CHAPTER XIV.

THE FIGHT FOR THE FORT.

The enemy still held the fort. All through the night a terrific bombardment had been maintained, and even when the first grey line of dawn began to creep across the downs the insistent fury of the guns increased rather than diminished. Major Wardlaw estimated that during the last twelve hours over eleven thousand shots had been fired from the big guns of Fort Warden, while thousands of shrapnel hurled against its fortifications from the various encircling field batteries manned by British gunners were beyond all definite calculation. At the height of the bombardment not less than 80 per minute must have been directed by way of return against the British batteries, and in this onslaught the great guns (of which there were seven at work in Fort Warden) contributed the most overwhelming and terrible results. This deafening and incessant rain of fire was directed mainly against the Castle and Fort Burgoyne, but, incidentally, it had wrought ruin and convulsion on every side. Shells falling into the town of Dover had already reduced it to heaps of tumbled masonry. Here and there great volumes of smoke rose from the wreckage of shops and houses. The Town Hall--the ancient _Maison Dieu_, founded by Hugh de Burgh, Constable of Dover, in the reign of John--having escaped destruction during the night, caught fire about daybreak, the flames, rushing upward in the morning air, watched by thousands from the western heights, to which the terrified inhabitants had fled for safety.

On the Castle Hill the bluish haze caused by the ceaseless bursting of shells and shrapnel in some measure veiled the central scene of conflict; and this haze, spreading far and wide over the landscape, presently assumed the most delicate and beautiful colours as the sun rose up and threw its shafts of light on hill and dale. When the light grew stronger, cloud after cloud of smoke was seen to rush aloft from the contending forts, and every moment the sun, with growing glory, painted these rolling billows with glorious hues of burnished gold or bronze. Here and there, while the people watched, columns of earth and chalk rose high into the air, as shot and shell ploughed deep into the soil, while flashes of fire from the bursting shells, the pale smoke rushing like steam from the shrapnels, and the leaping fountains of soil, all combined to give the beholder the impression of some terrific convulsion of nature. So extraordinary and ghastly was the general effect produced that many of the spectators believed they were witnessing a volcanic eruption allied in some way with the seismic disturbances reported to have occurred at Bath and other inland watering-places.

Yet towards the awful crater of this man-made volcano, British troops were now advancing. It had been fondly hoped by the British staff that the tremendous bombardment from the big howitzers, maintained ceaselessly during the night, would have disabled Fort Warden to such an extent that an infantry attack in the morning would meet with but feeble resistance. Very few of the officers, however, had any true conception of the enormous strength and staying power with which Wardlaw had endowed his military master-piece.

Yet the onslaught had to be made. To the Highlanders--brought over from Shorncliffe--was entrusted the honour of leading the attack on one side, while the Royal Marines, from Chatham; were simultaneously to advance on the other. The hour of trial came. Firing not a shot, but with heads bent low, creeping forward, and taking advantage of every inequality in the ground for cover, the attacking force approached the flaming portals that confronted them. It was but a short distance, for during the night the saps had been carried close to the first circle of wire entanglements. Some of the wires, moreover, had been destroyed, leaving gaps through which the Highlanders were ordered to drag light scaling ladders and approach the moat, while others pushed sandbags before them to take the invaders' fire.

Suddenly the word of command broke hoarsely on their ears. As it came from the Commanding Officer, a bullet struck him in the heart. He fell with a groan that was hardly audible. At the last word of their beloved Commander the Highlanders sprang up, and with an angry yell rushed headlong towards the moat. But narrow though the space they had to cross, the withering fire from the machine guns made it impossible to traverse it. The leading ranks, officers and men alike, were beaten down by lead as hail beats down a field of waving corn. The rest wavered, turned, and in a moment the ill-starred regiment, all that was left of it, rushed down the hill in desperate flight. Attempts to rally them were futile. Neither man nor devil could, or would, stand against that awful overwhelming hail of shot and shell.

On the other side of the fort, the Marines had approached somewhat nearer to success. Here the gaps in the wire entanglements seen at close quarters afforded some encouragement. With an inspiring cheer, the men dashed forward, their bayonets fixed; but suddenly, as if from the earth itself, sprang up an opposing line of bayonets. The gaps in the entanglement were filled with German soldiers, and in an instant the combatants were engaged, man to man, in a furious hand-to-hand encounter. Deep groans and screaming blasphemies blended with the tumult of the guns. Here and there in the mêlée, men whose bayonets were broken off clubbed their rifles and savagely battered at each other's faces; but still more ghastly than the injuries thus exchanged was the hellish work effected by the hand grenades, of which the Fort contained large quantities. These explosives, now used for the first time on English soil, blew men literally to pieces. Neither skill nor courage could avert these horrible results. The methods of the anarchist had been allowed to find scope in the warfare of civilized peoples. The bombs, wherever they struck, made mincemeat of humanity.

The Marines, like the Highlanders, had been driven back, and there came a ghastly interlude when the Germans sought to rescue their wounded and distinguish and carry in the dead. Those who had been butchered by the hand grenades had to be hastily shovelled into sacks and baskets before their remains could be removed. No pen could dare describe in detail all the revolting sights which this small battle-field in a few brief moments had revealed. Severed heads rolled down the hill, the eyes wide open, the features fixed in horror. In one spot from ten to fifteen corpses, friends and foes together, involved and twisted in a shapeless mass, were suddenly discovered in a hollow. In many instances the force of the explosions had torn the clothing from the bodies of the soldiers. Arms and legs had been wrenched from their trunks and blown away. From pyramidal heaps of mutilated English corpses stiffened fingers pointed towards the sky.

Many of the Marines who had escaped the hand grenades had had limbs clean amputated by the knife-like fragments of the high explosives ere the rush was made. In some instances the upper halves of bodies lay on the hill without marks of injury, the lower limbs having wholly disappeared. Yet terribly and suddenly as death had come to these devoted men, far more awful was the fate of those whom shell and bomb had shattered without absolutely killing. These slowly dying fragments of humanity lay moaning in their tortured state, praying as they had never prayed before for that last agony which should release them from sufferings that no tongue could utter and no imagination even picture.

Already the havoc wrought in human flesh had been accompanied with inconceivable disaster in all directions. Fort Burgoyne, its guns silenced by the more modern ordnance, was little better than a heap of ruins--ruins piled high above the dead and dying gunners. The more exposed batteries on the Western Heights had been dismantled long before the inhabitants of Dover climbed the hill and gazed across the valley. When, after the repulse of the British attack, the fury of fight was abated for a brief period, and the smoke of battle temporarily rolled away, the appearance of Dover Castle itself filled the spectators with amazement and dismay. So great was the destruction and the transformation that it was difficult to believe that what they now looked upon had any association with the great towers and massive walls which had been familiar objects to them all their lives. The Norman keep, with walls more than 20 feet thick, had been so battered as to present the appearance of a jagged range of rock. Peveril's Tower had disappeared. The Cotton Gate, rising as it did to a height of 90 feet and 460 feet above sea-level, by some miracle had escaped all damage; but the Constable's Tower was reduced to half its former height. The upper half, it was conjectured, lay crumbling in the moat below.

What had happened to the Duke of York's School, which the boys had evacuated overnight, or to the batteries that had been placed in Northfall Meadows and on the Golf Links, could only be a matter of surmise. The Pharos and St. Mary's Church so far seemed to be untouched, possibly because the gunners in Fort Warden had not deemed it worth while to waste their fire on either.

In all the awestricken throng that stood upon the Western Heights and gazed across the ruined town towards Castle Hill, none had feelings that corresponded wholly with those of Major Wardlaw. Scanning the field of operations through his glasses, his face twitched as if in actual pain. The attention of the uninformed lookers-on was constantly diverted from one thing to another, the wreck of the Castle, the crash of a roof as it collapsed in the town below, or the woolly clouds caused by bursting shrapnel, which still was being fired at intervals. But Wardlaw heeded none of the more picturesque effects. His mind, his powers of observation, his poignant feelings, were intent on causes, not effects. Every inch of the scene of operations was known to him. He knew the position and capacity of each fort and field battery. He could distinguish, where others knew no distinction, between the work of the big guns, the siege guns, howitzers, mortars, and field artillery. A sudden and terrific detonation told him that a huge naval gun had been landed from one of the great ships in the Admiralty Harbour. It must have been a work of enormous difficulty to get that gun ashore, during the night, and a still more terrific task to drag it into position to play with full effect upon Fort Warden. It was the work, as he knew, of British seamen--British seamen at their best, which happily still meant that there were none better in the world. But, more than all, his thoughts ran on Fort Warden--the Fort itself.

Nearly all his life the study of fortification had obsessed him. While he looked at people, or even talked to them, his mind had been at work on parapets, banquettes, palisades, scarp and counter-scarp. All the technicology of the art of war and of the scientific defence of permanent positions was as familiar to this Engineer Officer as are household words to household people. Fort Warden, as already indicated, was the outcome of his concentrated mental labours and his soldier's instinct. In his younger days superior officers had looked rather coldly on his zeal. He had shown that he was a young man with ideas, and ideas are unwelcome to officials who love red tape and well-established grooves.

But as years went on and slow promotion at last came to him, he had gained the ear of men in military power. Thus advanced in confidence and authority, he had been allowed almost a free hand in designing the modernized defences of Castle Hill. It was so desirable to sooth the public mind that public money had been spent upon the works without any sort of stint. Everything that the Major thought Fort Warden ought to have was there. In construction his plans had been faithfully observed. He had been allowed to make experiments of every kind. Not satisfied with earthworks, moats, wire entanglements, and bomb-proof shelters for the trenches, Wardlaw had adopted a novel system of armour plates for the protection of the Fort--plates that were produced by the use of tantalum ore alloyed with steel. This hardy metal, imported from Australia, had been proved to possess the most remarkable qualities. In itself it was heavier than iron, and could be so treated as to increase by 30 per cent. the resisting power of any armour plates previously in use for naval or military purposes.

The success of Wardlaw's designs, the wisdom of his carefully-considered plans, the selection and apportionment of warlike material (in the preparation of which the chemist played a more important part than the armourer), had been only too amply justified. Results affirmed the first principle of fortification and of the art of gunnery, which principle lay in creating and arming a position of such strength and such resources that it could be held by a body of men greatly inferior in numbers to those by whom they were attacked. Fort Warden, the great outcome of the Major's career, the splendid achievement on the strength of which he had retired from active service, thus stood justified beyond all cavil or dispute.

Yet, as he gazed towards the work of his hands, Wardlaw's heart was full of grief and bitterness. There stood the Fort in all its pride and strength; around it lay the victims of its fury; within it less than three hundred foreigners still defied thousands of British troops on British soil. Above it floated, so far, in victory, two foreign Eagles--the flags of Germany and the United States.