulliver’s dream, and by cantonments where their four _échelons_ of
auxiliary convoys take up deposits of cereals, biscuits, hay, two of
the administrative convoy _échelons_ being half-a-day’s march behind
the regimental trains, the other two bringing up supplies from the
rear, the cattle marching between advanced columns and the main body.
As to the third main array, which was the first actually to turn
a European villager into stone, they were composed of the taller
northerners, most of them nomads already by mood and heredity,
Mongolians, Manchurians, Kirinese, Pekingese. Their twenty corps
left Northern China desert, to find the ice of Lake Baikal already
melted, and to be carried across in their trains and armoured carts by
train-ship to the Baikal village side.
From which third-first mass of power, three corps branched off, about
Omsk, to turn toward Balkash and the sources of the Irtish, where the
Central Plateau of Asia has its western gate, thence to go swarming
like many waters down upon those lowlands and lonesome steppes, where
the yowling of the wolf’s mouth breaks the moon’s muteness round about
the Aral Sea, where Russia had so clutched, and in vain spent her
strength.
But even on these arid tracts, there seems to have been no creaking of
the commissariat machine, each unit of a host carrying some utensil
like a mess-tin, containing eight pounds of emergency rations, which it
was death to touch except in extreme need, and each corps headquarters
having droves of dogs, mules, camels, cattle, sufficient at a pinch for
six days’ food.
This streamlet of the northern stream crossed the Caspian narrows from
Krasnovodsk to Baku in twenty-six hours on huge sail-pontoons which the
pioneering (Midland) stream had constructed for its own passage three
days previously: for, by reason of the inconceivable legions which
formed a corps, works could be turned out in hours which other great
aggregations of men would take weeks to begin—the _objectif_ of the
streamlet being the conquest of the Caucasus, and the occupation of New
and Little Russia, as well as of an already Mongol Hungary, while the
pioneering five and twenty were to be Central and Northern European, as
the Thibetan seven Southern European.
Wherever the flood met resistance, as at Königsberg, Paris, Venice,
it was precisely like the resistance of isolated obstacles blocking
a tide; and long before the obstacle was down the tide was about and
beyond it.
It was German forts, really, which furnished the first line of defence,
since in Russia, now utterly an anarchy, part of her nationals fled;
part hid until caught; the rest stared and perished: for the coming of
the yellow feet seems to have been everywhere preceded by rumours of
such a suggestion as to transmute many into pillars—mephitic infamies,
massacre complicated by madness—and it was as if somewhere the earth
had opened to pour forth a smoke that, as it rolled and approached,
clutched the throat with drought, and smote the foot motionless: so
that a refugee, a bugler of the Kuban _voisko_, could report that half
his village stood rooted, staring at yellow troops pelting barefoot
upon them down a lane, and could not stir, fascinated and paralysed
like birds by serpents, like men by spectres, seeing in that crowd
of countenances nothing but a visit of ghosts, ghosts bloodless with
lust of gore, bonily ugly, with rigid grins, and it was then as if
every grave gave up its dead in the great and dreadful day of God, so
that many a woman stood quite mute, rooted, and died of white affright
before ever the spear could pierce her, the club crush her skull, or
the blunderbuss blow out her astonishment and awe; and of those who
fled many died later in a delirious frenzy of memory.
And with instant versatility these eastern pioneers turned from the
work of murder to the works of industry, divisions disintegrating
into brigades, into regiments, into battalions, to form communes of
peasants drinking _vodka_ instead of _samshu_; so that millions of
sticks in midfields round Ural villages were showing some Chinese
claimant’s name, and the Pechili housewife, vowing now to be sage
after the carnage and scarlet dark debauch, was taking stock of her
new belongings, before the slaughter round Paris and Venice was half
accomplished.
It was at these two points that the flood was longest dammed, because
Paris was “impregnable”—or would have been to any other army with the
few aeroplanes used by the Orientals; and because Venice was an island
when the Malghera Garrison had once blown up the Ponte Sulla Laguna.
Yet even here three days saw it all over.
In Paris nearly half-a-million people had been trapped, with such a
speed did the avalanche sweep from Coblenz westward; and these, with
that desperate pride and chivalry of Frenchmen, decided to enrich with
flesh the marsh-land of Île de France ere they perished.
The outer _ceinture_ of forts—Cormeilles, Franconville, Montmorency—had
aeroplanes in plenty, with great 30·5 cm. guns good and new, not half
the Garrison of Paris had fled; so, like a last rock standing out of
the sea of European ruin, Paris stood redly desperate; and when the
yellow hordes, after blowing up railways, drew lines nearly forty-five
kilometres in diameter, and dashed with siege-guns upon Domon, it was
to find Paris of harder heart than Port Arthur.
But the flood was already far west of Paris.
That same night, near eleven, a thin westering moon illumined a
moorland near St Quentin, in the south-east corner of which was a gipsy
camp without any fire, and on a sort of road running north-and-south
across it an ambulance waggon—stationary, since its one horse had just
dropped dead.
But on the heath were three nags, shaggy and long-maned, which
three Tommies in scarlet with white facings were trying to catch in
wide effort, looking like ghosts running crazy over the moor in the
moonlight’s vague mood, when suddenly a flock of fifteen Chinamen and
women came running out of coppice to the south: and, catching sight of
the gipsy camp, the waggon, the runners, these let out the scream which
ever jumps from Chinamen at anything sudden, and went pelting to their
right for the gipsies.
At the same time two ladies, Eulalia and Sister Darling, who had been
standing by the waggon, darted into it, snatching their rifles; the
three Tommies dropped into bracken, and began to pot at the Chinese;
and the flock of gipsies, screeching, scattered and ran.
Three of the Chinese instantly dropped shot, seven dropped into cover
to engage the Tommies’ fire, and five, changing direction, dashed for
the waggon.
On the waggon beds were three wounded, a German, nearly dead, an
Englishman, one-legged, and a young Frenchman, an army aviator named
Bonet, his left arm in a sling.
Besides these, there was a certain Burslem, who, in the flight
north-westward, had somehow become associated with the waggon—a
“living-picture” adventurer, of whom now the Chinese were likely to
make a dead picture.
He, with Bonet and Eulalia, took aim at flaps, while Sister Darling
knelt in the dark behind, her rifle grounded—the battle meantime
cracking away between the seven and the Tommies, while over the rough
road and over scrub pelted the five nigher with silent footsteps, like
death’s-heads running, the one on the road naked-breasted to the waist
but for a bandoleer, one to the left without pigtail, a girl in cotton
trousers, her gun stuck gawkily out before her, running furtively as on
hot bricks with long strides, her mouth howling wide without sound.
When they were a hundred yards off, a clammy hand in the dark was
laid on Eulalia’s arm, clammy on clammy, and a hoarse throat strove to
utter: “Dear, don’t shoot: leave it to the men.”
No answer: the next moment Bonet fired, and like an echo Eulalia, and
like an echo Burslem.
The Chinese girl stopped running, looked downward, sat down.
At the same moment a fourth shot, which rang out of bracken from a
Tommy stopped the Chinaman who was on the path, he, after some thought,
suddenly snatching up bracken with passion, as he dropped.
The other three Chinese, pealing shrieks now, ran on toward the waggon.
But shot after shot met them: two fell coming; the third fell flying.
The battle of seven-with-three, meanwhile, had become a battle of
five-with-two, the Tommies stealing ever nearer to the Chinese.
In the midst of which the girl sitting solitary in the gorse gurgled
forth a sort of dolorous sing-song of two notes, one _sol_ and one
_mi_, like a death-dirge just audible: upon which out to her dashed
Sister Darling.
“Katie, mind, come back!” cried out Eulalia.
She might as well have cried to the deaf dead....
As Sister Darling ran, a shot carried away half her left ear, fetching
a scream from her, whereupon Eulalia in a forage-cap, rifle in hand,
dashed out to her, and they ran toward the sitting girl; but as Sister
Darling in advance bent to raise the girl, in Eulalia some nerve of
passionate aversion burst out with, “Ah, don’t _touch_ her!”
In a moment more, however, she was assisting to lift the girl, who
moaned; but when a shot sang past her, she tossed from the girl—all
their actions being characterised by that jerkiness and distraction of
brains agitated to franticness, and, dropping upon her face in gorse,
she began to pot at the potting Orientals, while Sister Darling, who
was very strong, trotted under the girl’s burden toward the waggon,
dropping red upon yellow.
But three minutes afterwards the firing ceased, and three Chinese were
spied stealing back to the coppice whence they had popped out.
And now the ambulance-lamp was lit for some minutes, to glow upon
visages haggard with hunger and anguishes, while the gashed ear, and
the girl’s hurt, were dressed, and two of the Tommies, having found
their comrade dead, came in.
Whereupon they sat in grass round the waggon to debate, Burslem
observing that their one chance now was to abandon the waggon, and
“make paces to the coast before the Chinese reach it, if they haven’t
already.”
“Then, oh, go,” Sister Darling implored: “Eulalia, go for me! Why, why,
should you all wait and lose your last chance like this!”
“You are not going to catch us leaving you, miss,” said one of the
Tommies, “so it’s no use.”
“But this is a lunacy!” cried the little Bonet in good English: “oh,
but frankly, mees, pardon me, one is no longer able to consider you as
mentally sound. For in clinging to these two men who are dying, you
wilfully murder us six all. Me, I call that—distraction!”
Upon which Sister Darling clapped palms to forehead, distracted, crying
out to God: “I _can’t_ leave them! I would if I could, but I can’t!”
“Right you are, sweet!” cries Eulalia.
“Then,” said Burslem, “since Miss Darling persists in being so wilful,
I think the time is come for us others to consider whether we should
not leave her. Anyway, let us put it to the vote, and if——”
In that instant he was flying, and the council vanished, both the
Tommies in their scarlet lying dead, shot out of hedge-bush to the
west, the two ladies flying into the waggon, Bonet and Burslem buried
away somewhere; and five Chinamen, bursting out of bush, were running
wild-eyed, hot-footed, sweating, gasping gasps audible from afar,
toward the waggon.
One of them Eulalia laid low by three quick-successive bangs four yards
from the entrance-steps; the other four were hotly in, whelming the
ambulance with the raw sirocco of their breaths and frenzied presence,
fleshing a spear quick as one-two-three in the two wounded men and the
Chinese woman, who whooped a shriek, then overpowering and tearing down
the ladies: for many Chinamen did not at once butcher white women, but
idled with them awhile; and if the white woman chanced to be a saint,
or a princess, that made no difference to Chinamen.
Now, then, was the mouse amid ill cats.
However, a few seconds before Eulalia’s first yell of rage burst
from her entrails like a blast of blasting-gelatine upon the night’s
silence, Bonet and Burslem were at the ambulance-shafts, taking
careful-trembling aim lest the ladies should be shot; and soon they had
two of the Chinese shot in the waggon, and two as they were getting
away.
And now it was a question of capturing two of the moor-nags—no easy
thing; and there were the two little gipsy nags; on which four the four
rode barebacked northward, with halters, flogging the nags.
But they knew that few escaped—a new rashness of the Chinese in
the face of gun-fire now showing itself everywhere, as Paris was
then witnessing, Venice: for in neither case was any assault at all
necessary, since the population of Paris was already living on dogs
and cats, and some days’ investment must have ended it; while, as to
Venice, four Japanese cruisers stood beyond the Lido after sinking the
Austrian _Tegetthof_ and _Franz Ferdinand_, and capturing a mob of
Austrian and Italian gunboats: which cruisers, though under orders not
to shell Venice, stopped supplies from the sea (if any had come), and
had under their guns the _murazzi_ of the Lido, and the Lagoon forts.
It was only necessary, then, to wait: but waiting was no longer to
the taste of yellow men—rather dash through marshes of pigtails to a
city-gate now than tarry an hour: for, having got the taste, their
swarms dashed themselves forward, with a trembling intolerance of
obstacles, for the last bath and draught. To drink the red sea dry, to
sin now by mountains, to be crimson in iniquity, to sink, to sigh, to
die of crime—whatever kept them one second from this end they fell
upon with frenzy, making assaults in close order, whose masses the
rains of flame from the air and from forts mowed down by thousands in a
moment.
At St Cyr the guns glutted their gorges with carnage until their tired
rifling could no longer keep range.
One by one, Domon, St Germain, Versailles fell.
Before the seven batteries of the monstrous Fort de Marly massacre was
so common, and the Azrael of mortality so mawful, that at one moment
the Chinese line, advancing with scaling-ladders, wavered and shrank:
whereupon a little Japanese colonel dashed forward to take the fort
alone, calling, waving. They stood lashed by gashing gusts of bullets,
but would not go: he fell. A major dashed forward, waving, calling
_Come!_ They would not budge: he fell. A captain dashed forward to take
the fort alone, calling, waving, inviting. Still they shied at it: he
fell. But, as he fell, the yellow men yelled, pell-mell they pelted;
now red hell will not repel them; and yellow hell within twenty minutes
was the citadel.
At Cotillons the stock of ammunition was all exhausted in slaughter
before the overflow. The next day Vanves was overflowed, Ivry,
Montrouge—closer and closer like a death-malady spreading relentlessly
to the heart. Paris, frantic with panic, knew that yellow was at St
Cloud, at Putoux, at Suresnes, at Sèvres.
That same night the Venetian Canal Grande presented a strange
sight—gondolas and corpses—one throng—gondolas gaudy with lanterns of
Chinese and Japanese design, like a night of Carnival in the olden
times of Venice, only a millionfold more vermilion-tinted, splashed
with pageantry: for within some hours the Chinese were washed and at
home in a town, like old owners, and lords waddling in slippers through
inherited residences; and since Venice, like Paris and Buda-Pesth,
was intended to be the capital of one of the three great States into
which the new Europe was to be federated, greedy had been the press and
competition to get _pied-à-terre_ in it: so that such a crush of human
beings now brushed shoulders with a buzzing of bees within those _rii_
and narrow _calli_, as no city of man had ever seen.
Hour after hour the stars, the comet, saw the watch-night swarming and
gory; half the Ghetto to the north-west a conflagration glaring on
the night; all night that lunar glory of gondolas gliding through the
glooms of the gory Lagoon, clogged with throngs of goggling eyeballs,
pigtails grinning dead amid the Christian dead, all up the Grand Canal,
the Giudecca, away out to the Cemetery and Murano, without end; all
those Byzantine palaces—the Cà d’Oro, the Palazzo Foscari, dreams
of colour and _décor_—reeling unceasingly with the abomination of
desolation; all through the Giardini Pubblici prostrate lives lying
amid corpses, gorged like the cormorant with orgy, dying of licence
in wine and white flesh; all among the graves of the Cimitero; of the
Jews’ Burial-ground; up in the Campanile, the Clock Tower; down in
the vaults of St Mark’s; among the columns of San Giovanni e Paolo,
where an image of Puffa, the many-handed, a joss of eagle-headed Fé,
and of Gan, the big-bellied glutton, grinned at the Mary Magdalene of
Bergamasco, whose marble must have blushed.
Throughout Paris the next night it was the same, yellow men despising
rosewood to carouse at tables of flesh, despising eiderdown to sigh
on couches of flesh; publicly on the Grand Boulevard it raged, in the
Madeleine, Notre Dame; the Dragon-flag on the Elysée flapped.
By which time the four fugitives from St Quentin had contrived to
snatch their lives through jeopardy to within five miles of Douai; and
at about nine in the night were making their way—on foot now, since
their hungry nags had failed them, they themselves footsore, famished,
foredone—when there reached their ears that shriek of the Chinese, well
known now to them, more detested now and dreaded than very death.
A crowd of about a hundred, carousing in a cabaret two hundred yards
ahead on the left of the road, had spied them in the moonlight before
they could hide: and out they flew.
But on the right, closer to the fugitives, were three detached
houses—mansions almost: so they dashed into a gateway, locked the
gate, then through shrubbery to a door, locked it, up a stair, locked a
door, and dropped, all the four, upon a bed, to pant.
Within a minute, though, they were aware that the Chinese were scaling
the gate and garden-railings; and they darted to a window to see the
garden beginning to teem with Chinese.
A moment more and the Chinese were battering on the front, a rough row,
like the Vox Dei, heart-horrifying.
On which Eulalia in her distraction let down the jalousie with a
racket, and dashed open the _persiennes_ to shoot—rashly! revealing
where they were—and turned to snatch her weapon.
At that moment Sister Darling said to her: “Dear, don’t: it can do no
good”; but Eulalia, her face dead-blanched like a white radish, her
teeth rigid, hissed back: “Won’t it? _I’ll_ show them a bit of Irish,”
and with a kind of dance in her gait ran back to the bed for her gun.
However, she was never to fire, for in the instant that her back was
turned a shot was fired from outside, which found Sister Darling’s
heart. When Eulalia turned again to the window, it was to see Sister
Darling down; and the gun tumbled out of her hand.
At the same time Bonet was whispering: “Let us try the back—come——”
dragging at Eulalia by the arm.
But she would not go, lay over the dying girl, who was staring as
if in scare, rolling a death-ruckle in her throat, pouring it low,
hurried, like a purring rolling. And one lover’s-kiss Eulalia pressed,
wild-whispering “beloved?” and one wild press more and deep-secret
“beloved?” then by a cruel tug Bonet had her away, and they were gone
on all-fours amid bullets, not four, but three.
By a covered arbour at the back, soft-running, they made their way down
a sort of park to stables, whose doors they secured; and in there in
blackest darkness the three sat in three corners of a spacious, paved
chamber heavy with harness and saddlery, haunted with stenches of dead
horses.
And soundless through hour and hour of the dark they crouched so
apart, shivering, without prospect, but without much care any more
for the morrow, sleepily hearing as in a dream shrieks of cheer
pealing from the Chinese, who must have crowded into the house, and
were carousing; and if one of the three slipped a little into sleep,
ever, on his starting awake, the dream-shrieks reached the ear, like a
machinery acting everlastingly, afar.
But once toward morning Eulalia started awake to another sound—an
exclamation—“In the name of God, a Blériot!”
For Bonet, shuddering from cold, had risen to pace, and in a
neighbouring chamber had stumbled upon a monoplane.
He found in it a good 7-cylinder Gnome, and, moreover, he found tools,
petrol, rugs, compass.
When he examined it with matches, it seemed good throughout; and now,
clasping one of the chassis-wheels, he sat weeping.
On pulling himself together, he mentioned that it could carry two, and
no more; and set to work.
By a large doorway it was taken out into meadow-land at the
stable-back, as day was breaking, and Bonet fastened it to a larch
there with a strand of shredded rope.
But the engine’s hubbub was instantly heard by the Chinese, who hurled
themselves out of the house to see what was stirring; and quickly Bonet
leapt to his place, Burslem and Eulalia standing pale by the plane.
Not one word as to who was to be Bonet’s passenger had even now been
uttered.
“Now, Miss Bayley, all ready,” said Burslem.
The Chinese screamed at a corner of the meadow, spying them, pelting.
“You go, if you like,” said Eulalia.
“Choose quick!” cried out Bonet intolerantly, in French.
“Women and children first, lady,” observed Burslem with a hideous grin.
A shot from the Chinese chanted past Bonet’s head.
“But _why_?”—from Eulalia—“an excellent rule for clowns and cowards:
but for _us two_, surely, the question is, whose life is the more
valuable? Mine isn’t very.”
“_Vite!_” from Bonet in a shivering shriek, “or I go alone, God be my
witness!”
At which cry Burslem snatched a revolver from his pocket, and
discharged it into his right eye. The Chinese shrieking was near.
A shot tore Eulalia’s shoulder. As Burslem dropped, she sprang up
beside Bonet, her averted head turned toward Burslem, smiling him
into eternity. And Bonet hitched the engine; her strain broke the
restraining string; she tripped down the meadow merrily amid missiles
and throatings, suddenly sat fluttering as with laughter on her throne
in the air, and before long was landing safe at Dover.