Читать книгу Fort in the Jungle - Percival Christopher Wren - Страница 5

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A handful of assorted soldiers gathered from the ends of the earth, of very widely varying nationality, creed and breed, of greatly differing education, birth, and social experience, stood in the dark shadow of imminent death; Death ineluctable, inevitable, inexorable; Death now as certain as—death.

These men knew that no power on earth could save them; that no power from Heaven would save them; that this was as certainly the last night of their lives as it would have been had they each been seated alone in the condemned cell, doomed by law to meet, at dawn, the hangman, Madame la Guillotine, or the firing-party.

They knew that to-morrow’s dawn was the last that they would ever see.

The victorious and triumphant army of the Pavillons Noirs, the Black Flags, jungle savages, Möis, river pirates, Tonkinese dacoits and bandits, and Chinese Regulars in disguise, now bearing down upon them to join their besiegers, out-numbered them by a hundred to one. It could, and would, by sheer weight of numbers alone, overwhelm them, obliterate them. Against it, they had precisely as much chance as has a snail against a steam-roller. Should this great force of irregular but magnificent, well-armed fighting men, instead of sweeping over the little jungle fort, trouble to ring it about with fire, the score of defenders’ rifles would answer a thousand.

And for how long?

Almost with their guns alone could the Tonkinese and Chinese jungle-warriors blast, into its original dust, the mud wall of the wretched little post, already more than half-submerged by the slowly rising tide of the ever-encroaching jungle.

But this they probably would not do. They were very fierce, impetuous and primitive in their swift savagery. Almost certainly they would rush it, destroy it, stamp it flat, and let the jungle in. In a few weeks there would be no sign of where it had stood. It would be sunk full fathom five beneath an emerald sea of leaf and stalk; strangled, choked, drowned beneath the green ocean of leaves.

These men were doomed, for they were abandoned. Not abandoned callously, carelessly or neglectfully, but by necessity, the harsh cruelty of military fate and the adverse fortune of war. To have saved them would have cost ten times their number. To have saved the fort would have cost ten times what it was worth.

And loss of prestige? That would be regained a hundredfold when the General was ready, and reinforcements for his disease-decimated sun-smitten jungle-worn army should reach his headquarters from France.

The only doubt about their certain death lay in the question of the manner of it.

A furious headlong charge of strong swift swordsmen, brown, black-turbaned, Gurkha-like; rush upon rush, and an overwhelming flood which would surge across the stockade as waves break over a child’s castle of sand, and then swift sudden death by bullet and blade?

Or, perchance, a long slow day of torture by thirst and heat and wounds as, beneath a hail of bullets from high surrounding trees, they died slowly, man by man, their fire growing slacker and slower until the last wounded man with his last remaining strength and failing sight, reached the last cartridge and fired the last shot of the defence?

According to their Annamese informants, “friendlies” fleeing before the advancing host—this had been the fate of the first of the two forts that the rebel horde had attacked, the only other outposts on that side of the mighty river, deep and swift. It had been enveloped, surrounded during the night, and at dawn had been subjected to so heavy a fire at so short range that by noon the little post had been silenced, the fortunate among its defenders those who had been killed during the battle. The wounded had been crucified, slowly roasted alive, or indescribably tortured with the knife.

On the other hand, the second outpost had been carried by an overwhelming rush, and its defenders had died on their feet, whirling clubbed rifles, stabbing with fixed bayonets in a wild pandemoniac mêlée.

But few of the men of this latter fort had lived to suffer torture—fortunately—for these Black Flag pirates, the jungle dacoits of the Far East, are the most ingenious, the most inhuman, the most devilishly cruel and callous torturers on the face of the earth.

And this was the third outpost.

Their last night. How should it be spent?

Had these men been of a homogeneous regiment, whether English, Scottish, Irish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Swiss, Greek or Spanish, their general reaction to such a situation might be to some extent predictable.

Condemned to death without the possibility or faintest hope of reprieve, doomed to die at dawn without the slightest chance of escape, the men of one of these nations would have spent the night in grim uneasy jest; of a second in dour resigned solemnity; of a third in hectic nervous gaiety; of another in futile wrath and bitter recriminations against those by whom they had been “betrayed”; of another in a drunken orgy and a brave effort at the consumption of all stores of food and drink; of another in the singing of hymns and of national sentimental songs; and of yet another—in carrying on precisely as usual.

But of these particular men, not more than two were of the same nationality, and they represented most of the countries of Europe.

They were, nevertheless, soldiers of the French Foreign Legion, and as General Négrier had once informed the Legion, they were there to die, they were hired to die.

It was simply their business.

That was what they were for.

And so they sat—a wasteful plethora of tins of “monkey meat” and black issue bread, bidons of wine and packets of cigarettes beside them, talked and played mini-dini—and ate and drank, and were not merry, in spite of this unwonted luxury.