Part 23

Another party tried unsuccessfully to extinguish the fire aboard the _Hong Lu_, but had to leave her to her fate, for the flames had taken firm hold of her and were spreading rapidly towards the magazines.

It was quite dark before these precautions were complete, and meanwhile Dr. Fox, with his escort of fifty men, was hurrying to the top of the hill, bearing more ammunition and the urgently-needed surgical dressings.

He had landed far from the town, and, giving it a wide berth--for already the sounds of rioting and tumult rose from it--had struck the zigzag path just as daylight failed.

But few natives had been met, and these had fled precipitately.

Dr. Fox pressed on up the hill, aided by the _Laird's_ search-light, which lighted up the path ahead of him, made still more slippery and treacherous by the heavy rain now falling. Urged to his utmost exertions by the knowledge that he and his men were urgently wanted, he scrambled on, stumbling every now and then over the bodies of dead Chinamen and over rifles which had been thrown away in their flight, and now lay scattered in great numbers on the path.

At last he came out into the open in front of the breastworks, and feeble cheers greeted him from the remnants of the defenders. The search-lights of the ships lighted up the whole of that charred open space below the crest, and hundreds of prostrate bodies dotted it, thickly piled, literally in heaps, where the Maxims had swept them down in their last mad rush, their yellow faces horrible in the beams of the light. Right up to the sand-bags they lay, giving proof of the fierceness of their charge, whilst the dark eyes and haggard, drawn faces of the marines and bluejackets behind the breast-work showed only too plainly the terrible struggle they had made to defend it.

Cummins came forward with blanched, anxious face, his left arm bound across his chest.

"Thank God! you're come. Poor Richardson was killed three hours ago, and we have thirty men wanting you."

The worn-out defenders had roused themselves for a minute or two to welcome their comrades, but then lay down exhausted, and, with all danger past, fell asleep immediately, drenched though they were by the bitter cold rain which swept moaning across the plateau.

Nobody on that bleak hilltop will ever forget the night which followed.

The men were too utterly wearied to carry down the wounded, even if this had been possible. No one thought of leaving the dead unguarded, so the fifty men whom Dr. Fox had brought hastily pulled down the Log Redoubt which Captain Williams had maintained so stoutly, and with the timber made two bonfires under the lee of the gun-pit parapet. By their light and that of the search-light Dr. Fox dressed the wounded who hobbled stiffly over from where they had fallen, or were carried to him.

The dead, too, were collected, reverently laid together, and covered with the big tarpaulin from the Krupp gun--Captain Hunter, Dr. Richardson, eleven marines, the signalman who had been the first to fall, the sick-berth steward who had been killed with Dr. Richardson during that fight round the gun, whilst trying to protect the wounded, and five blue-jackets.

The Commander resolutely refused aid till the last, and when his turn came Dr. Fox found that he had a terrible gash on the left shoulder--from a cutlass--cutting clean down to the collar-bone and shoulder-blade, and his arm was quite helpless. "Another inch, and you would have bled to death," said Dr. Fox grimly. "The bones saved you."

"I dodged my head in time, or it would have caught me there," said Cummins, raising a feeble chuckle; but then he fainted through loss of blood and sheer exhaustion.

Saunderson had a bullet through his chest, and lay very still, wrapped tightly round with a bandage, and too worn-out and numbed with cold to worry about his condition.

"You'll be all right," Dr. Fox told him, and covered him with a blanket; "only don't move till morning."

* * * * *

Down below every corner of the harbour was being searched by the lights of the ships, for Schmidt was still at large, and there was no knowing what devilry he might devise.

The _Hong Lu_, burning fiercely, threw a red glare over the hills and turned the harbour to a blood colour, and from time to time tremendous explosions on board her quenched the flames momentarily, but they leapt out again more furiously than ever.

From the town itself came the angry buzz of shouting and yelling; rifle shots rang out in a jerky, spasmodic crackling, and it was evident that the natives, emboldened by hunger, by the desire to save their own possessions, or by the lust of looting, had gradually crept back and were now fighting among themselves.

Presently the horrors of the night were intensified by flames springing from the go-downs and warehouses near the water's edge. In half an hour they were well alight, burning fiercely, and, fanned by the wind, the flames spread to the bamboo-matting huts, leaping from one to another with their fiery tongues till the whole lower part of the town was one roaring furnace. The flames and the black smoke blowing across the lurid harbour almost hid the search-lights of the ships.

It was a weird and frightful spectacle, fit end to an awful day.

* * * * *

Far from exulting in its success, Helston's squadron that night was sunk in gloom darker than the acrid clouds of black smoke sweeping through its rigging, for the names of the killed and wounded had been signalled with flash-lamps from the hill, and posted up on each lower deck was the grim list, the roll of killed beginning with Captain Hunter, idolized by officers and men alike, and ending with Gunner Bolton, the corner man in the _Laird's_ Nigger Minstrel Troupe. His mess-mates would chaff him no more "that he had done them out of a show".

Even Ping Sang was not happy, and wrung his hands as he saw the flames devour the warehouses, crammed, as he guessed only too accurately, with his own merchandise, and implored--at times almost commanded--Helston to endeavour to save them.

But Helston was obdurate--not another man would he risk; and though he did send two steam-boats to haul off a big steamer lying alongside the pier under the town, and they succeeded in towing her away before the flames reached her, he resolutely refused to land another man either to quell the riot or subdue the fire.

Even now he was anxious about Cummins and Dr. Fox, and "stood by" all night with a couple of hundred men, to go himself to their assistance if the hill were again assailed.

In the intervals of smoke he could see the flickering bonfires they had lighted on top of the hill, and round which they were huddled waiting for the morning. One incident broke the strain of that terrible night. It was when the clouds of smoke were densest that suddenly a man aboard "No. 2", which was lying farthest out from shore, sang out that he had seen a sail show black above the low land near the narrow outlet.

He lost sight of it behind the driving smoke, and when the view had cleared again and a search-light had swept towards it, a junk could plainly be seen bending and staggering under the fierce gusts of wind which whirled down on her as she cleared the island. A rain squall shut her out, and when it had passed no further trace of her could be seen.

Mr. Lang thought rightly that Schmidt himself was aboard her, and made a signal asking permission to endeavour to cut her off to leeward of the island, but Helston refused to allow him to venture out--the risks were too great--and doubted not that the helpless, clumsy junk could well be left to the short shrift of that howling gale outside.

Even his own ships must have been dispersed that night, and he gave fervent thanks, where thanks were due, that success had been granted him, and that his squadron lay in safety inside the harbour.

Schmidt it indeed was who, with some of his boldest men, had seized the junk under cover of the smoke, cut her grass hawser, towed her silently with a dinghy till she had reached the outlet, hoisted her bamboo-matting sails till he had cleared the land, and then let her run before the raging gale under bare poles.

How he at last reached land, gathered more men round him, and spread terror through the island waters of the Chusan Archipelago, must be told another day.

*CHAPTER XXV*

*The Fruits of Victory*

Oh, the Pity of It!--We Find Hopkins--Helston has Suspicions--Helston's Speech--A "Stand Easy"--Ping Sang Departs--We Hand Over our Ships--Homeward Bound--The Admiral Speaks his Mind

_Dr. Fox concludes his experiences_

If I had only known that I should have to spend the whole night on top of that hill, I should never have been such a fool as to volunteer.

The young Surgeon of the _Strong Arm_ was every whit as capable of doing the work as I was, and his youth would have carried him through the night's exposure without harm. As it was, I always date the commencement of my rheumatism from that horrible night, and never cease regretting that at the moment when Helston showed me the signal from One Gun Hill, and I read of the death of my Surgeon, Richardson, and of the wounded lying there without anyone to look after them for the last three hours, my common sense should have failed me momentarily.

Ugh! How it rained and blew! That zigzag path was a miniature torrent, and my feet slipped backwards in the squelching mud at every pace. The idiot, too, who was training the _Laird's_ search-light thought, I have no doubt, he was lighting my way; but he kept his beam fixed on me and the men who went with me, with the result that I was nearly blinded. The shadows were made still more intense, and it was more difficult than ever to avoid stumbling over the bodies of the dead Chinamen which littered the path.

Two hours' hard work it was before the wounded were patched up and made fairly ship-shape.

The Mauser bullet wounds did not bother me much, but quite a number of men had deep flesh wounds inflicted by cutlasses, swords, or bayonets during the hand-to-hand fighting, and it does not require much imagination to understand the difficulty--the impossibility, in fact--of making a good job of these, dressing them by the unsteady light of the _Laird's_ search-light, with the rain pouring in torrents and driving almost horizontally across the top of the hill before the gale.

As each case was finished, and the poor fellow, blue with cold (the skin of their hands and faces was wrinkled like a washerwoman's hands), was laid down somewhere in the lee of the dripping sand-bags, I injected morphia to ease his pain, and could only hope that he would be sufficiently alive in the morning for us to get him safely down to the ships, where he might have a chance of being properly looked after.

Little Cummins had about the worst wound of the lot, and even if he managed to pull through, I had little hope that his left arm would be of much use to him.

However, he tried to be cheery, especially when I told him that young Glover was safe and sound aboard the _Laird_, and gave one or two of his irritating chuckles before he fainted. He then lay quiet for the rest of the night. There was no need to give him any morphia, for he was absolutely "played out".

Saunderson, with a bullet through his right lung, did not worry me much, because so long as he kept still and was tightly bandaged, nothing more could be done for him, and his grand physique would carry him safely through the night's exposure.

Things were made more comfortable when the men who had come with me pulled some logs across from one of the breast-works and made a fire close to the Krupp gun parapet, and probably more lives were saved by this means than by anything I did.

The men who had defended the hill all day were now fast asleep, most of them absolutely unprotected from the cold rain, so I made my fellows bring them nearer to the fire. Many were so exhausted that they were carried across without being awakened. In fact, it was so difficult to distinguish the dead from the living, that they actually carried over two dead men and laid them down round the fire, nor was their mistake discovered till morning.

At last I finished, and had time to crouch down behind some sand-bags and managed to light a pipe, shivering with cold and cursing myself for a fool for ever having been induced to join Helston in his mad enterprise.

The gale shrieked and howled; the rain stung my face. Seawards, out of the pitchy blackness of the night, the waves bellowed as they pounded the foot of the hill in one incessant roar; the burning ships and warehouses, the crackling of musketry in the town below, the constant explosions from the doomed ships, all made of the harbour a very inferno, from out of which the cold, clear search-light flashed pitilessly on the slaughter-house round me.

Twenty English and two hundred or more Chinamen lay there sleeping their last long sleep.

Oh, the pity of it all!

My worst enemy could not accuse me of being sentimental, and that night all feeling whatever seemed numbed; but as I recognized the dead faces of Hunter, Richardson, and a dozen men whom I knew, the only thought was one of bitterness that men should throw away their lives so comparatively uselessly, and the selfishness of it all made me feel almost angry with them.

Hunter's family I knew. He left a wife and two children. Richardson had only recently married; and little did they reckon, they and the other poor fellows, when they volunteered for this expedition in their lust for change, for excitement, for self-glorification or chance of promotion, the misery they were to inflict.

Who bears the bigger share when the man goes out to war?

Is it the man, with his cares forgotten as the shores of England slip down below the horizon, with the hot blood coursing through his body and the fighting instinct of the male animal to bear him along, or is it the woman he leaves behind him--the mother, wife, or sweetheart--who is left to her humdrum daily duties, with her heart full of empty pains and aching fears, to hope and long and dread for news, day after day, week after week?

It seems foolish to write this, but all through that ghastly night, turn my thoughts how I would, they ever came back to the bitterness, the selfishness, the pity of it all.

Every now and again some wounded man wanted attention--one man became delirious, and at intervals uttered horrible shrieks. Pattison also became delirious, and I had to keep a man watching lest he should tear off his bandages.

About three in the morning one of my men thought he heard a cry for help down the sea slope of the hill, and we searched by the light of the signal lantern for nearly an hour, but found no one.

No longer, no more terrible night, have I ever spent; but at last it did end--the darkness lessened, the uncanny search-light was switched off, and daybreak gradually revealed the gruesome sights which had been but half seen and only partially conjectured before.

Fortunately both the doctors of the _Strong Arm_ came up to relieve me an hour after daylight, and I quickly scrambled down the hill, slipping and sliding in the mud.

I met Helston on the way down, and his face lighted up with relief when he saw me, and I was able to give him a fairly cheerful account of the wounded. He had landed with a couple of hundred men and driven the mob of Chinamen out of what was left of the town, and was now on his way to Hopkins's bungalow, guided by Hi Ling, the head boy.

"Come along with us, Doc, old chap. I want you to see Hopkins before you go off to the ship, if it is not too late."

We were close to the European bungalows, and Hi Ling led us straight to the one Hopkins inhabited, going on ahead of us.

As we approached we saw that everything was in disorder. Furniture, clothes, books, and papers were strewn all over the verandah, and a dead Chinaman lay sprawling half in, half out of a window.

"Looted during the night," I thought, and saw that Helston also thought so, and neither of us expected to find the American alive.

Hi Ling met us on the verandah, wringing his hands and moaning. We pushed aside a bamboo curtain and followed him into a room where everything was in still greater confusion, a trestle-bed overturned, drawers ransacked and their contents scattered, and lying on the floor was Hopkins himself, with a dead Chinaman beside him. The one we had seen from outside had probably been killed as he tried to escape.

Both had bullet wounds, and had evidently been killed by the revolver Hopkins still held in his clenched hand.

He was quite dead, and I must confess that I felt much relieved, because nothing could have saved him, and also I did not want him to speak to Helston of Milly, as I feared he might have done, for Helston was of such a peculiar disposition, that I was very anxious that he should know nothing about the photograph or the will which Hopkins had made in her favour--nothing, at any rate, till I had got him safely home.

I hurriedly examined Hopkins, and whilst doing this tried to find the photograph of which Glover had told me; but it was not near him, only the crumpled-up piece of paper which Helston had signed on young Glover's safe return.

Poor fellow! the knowledge that his will was safe may have cheered his last moments.

We prepared to lift the body and place it decently on the bed, but, unfortunately, whilst we were righting the trestle-bed the photograph fell on the floor, and though I hastily tried to seize it, Helston stooped before I did and picked it up.

His face became rigid as he recognized it, and I saw his hand shaking as if he had an attack of ague, but in a few moments he recovered himself and gently laid it on the table.

"Help me to lift him, Fox," he said in a husky voice, looking at me suspiciously, and we laid Hopkins on his bed and left Hi Ling to prepare his master for burial.

The faithful Chinaman was actually crying. I had never seen a Chinaman cry before.

Hardly had we gained the verandah before Helston stopped, turned abruptly, and went back again. Through the open window I saw him place the photograph in Hopkins's breast, inside his pyjamas.

He rejoined me immediately, and said in a strained, hard voice: "What is the meaning of it all, Fox? You seem to know something about it. Tell me, for God's sake!"

I thought it best to tell him all I knew, and did so.

As I feared, he magnified the very little that I could tell him, and would not believe that I knew no more.

Poor chap! his face was drawn and haggard as he rapidly questioned me in a jerky, constrained manner, trying vainly to conceal his agitation, and darting suspicious glances at me.

"Did you know anything of this before we left England?"

"Nothing. I knew that they had met. Nothing else."

"But had you no suspicions?"

That made me angry. I hate being badgered.

"Look here, Helston, all I know I have told you. That he should fall in love with Milly is nothing remarkable. A dozen men, to my knowledge, are, or pretend they are, in love with her, and as to the photograph, why, every girl thinks the gift of a picture of herself quite sufficient a reward for that."

"Yes, perhaps; but there must have been something in it if he has left her all his money."

"Oh, confound you, don't be such a fool!" And, thoroughly irritated, I left him to climb his way wearily to the top of the hill, whilst I went off to the _Laird_ to get something to eat, a bath, and an hour's sleep. But for that nine stone, more or less, of frilled and furbelowed Milly, Hunter would not be lying dead on the hill above, nor Richardson either, and without Richardson I was left single-handed, just when I wanted him most. I wished most devoutly that Helston and I had never saved the life of that avaricious old Chinaman, Ping Sang, ten years ago.

The first thing I did when I went aboard the _Laird_ was to get the First Lieutenant to send half a dozen men ashore to bury Hopkins behind his bungalow, and then I had a hot bath and turned in, and slept like a log till I was called an hour later.

I felt better after that, and was hard at work for the rest of the day preparing one of the cleanest of the merchant ships--the _Hoi Feng_--for the wounded, and by night we had brought them all down from the hill and safely aboard her, sending to her the wounded still on board the _Strong Arm_ and our own ship as well.

But for half an hour for dinner I did not stop working all day, and what with our own people and the wounded Chinamen, who began creeping back to the town in great numbers, we had enough to do and to spare.

It was nearly midnight before I finally turned in, and at two o'clock Jeffreys, the Sub-lieutenant, woke me up and told me that the Captain was walking up and down the quarter-deck in the rain, and would I speak to him and try to make him go below, as no one else dare approach him.

He was walking up and down with long strides, his hands clasped behind his back, his head drooped between his shoulders, and his eyes vacantly staring ahead of him.

He seemed to wake, as if from sleep, when I put my hand on his shoulder (his monkey-jacket was wet through).

"And this is the moment Bannerman chooses to ask me for the _Strong Arm_," he said fiercely, "and poor Hunter not even buried yet. How I do despise that man, and wish, with all my heart, that I could give her to Cummins; but he won't be fit for duty for weeks, and is junior to Bannerman, so I suppose Bannerman must have her. It makes me boil over with anger to think of him stepping into Hunter's shoes."

This was not, I knew well enough, the real cause of his discomposure, but I was only too glad that his thoughts should be turned into another channel.

"He'll be stepping into yours if you don't take more care of yourself and get below out of this rain," I told him.

Ultimately I managed to induce him to undress and go to bed; but his mental condition seemed very unstable, and I much feared that the strain of the whole expedition would result in his complete break-down.

However, he slept soundly enough after that, and was much more composed in the morning.

That day every man who could be spared from the squadron was marched to the top of One Gun Hill, and there Hunter, Richardson, and their men were buried, and their graves marked by rough wooden crosses, with their names carved on them.

Three volleys were fired. The buglers of the squadron sounded a melancholy Last Post, and they were left there with that grim bullet-splashed Krupp gun to guard them.

The expedition had been successful.

It was Helston who read the burial service, and before the men marched down to their ships he made them a short address as they stood on the plateau in a hollow square round him. He always showed to advantage on these occasions with his tall figure, commanding features, and resonant voice.

"Officers and men of the Royal Navy and Royal Naval Reserve," he said--"we have paid the last honours to those of our comrades who lie buried here on the summit of the hill they defended so valiantly, and no words that I can say will add to their honour.

"They have, by their courage and devotion, enabled this expedition to be completely successful, and now that our return to England will not long be deferred, I want to say two things to you.

"Do not forget them.

"When we leave them here on this lonely hilltop standing in the midst of a distant ocean, sometimes think of them.

"If fate had ordained that any of you standing round me should have been now lying amongst them, you would have wished to be remembered by your mess-mates.