XVI
Brown woke, or regained consciousness, just as dawn was climbing brilliantly up the sky. His first action was to drink temperately from the dwindling supply in his second water-bottle. His cracked lips and lava-impregnated mouth and throat permitted of no choice of action. Then, doggedly, he began to make sure of his position and situation. Looking out of his notch in the cliff face, hoisting himself cautiously on his knees to do so, he saw a dozen white figures creeping slowly on the very crest of the island a quarter of a mile from him. On the inner face of the island, round about his previous position, he saw about a dozen others perched precariously here and there, still endeavouring to carry out their fantastic orders to sweep the island from one sea to another. Of the rest of the landing party Brown could see nothing, but he could guess shrewdly enough. They were scattered hither and thither over the outer face of Resolution, perhaps still struggling on, perhaps nursing cut feet or broken ankles, perhaps sleeping or dodging duty in the way unsupervised men will. Brown shrank down into his notch again; he was safe enough from observation, and out of sight, indeed, of nearly every point of the island.
In front, however, Ziethen was in full view. The gay screens hung out over the damaged part were like a box applied to the ship’s side—a box defective down one edge, however. Through the gap Brown could see occasionally a white figure appear and disappear, although for the moment the noise of the hammers had ceased. Actually, with the removal of the damaged plates, the operation now in progress was the lowering down of the new plates to be riveted into position. It was in consequence of the demands of the tackle for this business that the booms of the screens had been shifted to leave the small gap Brown noted; and as Brown had not fired at the ship for fifteen hours a certain carelessness had been engendered, to say nothing of the fact that Ziethen believed, and could hardly help believing, that the landing party had killed Brown hours ago.
Brown pulled the oily rag through his rifle barrel; he oiled the breech, which was beginning to stick badly, and then he sighted carefully for the gap in the screen. He awaited the most favourable moment and then fired twice, quickly, and he killed the two men he could see. Then, to make the most of his surprise, he fired again and again through the screen, scattering his shots here and there across it and up and down it. He actually, although he did not know it, hit one or two men, and his misses were quite efficacious also, in that they scared into jumpiness the men they did not hit. The moment when a ten-ton steel plate is swinging in tackles is a bad moment to be shot at.
The killings and the wounds and the interruption roused Ziethen to a pitch of fury previously unreached. Those on board were maddened by the deaths of their friends, and they were furiously angry with the landing party, who had so absurdly failed in its mission. Captain von Lutz, in a flaming rage, set the bridge semaphore into staccato action, and the wretched Lieutenant in command on shore, staggering bleared-eyed along the crest after a sleepless night of fevered action, read the messages he sent with a sick feeling at his heart. The vivid sentences poured out by a gesticulating semaphore as Captain von Lutz vehemently demanded what on earth the Lieutenant and landing party were about stung the wretched officer to the quick. A Japanese lieutenant would have committed suicide; a German one merely called out his last reserves of energy and tried to gather a body of the less fainthearted and push on round the island to where Brown lay hidden.
On board Ziethen work was suspended temporarily—another triumph to Brown’s credit. Too many skilled ratings had been lost already for the Captain to order his remaining ones to take the chance of the bullets which Brown was sending at intervals through the screen. Instead he decided to turn Ziethen away from the point of attack, and to turn an unwieldy armoured cruiser, with her five hundred feet of length, and listing badly at that, in a lagoon wherein the tide was swirling in a whirlpool, was an operation called for care and consuming much time. The two anchors had to be raised, the propellers set in motion, and Ziethen gently nursed into position, one anchor dropped, the set of the current combated, and then the other anchor dropped—and good holding ground was scarce in that fathomless crater. Altogether it was an hour before the delicate operation of mooring was completed and the delicate operation of lowering the new plates into position was resumed. Brown heard at length the clatter of the riveting, and knew that the delays he had imposed upon Ziethen were ending at last.
But the labours of the landing party were still in full blast. The Lieutenant found it hard to move any sort of force along the island. His two hundred men were scattered over a mile of almost impossible country, and the problem of supplies suddenly leaped into prominence and added another burden to the Lieutenant’s overloaded shoulders. Every man had landed with a day’s water; they had been violently exerting themselves for nearly twenty-four hours, and nine men out of ten had consumed the last drop of their water several hours back. The Equatorial sun, mounting steadily higher, called the attention of everyone to his overwhelming thirst. The unhappy Lieutenant signalled to his captain that he could not hope to move without water. Captain von Lutz signalled back in blistering fashion, but the Lieutenant, under the spur of most dire and urgent necessity, held to his contention. The Captain, raging, sent off water to him round the island, and his Commander as well, to take over control, under strict orders not to return without bringing back Brown, dead or alive.
For the moral situation was serious. No captain could dream of setting out on a long and arduous cruise with a crew in such a temper as Ziethen’s was. Thirty-four men killed and wounded (their loss alone would be a serious nuisance with prize crews to be thought of) and two ignominious reverses had upset discipline to a tiresome extent. If Ziethen were to sail away without taking vengeance on Brown the crew would lose all respect for their officers. And discipline would be under severe strain on a raiding voyage, with its necessary accompaniments of coaling at sea, and loot, and imminent prospects of a fight. Captain von Lutz, weighing all factors in the situation, decided that Brown must die, even though killing him meant prolonging their dangerous sojourn in the vicinity of land and postponing their ravening onslaught upon British shipping.
So the water was sent, and the Kapitan-Leutnant took over the command; and he did not find it an easy burden. To distribute water among his scattered, weary command, each individual of whom was stuck where he was nearly as effectively as a fly upon a flypaper, consumed hours of time and much of the strength of the twenty men he brought as reinforcements. It was afternoon before he was ready to make his first move, and by that time the riveting on Ziethen was completed and she was a whole ship again, ready to steam out of Resolution. Brown could now credit himself with further delays to her—all the length of time, in fact, which he occupied in dying.
The Commander acted with energy. He sent his casualties—heatstroke, broken ankles, cut feet—down the cliff to where the first landing had been made. There the men Brown had wounded the day before at last received attention and water; the dead and wounded were sent back to the ship for attention or burial, but all this was in rear of the Commander’s headquarters and main line of assault. Having purged his force of its weaker elements, the Commander proceeded to make his way along the crest of the island, while a boat with full crew lay ready to dash to any point to which it might be signalled, and another one landed more men across the opening of the lagoon to cut off any attempt Brown might make to evade attack again. The Commander, thrusting aside with contempt the expostulations of the Lieutenant he had superseded, still did not realize the hopelessness of movement on the land, or, if he did, he did not care how much time the business consumed as long as it was done thoroughly. From Ziethen’s bridge he had watched the failure of the first frontal assault, and he was not going to throw away another dozen lives in that fashion. These long, weary flanking movements were the alternative, and he accepted it stoically. All the same, a day of little water and a night of no rest had taken most of the heart out of his men, and it was woefully slow progress that he made. Night came down and found his men still tangled utterly in the crevasses of Resolution. It found Brown, too, lodged in his cleft in the cliff, tormented with thirst, running a dry tongue round his cracked lips, agonized by the pain in his hands and feet, bitten in every part of his body by the vicious flies, but all the same without a thought of surrender. That simply did not occur to him. It was not consonant with his heredity nor with his childish training.