Читать книгу Fort in the Jungle - Percival Christopher Wren - Страница 8
ОглавлениеCHAPTER I
As I have already told,[1] I was bred to the sea, my father being an Admiral, and my forbears having held rank in the British Navy for centuries.
But my mother, abetted, if not instigated, by my step-father, Lord Fordingstane, decided that she could not afford to send me to the Britannia and into the Navy; I was apprenticed to the shipping-firm of Messrs. Dobson, Robson, and Wright, of Glasgow, and made my first voyage, as an Apprentice, in one of their ships, the Valkyrie of ill omen.
Sickened, for the time being, of the sea—for this voyage was one of the most tragic and disastrous made by any ship that ever came to port—I decided to be a soldier; and, with my fellow-Apprentice, Dacre Blount, enlisted in the Life Guards, a regiment in which my step-father had been a Cornet.
Having served for a couple of years in the Life Guards, Dacre Blount and I accepted a friend’s offer of a chance to go to sea once more, this time on a gun-running expedition to Morocco. Here I was captured by nomad Arabs, sold as a slave, and, later, taken by my master to Mecca.[2]
The pilgrim ship in which we were returning from Jiddah was burnt; and I, escaping from it, was picked up by an Arab dhow which, proceeding to Djibouti in French Somaliland, was there seized by the French Naval authorities for the slaver, pearl-poacher, gun-runner and hashish-smuggler that she was, and handed over to the civil power. My Arab captors, long wanted by the French, were tried for piracy and murder, and were shot; I, proclaiming myself an Englishman, late in the employ of the Sultan of Bab-el-Djebel, was accused of being a Secret Service agent and spy, left for long in doubt as to my fate, and then, having been tried on an espionage charge, was found probably-guilty and given the choice between enlisting in the French Foreign Legion and suffering indefinite detention.
In point of fact, I was just in the humour to join the French Foreign Legion, being at the moment rebellious against Fate, at a loose end, and somewhat desperate.
Moreover, that way of life undoubtedly promised adventure, and of adventure I was avid.
It seemed to me, too, that I was remarkably well equipped for this new rôle, inasmuch as I was a soldier, spoke and understood Arabic perfectly, had a good ground-work of French, knew the desert and the Arab and the Arab’s way of fighting, better than any veteran in the Corps; and, thanks to sea-training, Guards’ training, and my extremely active life in the desert, was a remarkably tough, seasoned and active young man.
But Fate will have its little joke; and as I knew Arabic and was an experienced desert fighter, I was sent almost direct to where the only useful language was Annamese; the terrain was swamp and dense jungle; and the mode of fighting was as different as it could possibly be from that of Arab warfare.
| [1] | Action and Passion. |
| [2] | Sinbad the Soldier. |
§2
Accounts of the routine of joining the Foreign Legion, proceeding to Sidi-bel-Abbès, and undergoing recruit-training are numerous, and their number need not be increased. Suffice it to say that my training as a Guardsman, my size and strength, and my African experience, stood me in very good stead, and enabled me to endure, if not enjoy, recruit days at the depot at Sidi-bel-Abbès, and to suffer nothing worse than boredom.
It was at just about the time when I was dismissed recruits’ drill that a notice appeared in rapport that a draft would shortly be going as re-inforcement to the Legion battalion in Tonking on active service against the rebellious or, rather, unsubdued, followers of the Emperor of Annam, who had recently been defeated by the French and exiled from Indo-China.
These mountaineers, Annamese of the Dalat plateau and other highland parts of Tonking, aided by vast hordes of dacoits, brigands, and pirates, known as Black Flags, and secretly subsidized and supported by the Chinese Government, who reinforced them with bodies of irregulars and regiments of Chinese regular troops, were a powerful and dangerous enemy who had inflicted more than one definite defeat upon French Generals.
Promptly I put in my name for the draft and, presumably on the strength of my previous military training and experience, my physique, and the white crime-sheet of a blameless life, I was accepted, our Commanding Officer, Chef de Bataillon Wattringue doing me the honour of speaking a few words to me as he inspected the special parade of applicants for foreign service.
“What’s your name, mon enfant?”
“Dysart, mon Colonel.”
“Previous service in the British Army, I’m told. Regiment?”
“Life Guards, mon Colonel.”
“Your father an officer?”
“Admiral, mon Colonel.”
“Why did you come to the Legion?”
“For adventure; active service, mon Colonel,” I replied, telling him the truth and nothing but the truth—if not the whole truth.
“Is he a good shot, a good marcher and a good soldier?” he enquired, turning to Captain Dubosque, commanding my Depôt Company.
“Excellent,” replied that worthy man.
“And you wish to proceed forthwith to Tonking, eh?” he asked, turning again to me.
I assured him that I did.
“Well, perhaps you will. And equally—perhaps you won’t,” he replied, and passed on.
A fortnight later my name was published in Orders among those, my seniors and betters, who, having had six months’ service and not having suffered imprisonment during that time, were to be formed into a separate section, receive flannel uniforms and a white helmet, and parade with the troops under orders for Tonking.
Of the men who entrained at Sidi-bel-Abbès for Oran to embark in the troop-ship Général Boulanger from Marseilles, already full to capacity with troops of the Infanterie de la Marine, few returned, most of them leaving their bones in the swamps, jungles, and military cemeteries of Indo-China.
Not a few died of heat-stroke, disease, and wounds before the troopship reached Pingeh, the port of Saigon in Cambodia.
Of those who died of wounds, two were shot attempting to desert in the Suez Canal where the ship tied up for the night; three at Singapore where we stopped to coal; while one man, who had succeeded in swimming from the ship at that port, was taken by a shark.
These deaths led to others, as, the deserting légionnaires having been shot by sentries of the Marine Infantry, there was, for the rest of the voyage, a very strong Legion feeling against the men of that Corps, a reciprocated bitterness of spirit that was expressed in more than one desperate and murderous conflict.
After calling at Saigon in Cochin China, the troopship proceeded to the mouth of the Red River, where the Legion draft was transferred to a couple of river gun-boats, the Lily and the Lotus, and taken some six hours’ journey up the river and disembarked at the town of Haiphong.
From the wharf, our draft marched by way of a fine boulevard, the Avenue Paul Bert, to the Négrier Barracks, whence, a day or two later, we were taken on gun-boats another day’s journey up the Red River to the base camp at a place called Hai Duong.
Thence, after rest, re-organization and re-fitting, we marched to a spot we called Seven Pagodas, and thence to the camp of the Second Battalion of the First Regiment at Houi-Bap—the seat of war.
I was on regular active service at last.
