Brown on Resolution (17 page)

So that
Leopard
and her attendant light cruiser
Penzance
had passed out of the West Indies and the cognizance of the German agents there, and was even now making the passage of the Canal, the first ship of all Britain’s Fleet to make use of the waterway—one month open, only. The whining voice on Herr Schmidt’s telephone had told him of her passing Gatun lock, and now, while Schmidt was broadcasting his warning to all who might read it, she was going through the Miraflores lock and her bow was wet with the salt water of the Pacific. Her twenty-four knots and her 12-inch guns meant death to any German ship on that ocean; small wonder, then, that Herr Schmidt received the news so gravely, and small wonder that he prayed to his German God that the electrical disturbances of the Pacific would not prevent the reception of the warning he was sending out. With the damp, sticky heat calling forth the sweat from every pore he bent again and again to his duty, his masterful hands tapping out the staccato Morse at regular half hour intervals. He did his duty thoroughly, as every German did. From down below came the faint thud-thud of the engine and the deep hum of the dynamo; the shrill whine of the mosquitoes circling round the sweating head blended with the hum. They bit the back of his thick neck and they sought out his uncovered ankles.

A
LBERT
B
ROWN HAD
spent a weary night. Before morning he had used the last of his water, and his thirst occupied nearly all his thoughts. His hunger had led him to eat some of his tinned provisions, and that, of course, increased his thirst inordinately. From the cessation of the noise of the riveting on board
Ziethen
he deduced that repairs were completed, but as long as a landing party was on shore it was his duty to go on fighting and keep it occupied, and so detain
Ziethen
longer still at Resolution. He fought down his thirst, and he fell now and again into a troubled sleep, from which he awoke each time with a start and listened to the clamorous noises made in the otherwise still night by the landing party.

It is difficult to imagine the condition of the surface of Resolution. Think of a stretch of mud exposed to the sun. It cracks in all directions, breaking up into small cakes. The lava of Resolution has done the same thing; the pieces of lava of which it is composed are of much the same size and shape as a dining-room table would be if it were solid down to the end of its legs, and the cracks between the pieces vary in depth from one to ten feet. Now realize that the edges of each cake are sharp as knives, and that the surfaces of each cake are seamed with minor cracks whose edges are equally sharp. Add to this the facts that landslides and earthquake action have tumbled the blocks over each other higgledy-piggledy, and that the general slope of the whole mass is on one side steeper than the roof of a house and on the other nearly as steep. Finally, dot the whole slopes with intensely spiny cactus, and a faint mental picture can be formed of the difficulty of progress over them in the dark, especially when hampered by thirst on a hot night. A hundred yards in an hour is a high speed—six hundred yards in six hours is impossible.

This was the lesson which each officer of
Ziethen
had to learn in turn, and which each refused to accept as truth from his junior. The Commander doubted what the Lieutenant said about it, and Captain von Lutz, who, of course, did not leave his ship, doubted both the Commander and the Lieutenant. When morning came and found Brown still alive and untaken (he informed every one of the fact by sending a couple of bullets along
Ziethen
’s bridge, narrowly missing the officer of the watch), pleasant expectation on board changed to furious consternation.

The semaphore came into action to goad the unhappy Commander with a proper sense of his failure. Captain von Lutz interfered with the plans of the Commander, and abruptly sent the last fifty men who could be spared the work of the ship in a dash for the inner shore in assault upon the place where he judged Brown to be. He was only one hundred yards out in his estimate of the line; that was good judgement, not bad, considering that he had only the noise of rifle shots echoing from a cliff to guide him, and that
Ziethen
, thanks to her turn away, was now nearly half a mile from Brown.

Brown saw the boats coming and turned his rifle upon them, but now, with his teeth chattering with fever and his hands trembling, he could not make even moderately good practice. He knew that Fate was close upon him as he looked along the rifle barrel and saw the foresight dancing like a live thing in the U of the backsight, and as shot after shot went wide. But the rifle is a sweet tool, and gives of its best even in bungling hands as far as in it lies. Twice Brown loosed off, almost by accident, at the right moment, and each time a man in one of the boats collapsed upon his thwart. Two casualties could not stop the boats. They rushed in to the foot of the cliff and the boats crews bundled out, just as in the first misguided attempt, scattering a little swarm of
Amblyrhincus
—marine iguanas—who had been comfortably feeding on seaweed at the water’s edge regardless of the din of battle echoing round the island.

Even at a hundred yards Brown found that he made but poor practice. He dropped two men only in five shots, and then, reaching into his pouches to refill his magazine, he realized that only two of them were full; he had only twenty rounds left. With such a small reserve he knew that he could hardly stop this close attack—and the one which must develop soon out on his left would be able to push forward unopposed. It was the last, desperate death grapple. Brown’s lips parted in a harsh grin so that the black cracks upon them showed in deep contrast with his white teeth. He pulled his failing strength together for one more effort, steadied his weak limbs, and tried to shoot the attackers down deliberately, one by one.

More than one of the struggling attacking party dropped, but far more by reason of the difficulties of the ascent than in consequence of the casualties the forward impetus died away. just as before the climbers crouched down in hollows and crannies; from the sound of Brown’s firing they had formed some idea of his position, and they began to fire back at him. Once more Brown heard the sharp noise of bullets passing close beside him, and once more little puffs of lava dust arose here and there where the bullets struck. But on this occasion the attack had begun farther off to one side and Brown was not perched quite so high up. So that his position was not nearly so dominating, and he could not overlook the lumps of rock behind which lay his enemies. Only here and there could he see small portions of the bodies of the men firing at him, and in his shaking condition he could not hit these with certainty or anything approaching certainty. He caused another two casualties, but these did not deter the forty men who were firing at him, and when he had filled his magazine with his last cartridges he had to keep these in reserve to use against the last rush. He lay as close to the lava as he could, waiting in uncomplaining patience for the end to come, while the bullets crackled and sang all round about him.

Soon his quiescence was noted by those below; the bolder and the stronger among them heaved themselves up and made little advances up the face of the cliff from one block to another, out of one crevice into the next. Before long most of the line was bellying forward, up the cliff and working along it, emboldened by the cessation of Browns fire. Only half a dozen men, the less energetic or the fainter hearted, still lay crouched in their cover and maintained hectic fire on the patch where they thought Brown lay. They wasted ammunition at an amazing rate, but they made an encouraging noise even if they did nothing else. Brown, peering with one eye over the edge, could see two or three men actually only twenty yards below him and fifty yards away. Soon one of them would get a clear sight of him, and that would be the end. He felt no resentment either against Fate or against the men who were about to take his life; he had done all he could.

At that very moment the battle was interrupted. A tremendous braying from
Ziethen
’s siren called everyone’s attention clamorously to the signal which was being wig-wagged rapidly and repeatedly from her bridge semaphore. It was the general recall.

For some minutes the attackers hesitated. It was hard to go back when success was so close at hand. But the siren brayed again, and the semaphore gesticulated feverishly. No one could act in independence of orders so definite and so oft repeated. Reluctantly the officer commanding the landing party blew his whistle and the attackers turned back down the cliff, crawling back perilously, dropping down little precipices, more slowly than they would have gone had their effort been successful. Brown saw them go, and as a last effort he raised himself and sent a bullet through the shoulder of the officer in command—which had the very desirable effect of delaying the retreat while the landing party turned and wasted much further ammunition upon him until further trumpetings of
Ziethen
’s siren recalled them to duty. They dropped down to the boats, lifted in their wounded and dead, and pulled slowly back to the cruiser.

Nevertheless it was not the evacuation of the island by the landing party which took up so much time; the real delay was caused by the huge, useless, straggling mob on the outer face. After the Commander in charge had read the signals from the vantage point on the crest he had so painfully gained, he had still to pass the word for retreat throughout the length and breadth of his straggling command, and having done so he still had to get his men down to the beaches. Most of them had been straying loose over Resolution for nearly forty-eight hours; they were dispirited, lame, fatigued, and most woefully undisciplined. Many of the lazy and insubordinate among them had found crannies here and there and were stretched out fast asleep in some tiny area of shade. In the blinding noonday heat even the best of the men moved slowly when the heart was taken out of them by the order to retreat, and many of them strayed back in directions quite opposite to the one the Commander desired. The frightful heat of the rocks, enough to blister a bare hand laid upon them, discouraged activity; men who would struggle cheerfully forward into action would soon cease to struggle when defeat, and that by a single man, had to be admitted. The Commander and the Lieutenant raved and swore as much as their dry throats permitted, while the sweat drenched their soiled ducks; the petty officers struggled to keep the men within earshot of them on the move; but it was a painful, hopeless task. A man a hundred yards away might as well be ten miles away for all the use it was giving orders to him—there was no going back to him without wasting another hour.

To the wretched Commander on the crest the hours after noon seemed to race by; the sun seemed to sink towards the horizon at three times its usual speed, while the messages spilt out by the accursed semaphore became more and more caustic. He watched the incredibly slow progress of his men down to the boats with fever consuming his soul. There seemed no end to the white-clad figures who came into sight one after the other, round the bulge of the island. at ten-minute intervals—and some of them were actually still trying to make their way up to the crest instead of down to the boats..

Seaman Muller, the ship’s bad character, came struggling along the top of the crest past the Commander. His feet were very sore and his clothes were in tatters, and his gait was, to use a homely simile, like that of a cat on hot bricks. With his rifle hitched over his shoulder he was picking his way along the more easy stretch of small lava at the top the island. He came within fifty yards of the blaspheming Commander, who shouted to him to get away diagonally; down the slope to the boats, but Seaman Muller made an inaudible reply—he was not a very disciplined character at the very best of times. He was certainly not going to plunge down into that awful inferno of rocks and cactus until he had to. He would keep along the crest until he was above the boats, and then he would perhaps, graciously go down the steep slope. Until then he was going to keep to this easier part of the island—easier, but most uneasy. He hitched his equipment about him and continued the agonizing effort of struggling up and down the lava blocks.

A hundred yards past the Commander he stopped to rest. He sat down where a lava block now cast a fair amount of shade, thanks to the setting of the sun. He mopped his streaming face; he considered his thirst and went off into a happy dream, imagining one hundred ways of quenching it, in none of which water took any part whatever. And as he allowed these delightful visions to play over him his eye roamed about carelessly over the tangle of cliff across the arc of the lagoon. A quarter of a mile away, one-third the way up the cliff he seemed to see a speck of something which was neither cliff nor cactus. It might be the head and shoulder of a man who was kneeling up and peering round about over the top of a block of lava. Seaman Muller unslung his rifle and threw himself upon his face. He slipped a cartridge into the breech. The red splendour of the setting sun illuminated the speck of target presented to him. Muller was neither a good shot nor a musketry enthusiast. He took aim and fired just as he would have thrown a stone at a stray cat or bird. He did not even see whether he hit what he aimed at, for at the sound of the shot the empurpled face of a petty officer shot up from a hollow close beside him and an order bellowed into his ear roused even the undisciplined Muller to rise to his feet and sling his rifle and continue his slouching march back to the boats. And for firing the shot against orders he was very properly run into the punishment cells as soon as he and the Commander had reached
Ziethen
again.

But that last shot, fired in the last few minutes of daylight, had reached its billet. The sharp-nosed bullet had hit Brown high up on the right shoulder; it had smashed a rib and a shoulder-blade on its way through, and had flung him back into his crevice. At first he was merely numb. He put his hands to his wound and was surprised to find them red with blood. It was some time before pain came—after the sun had set, in fact.