Part 19

He could do nothing more to assist Captain Hunter at present, so he employed his men in still further strengthening the sand-bag breast-works. The Maxims were placed in sand-bag redoubts, one at the angle between the Log Redoubt and the end of Saunderson's breast-works, and the other between these two breast-works. Both swept any approach up the harbour face of the hill by the zig-zag path, and the first also commanded the bare crest between it and Bush Hill.

Sand-bags, too, were hauled to the edge overlooking the sea, and little did the men think as they cheerfully piled them up that the Commander, studying his notebook and the sketches he had taken the day before, was debating the necessity of abandoning the hill, and the possibility of rushing one of the two forts.

No rifle fire was annoying them, no shell fire alarming them. Captain Hunter, whom they idolized, had gone to rescue the oil-drums; therefore the oil-drums would be up at the top directly, and the big gun would have the pirates at its mercy, so right cheerfully they worked, despite the soaking rain sweeping the top of the hill.

Glover was standing near the Commander, blue with cold and soaked to the skin. Cummins suddenly noticed him and his condition. "Go and help with the sand-bags, boy; you can run this time," he chuckled, and turned to watch Captain Hunter's progress below him.

He and his little party of thirty marines had disappeared among the trees and bushes, crashing their way through them, but now they were hotly engaged, and their progress could be traced, as they fought their way down, by the line of smoke puffs which rose above the bushes.

The line steadily descended towards the little spot near the sea, from which the rapid firing of more Martinis comforted him with the certainty that the destroyer's men were still guarding the precious oil. The loud reports of their big-bore rifles, however, were almost drowned by the constant crackling of the small-bore Mausers.

Had he not been certain that, by a merciful dispensation, a Chinaman can seldom be made to take aim, he would have thought it impossible for any of the little band to survive.

Now the wind brought up the sound of British cheers--he could swear to Captain Hunter's above the rest. The line of smoke puffs swept downwards, and he knew that they had joined hands with the destroyer's men.

Then came the upward struggle, and slowly they fought their way, whilst the Chinese set up a shrill yell of triumph, and the Mauser fire crackled in one continuous roar.

Still the line of black powder smoke advanced, but more slowly. Then he saw, with anxious eyes, that it was stationary. The Chinese had got in above Hunter and cut him off. He watched a single tree; the little puffs of smoke came regularly behind it; the yells of triumph redoubled.

Captain Hunter and his men could advance no farther. Could he take the tremendous risk of reinforcing them and still further weakening the little garrison at the top of the hill?

His mind was made up in a moment, and he called Williams and Saunderson to him and showed them the position of affairs.

"Take forty of your men, Williams; leave me Sergeant Haig; creep down to the left till you get on a level with them, and rush their flank. There is no hurry, and don't waste cartridges."

"Thank you, sir, my men want something to warm them."

As they filed down the hill towards the left, the two field-guns again opened fire. Bannerman at last had been compelled to haul out in the face of the gale.

"Take cover, men," Cummins sang out to the few bluejackets and marines still left to him; "their bark is worse than their bite;" and he remained in the open watching and waiting for Williams to come in touch with the enemy.

He and his party had already disappeared among the trees which had swallowed Captain Hunter and his men nearly an hour before. Ten minutes went by and nothing happened. Minutes seemed like hours, and to his tense nerves it seemed that the Chinese were closing in on Captain Hunter, and that the Martini rifle fire was slackening. Surging through his brain swept the burning thought that he had made not one, but two mistakes.

To find the gun unable properly to control the harbour was bad enough, but now his second mistake was ten times more serious. The Chinese could fight, and his whole plans had been based on the opposite belief.

For a moment his own inherent optimism and resourcefulness, bred in the bone through many generations of fighting men, deserted him. He saw the failure of his scheme, the ruin it would bring to the whole squadron, and the end of poor Helston's ambitions. Of his own fate he cared nothing at that moment, but cursed himself for leaving the sea to venture a soldier's job, and for sacrificing, to his own self-assurance, the men who had so willingly followed him.

At that moment his vivid brain even pictured the final back-to-back struggle and the sobbing panting of stricken men as one by one they fell.

Would he be the last? he wondered.

A shell burst on the ridge, and the jagged fragments screaming past him woke him from his nightmare to catch sight of Glover's scared face as he stood at his side.

Putting his hand on the midshipman's shoulder he said softly: "Glover, I am sorry; get under cover, boy."

But before Glover could move away a great burst of cheering came up from below.

Williams and Saunderson, with their forty men behind them, were charging into the flank of the unsuspecting Chinamen, and, hardly firing a shot, they were driving them like sheep from Captain Hunter's path.

Yells of pain and shrieks of agony told that they were relying on cold steel. The Martini fire broke out again with a roar, and now the line of smoke began to ascend once more.

With a gasp of relief and a funny feeling at the back of his throat, the Commander saw it coming towards him rapidly now, the whole eighty of them cheering madly.

They had got the Chinamen "on the run".

"Bring a Maxim over here, Glover! Quick, boy! we shall have them when they break into the open."

The cheering redoubled. Chinese suddenly appeared among the trees below them, doubling to left and right as Hunter burst through with a dozen or more of his men. Then came the destroyer's men with their drums of oil, Collins the Sub at their head, a knot of men carrying some mess-mates, and, bringing up the rear, Williams, Saunderson, and the marines fighting slowly, running a few yards, then dropping behind a tree and shooting downhill.

Directly the oil-drums were safe and the wounded had burst through, Hunter swung his men round and went down again, his great, joyous, bellowing cheer heard above the noise of Mauser or Martini. The Chinese gave way and fell back down the hill. Some that tried to escape to the left had to pass Sergeant Haig's redoubt, and his men knocked them over like rabbits; others swept across the right towards Bush Hill, but then the Maxim spoke with its horrid "br-br-br", and brought them down in heaps.

In less than a minute not a living Chinaman was to be seen, but a desultory fire commencing again from "Bush Hill" showed that they were still under some control.

As Captain Hunter and his party, flushed with success and breathless with their exertions, swung into the plateau, a shrapnel burst above them, and the bullets, pouring down all round them, covered them with dust. A marine fell with a yell, his thigh smashed, but no one else was touched, and Hunter ran up to Cummins, who had now recovered his composure. He was simply mad with the physical joy of fighting, and this hailstone of shrapnel bullets had simply intoxicated him.

"My country! that was a pretty bit of fighting," he roared; "worth ten years of ordinary life. I've got your oil, and we've brought every man Jack back again. There's a man on the other side I'd like to shake hands with--after my own kidney, that chap--a huge fellow with a black beard; led 'em on time after time, but those skunks of Chinamen would not follow him."

"He led the first rush," Cummins answered, trying to calm him, "and led it well, too. Have you lost many men, sir?"

"What a brute I am!" he cried, the joy of battle quickly vanishing. "I don't know exactly, but we've brought them all back. Before we came ashore I told my men that if anyone fell he should not be left, and--and they are splendid fellows, Cummins."

The casualties were serious enough. Five had been killed--two of the destroyer's and three of the _Strong Arm's_--and eleven wounded--three of these belonging to Captain Williams's party, three to the destroyer, and the other five to Hunter's party.

"That oil is worth a good deal now," said Cummins sadly.

* * * * *

Behind the gun-pit parapet Dr. Richardson busied himself with the wounded, a lieutenant of the _Strong Arm_, Gibbins by name, took charge of the gun in place of poor Pattison and commenced to fill the recoil cylinders, the less fatigued of the men carried on hauling sand-bags towards the edge overlooking the sea, whilst the remainder, thoroughly exhausted, lay down behind the breast-works.

Shells were still coming from those field-guns, but the _Strong Arm's_, reassured by the _Laird's_, who had already begun to despise them, soon learnt that they were harmless so long as they kept down behind their sand-bags.

Meanwhile preparations were being made to shell the hilltop from the guns of the cruiser which had been warped across the harbour. Her guns could not at first be elevated sufficiently to reach the top of the hill, but they were overcoming this difficulty by letting water into her on one side and giving her a list to starboard, and thus tilting her gun muzzles still farther upward.

Hunter and Cummins were anxiously watching this operation--necessarily a slow one--and it was not completed before Gibbins rushed across to them and reported the Krupp ready for action.

"We'll weigh in first, old chap!" Hunter exclaimed with glee.

A great shell, grooved and lead-coated to take the rifling, was hoisted out of the magazine, the derrick raised it to the breech, a dozen men shoved it home with a long rammer, a quarter charge of powder-bags followed it, the clumsy breech-block was slowly worked across, Gibbins sprang up to the sighting-platform and jammed in the friction-tube with its lanyard, and all was ready.

Cummins coolly examined everything till he was satisfied that nothing was wrong with gun or mounting, and then the ponderous mass of steel was laboriously trained towards the spot where lay the cruiser under the cliffs, at the opposite side of the harbour. From the sighting-platform not even her masts could be seen, and the direction had to be roughly found by means of rifle cleaning-rods stuck in a line on the edge of the intervening plateau.

Clumsy this method was, but the best available.

Cummins grasped the lanyard, the gun's crew were ordered out of the pit in case of accident, the marines, lying behind the breast-work at the edge of the plateau and in front of the gun, were cleared out of danger, and he gave it a sharp tug.

A huge cloud of smoke, a huge, bellowing roar, cubes of burning gunpowder leapt down the side of the hill, some or the sand-bags were blown over the crest, the muzzle of the gun cocked itself into the air as the gun recoiled along its slides and then gently slid forward again. Everyone rushed to the edge to see where the shell fell. Half a minute of breathless anxiety, heedless of the bullets that were flying past, and then, up on the cliffs, behind the cruiser, a balloon-shaped mass of white smoke burst out, masses of rock leapt into the air and fell splashing into the sea, and the roaring of the explosion tossed from hill to hill, and, crashing from cliff to cliff with tremendous reverberations, came up to them like thunder.

"Their game is up," shouted Hunter. "Cheer, men, cheer!"

Cummins, a quaint little rain-soaked figure, standing on the parapet of sand-bags behind the gun, and with the lanyard still in his hand, simply chuckled: "You can load again, men, she is quite safe."

*CHAPTER XXI*

*On One Gun Hill*

The Hill on Fire--Gunner Bolton, R.M.A.--I Help Dr. Richardson--Doing Well--We Stir Up the Pirates--Reporting to the "Laird"--A Yarn with Collins--A Overwhelming Rush

_Mr. Midshipman Glover relates his experiences_

I have often wondered whether or no I was really frightened.

Certainly, whilst we were climbing up that hill through bushes and trees, in the most absolute darkness, I should have been in an utter funk if I had not been obliged to stick to the Commander and do my utmost not to lose touch with him.

As far as I can remember I thought of little else but that, and to wish that he would not go so fast. When at last we had found the pathway--just as it was getting light--I was too excited to be really frightened, and afterwards, when I had to follow the Commander about the level space on the top of "One Gun Hill", as we called it, I was kept so busy taking messages that I hardly thought of the bullets, or even the shells, and was much more afraid lest the Commander should think that I was funking.

At first it was simply horrid to have to walk across, for you could hear bullets going by and making a noise just like a crack of a thin whip, and sometimes would see one strike the ground or a sand-bag just in front of you, where you would have to pass in a few seconds, and then--well, it was jolly hard work to prevent your legs from going as fast as they could go. I seemed to take up so much room, so much more than anything else near, that it seemed actually impossible for the bullets to miss my body. In fact, when they commenced shelling us, and Mr. Saunderson, who is really an immense man, turned round and told me chaffingly to stand in front of him, I thought that I actually should shield him if I did so. That feeling explains what I mean rather better than anything else I can say.

Later, however, I became so awfully tired and sleepy that things just happened, and I did what I had to do quite mechanically. When the Chinese made their first rush I was hardly even excited, and remember that I thought it the most natural thing in the world to see Hopkins fall down wounded. I was sorry for him, just as one is in a dream, and, in fact, I kept on thinking that presently I should wake up and find myself on board the _Laird_, with some silly idiot of a midshipman playing a trick with my hammock. It never even occurred to me till long afterwards that all that time the Commander had been standing in front of me to protect me.

I was very cold and very wet, and stood shivering and watching Captain Hunter trying to rescue the oil-drums, and afterwards found myself hauling sand-bags and piling them round one of the Maxims, and getting warmer every minute.

Then I remembered that the Commander had told me to do this.

When a little time afterwards he put his hand on my shoulder, with a terribly sad expression on his face, and said in a strange voice, "Glover, I am sorry," I had not the least idea what he meant, and thought that it was because I was absolutely drenched to the skin.

Of course I know now what he meant, but at the time had not the faintest notion that we were in so much danger.

What did at last really wake me was the firing of that big Krupp gun and the noise of the shell bursting on the cliff on the opposite side of the harbour, just above the cruiser which was preparing to shell us, and not far from the ledge where the Commander, Jones, and I had been hidden.

Quite close to where it burst were several little groups of Koreans--white patches against the green background. They had been watching from daybreak the attempts to recapture One Gun Hill, but now vanished out of sight, and we never saw them again.

Our second shot, five minutes later, was still nearer the cruiser, but she made no attempt to move, and began firing single guns. They had been obliged to give her a tremendous list to starboard, in order to elevate their guns sufficiently, and as her gunners could not see our Krupp gun from the decks, they had men stationed high up on the cliffs, some distance away, who signalled with flags (I could see them quite plainly) after each shot, whether it was right, left, short, or over.

Most of them went right over (they were firing shrapnel), some burst very short, only the fragments of the shell coming crashing on the ground round the gun, whilst the bullets plunged into the bushes below us, beating them down.

Many actually struck the slope of the hill before bursting, and whether it was these, or whether it was the burning cubes of gunpowder which went flying down the hill each time we fired that gun, I do not know, but presently the bushes and undergrowth began to smoulder, and the smoke, all the denser because they were damp, was driven down towards the town by the wind.

This in time increased the clear space below the breastworks, but the smoke made our shooting all the less accurate, did not hide us at all, either from the two field-guns or the cruiser, and unfortunately concealed the movements of the Chinese behind it.

I suppose that Captain Hunter or the Commander never thought of that at the time, otherwise they might have stamped the fire out when it first began to burn.

"Go and get something to eat," the Commander had told me; "I sha'n't want you for half an hour." So I had gone across to Sergeant Haig's breast-work, and was lying down close to a fire his men had made, and huddled up against the sand-bags to find some shelter from the wind and rain.

I was feeling precious hungry again, so, unfastening my haversack, I broke off a big hunk of that home-made cake. It was jolly good, and I had a good pull at my water-bottle; old Mellins had filled it with weak tea. It was jolly hard work pulling out the stopper, for my fingers were so numb with the cold.

I broke off another piece of cake and gave it to the marine lying next to me. It was Gunner Bolton, with his rifle pointing through a loophole and his finger on the trigger. He turned round into an easier position, and after a few bites said: "D'ye think, sir, as 'ow I shall get into trouble about that 'ere gun?

"You see, sir, it was just like this. I'd been bringing up the rear and got rather be'ind'and, what with one thing an' another, and in them thick bushes, it being so dark an' all, I jest lost mysel' and couldn't no'ow find the rest of 'em. So I thinks to mysel', 'Jest obey orders', and when you're lost, as the Commander said, 'Jest climb and climb'.

"Well, that was what I did, sir," he continued, with a half-anxious, half-humorous expression, "and I climbed and I climbed till, blow me! I simply fell over them sandbags, and not a savidge anywhere could I see. So I jest lights my pipe and stops there, knowing the Commander would be along in no time. But you see, sir, I've rayther done 'im out of 'is show, and my mates are rayther furious about it too.

"I wish I'd 'ung on to the party, an' then there wouldn't 'ave been none of this 'ere trouble."

He munched his cake solemnly and then added slyly: "That 'sentry-go' business, sir, that's what riled 'em. That was just for effect, I don't mind telling you, sir."

"That's all right, Bolton," I told him. "You won't hear any more about it from the Commander, I'm sure of that."

"Well, I 'opes you're right, sir; an' if you'll look arter this 'ere rifle of mine I'll jest see if there ain't a little o' that 'ot cocoa left."

He crawled away, scraped a little out of the big mess-tins, warmed it over the fire in his own tin cup, and brought it back to me.

It was jolly refreshing, I can tell you, and warm and oily.

He took his rifle from me and watched me drink.

"You'll put in a good word for me, sir, when we gets aboard the _Laird_; now, won't you, sir?"

I promised that I would do so, but could not help smiling.

"You see that 'ere Chinaman?" he said presently, jerking his thumb towards a motionless blue heap which lay about a hundred yards away along the crest--one of those who had bolted away from Captain Hunter. "I shot 'im, sir; knocked 'im all of a 'eap. Caught 'im in the upper works I did, sir, an' 'e jest toppled over an' over an' never moved a 'air, though there I was all waiting, with another cartridge jammed in, in case 'e did.

"Never moved a 'air," he kept repeating softly to himself, evidently vastly contented with his marksmanship, "an' with that 'ere rifle too," and he kept patting its breech.

"Eh! look at that, sir!" he said, pointing down to the harbour, just after the Krupp gun had fired again, and jumped to his feet, waving his rifle over his head and cheering loudly, as did the others, for the shell had landed, fair and square, in the cruiser's stern, and seemed to have practically wrecked her.

Every man on top of the hill roared himself hoarse.

However, they sank down behind the sand-bags again, for they had drawn a rapid fire from "Bush Hill" and the field-guns.

I watched the great clouds of black smoke rolling up from the cruiser.

"If that ain't pluck, call me a coal-shovelling stoker!" cried Bolton, as the big fo'c'stle gun fired again before our Krupp had time to reload, and the shell burst just below the crest.

We ducked our heads behind the sand-bags, and the fragments tore up the ground.

"There's a Englishman a-running that show, sir; none o' your spotted Dagos, I'll be bound."

He was just a little too talkative for me, so I went away, Sergeant Haig smiling grimly as I left. "Haven't had much to do this side yet, sir."

I ran across to the rear of the big gun just as it fired again.

That shot was short, and whilst they were reloading her the cruiser fired two more rounds; but our next shell struck her farther forward, bringing down her funnel and foremast and crumpling her up like match-wood.

We could see them taking to their boats and pulling ashore, and the men yelled again with delight, for although her shells had done very little mischief, and had only wounded one man--a marine behind the "Log Redoubt"--the noise of their bursting shells was intensely unpleasant and disconcerting.

The big Krupp was now turned on the cruisers lying to the right of the town, but these were so much closer in and right down under the land that it was still more difficult to drop shell anywhere near them.

Of course we could not see anything of them from the gun itself, and had to chance more or less the direction and also the powder charge, trying first three bags of powder, which sent the shell almost over the back of the forts at the entrance, and then two bags, which did not send it far enough, but made it go ricocheting down the side of the hill before it burst near the bottom. We tried elevating the sights a little, and gradually began to drop our shells with some amount of precision.

The _Hong Lu_ was, of course, the ship we were most anxious to hit, because she was the only ship which was really good for any serious fighting.

I was watching the men working like demons inside the gun-pit, hauling the big shell and the bags of powder from the magazines, and training her with the clumsy tackles, when presently Dr. Richardson called me.

He had found a little hollow in the side of the hill overlooking the sea, and there he had brought all the wounded men and was busy among them still, with monkey-jacket off and sleeves rolled up.

He was bandaging a marine who had just been struck by a shrapnel bullet.

It had struck him a slanting blow on the back of his head, and he sat there gazing stupidly in front of him, supporting himself mechanically with his hands as he swayed unsteadily.

When he had finished the bandage, Dr. Richardson lowered him on his back in the grass, and injected something into his arm with a syringe which the sick-berth steward handed him.