Tom Willoughby's Scouts Part 10

"The position--what is it? You British are outnumbered. You have no forces equal to ours, even as they are; and I tell you we shall have ten times as many in a few months. Paris has fallen: your empire is broken up: your navy is defeated----"

"Come now, Herr Reinecke, don't draw the long bow."

"I a.s.sure you the news has gone all over the world," said Reinecke emphatically. "What can you do? We shall shortly capture Abercorn: already we have taken Mombasa and Nairobi; there will soon be no more British East Africa. It is certain. Well now, I make a proposition. I wish to be fair. The plantation is of course confiscated; it will now be mine, solely. That is the fortune of war. But you are young, hot-headed. I would do something for the sake of my late partner.

Abandon this folly, then, while there is time; and I give my word to send you safe into British territory."

"And you make that proposition to me!" cried Tom, enraged by the mention of his father: "you, the man who has systematically robbed your partner, falsified the books, tried to murder me! I should be a fool indeed if I placed reliance on the word of a man like you. Save your breath, Herr Reinecke.... Ah! it is time for us to go." Mwesa had just appeared in the doorway. "Get up! don't try any tricks: I have given you fair warning."

Mwesa had come to report the return of the first contingent of Wahehe.

They had established a camp some eight miles from the plantation.

"Very well," said Tom. "Let them take up as many of the remaining loads as they can carry. I shall soon be with you."

He clapped his hands. Mirami entered.

"Bring the lanterns, you and your fellows, and meet me at the front door," said Tom.

Then, urging Reinecke before him at the muzzle of his revolver (and the German seemed to be genuinely astonished at the rejection of his offer), Tom went out to his men. The askaris he ordered to join the ranks of the carriers, each man with a load. To the household servants were given light articles, such as candles, matches, paraffin, drugs. Among the supplies just brought from Bismarckburg were some cases of ammunition. These were entrusted to their original bearers. By the time the party was ready to start, the plantation had been pretty well ransacked of all portable and useful stores.

Darkness having now fallen, the column was headed by two men carrying lanterns. In turn came the porters, two more lantern bearers, the three Arab overseers under guard of riflemen, then Reinecke, followed immediately by Tom and Mwesa, and finally two lantern bearers. Apart from their use in lighting the way, the lanterns gave confidence to the natives, for whom a night march had nameless terrors.

So strange a procession, at dead of night--the lights flickering on the trees, the negroes chattering in loud tones to keep their courage up--must have startled the furred and feathered inhabitants of the forest. Birds clattered out of the foliage, insects swarmed around the lanterns; no four-footed beast came within sight.

It was about midnight when they arrived at the camp, pitched on one of those wide bare s.p.a.ces which break the continuity of the upland forest.

Fires had been kindled at several points of the circuit. Within was a scene of great confusion--women, children, and bales of goods lying helter-skelter. Hopeless of evolving order at this hour, Tom contented himself with posting three sections of six men each as sentries on the southern border of the camp, where alone danger might be feared. An attack seemed to him improbable. The plantation had been cleared of men; and even if the fugitive Germans and Arabs had succeeded in reaching a German post, there was little chance of an armed force coming up while night lasted. Nevertheless, the sense of responsibility and the need of keeping a close watch on Reinecke, whom, out of respect for the white man's dignity, he had left unbound, prevented Tom from getting any sleep. Indeed, few of all those there encamped, except the children, closed their eyes. The negroes, for all their weariness, talked excitedly, hour after hour, of the wonderful change that the m'sungu had wrought in their lives, and speculated on the fate in store for their late master. Watching them, Tom could not help questioning within himself whether he had done right, whether they would be able to defend and maintain their new-won freedom; but with the hopefulness of buoyant youth he dismissed his doubts, resolving that, so far as lay in him, nothing should be left undone to safeguard them. After all, British territory was only forty miles away.

An hour before dawn the camp was astir. Everybody was fed: then, just as light was stealing over the scene, the women and children were sent off under escort, scouting parties dispatched southward; the unarmed men gathered their loads and departed. Mirambo and a score of the elder men with rifles accompanied the latter, with orders not to allow the askaris to approach within half an hour's march of the nullah. They were to drop their loads at a convenient spot and return under guard for more.

Tom remained at the camp, keeping the prisoners and the remainder of his armed men.

It was about two hours after the departure of the women: the carriers had not yet come back: when Tom heard a faint sharp sound from southward, which, unexpected as it was, he believed to be a rifle-shot.

For some few minutes there was no repet.i.tion of the sound: then there came half a dozen cracks in succession, a little nearer--unmistakably the reports of rifles. Tom at once dispatched two men to follow in the track of the scouts and see what was happening. It seemed unlikely that a German force had already been dispatched in pursuit of him; but it was clearly necessary to be prepared for any contingency.

The shots had roused some excitement among the Wahehe; Reinecke and the Arabs did not disguise the spring of hope. Tom recognised that his men were ill-fitted to cope with trained troops, in the open or even in the bush. The nullah, on the other hand, about six miles away, offered many facilities for defence, and his plan had been to post his non-combatants far up towards the lake, and to employ the men to strengthen the position below. He had reckoned on being unmolested for a whole day, and the shots gave him not a little uneasiness. The progress of the laden carriers would necessarily be slow: it was essential that the enemy, if enemy it was, should be delayed at least until the stores had been safely conveyed to the nullah. He must fight and run.

Hoping that it might turn out to be a false alarm, he nevertheless sent forward a runner to urge the carriers to their utmost speed; then selected a score of the older men, who in their day had fought the Germans, and ordered all the rest to hurry on with as much as they could carry of the remaining stores. Mwesa he kept as interpreter.

As soon as the camping-place was clear, he sent Reinecke and the Arabs on, guarded by half a dozen men, and followed closely behind them with the rest of his party, to discover a suitable position for making a first stand if pursuers were really on his tracks. He had been marching less than half an hour through the forest when some of his scouts overtook him, and reported that a large force of askaris, under German officers, was pus.h.i.+ng on at great speed. Knowing the hopelessness of getting from the natives a sound estimate of the enemy's numbers, he asked no questions, but pressed forward as rapidly as possible for another ten minutes. Then, on the further side of a comparatively clear s.p.a.ce, about two hundred yards long and twice as wide, he saw a dense belt of trees, fringed by low bushes, which seemed to offer advantages for a delaying action. There he decided to await the enemy's arrival.

He looked at his watch. Allowing for the slow pace of the children and the laden men over difficult country, he calculated that the head of the straggling column had probably covered two-thirds of the distance to the nullah. It would be at least another hour before they reached its entrance, and a second hour before the people and the stores were far enough up to be out of harm's way. The question was, then, could he check the pursuit for two hours?

By the time he had posted his men just within the belt of trees, where they commanded the whole s.p.a.ce in front, he had been rejoined by all his scouts. The report of the last comers was even more alarming than that of the first. According to them, a great throng of ferocious askaris, like a swarm of wild bees, was das.h.i.+ng on with the speed of antelopes.

Though he was aware of their habit of exaggeration, Tom was conscious of a consuming anxiety, but had self-command enough to present a calm and smiling front to the natives, in whom the least sign of wavering on his part would have started a panic. Through Mwesa he gave them the order not to fire until he whistled, resolving at the same time to cut himself a wooden whistle at the first opportunity.

The men had been posted barely twenty minutes when, through the thinner woodland on the opposite side of the clearing, Tom caught sight of a few scattered negroes in uniform. "Scouts feeling their way forward," he thought. The askaris moved rapidly, but cautiously, flitting from tree to tree in a series of short rushes. Marking one of them, Tom fired.

The man instantly slipped behind a trunk; his fellows had all disappeared.

a.n.a.lysing later his frame of mind at the moment of firing, Tom had to admit that his aim had been intentionally bad, and justified his action with the excuse that his object was merely to delay the enemy. At bottom, however, he was really loth to kill his man--a feeling which has, no doubt, seized many a young officer in his first fight. In after days he often debated with himself and discussed with others how far humanity is compatible with war, and the conclusion that he came to was that war must be abolished, or humanity would perish. If man must kill man, whether the agent be bullet, sh.e.l.l, bomb, poison gas, or any other abomination, logically there is nothing to choose between them: the vile thing is war itself. But at this moment he had no time for reflection: he acted purely from a humane instinct, not realising what war meant, ignorant of the methods in which the enemy was prepared to wage it.

His ill-aimed shot had not been without effect. The enemy had vanished, and Tom's men, in their simplicity, whooped with delight. Tom however, was under no delusion. One or more of the askaris had no doubt stolen back through the wood to report that they were in touch with the fugitives; the rest were still lurking among the trees.

As the minutes pa.s.sed without further movement, Tom's anxiety increased in proportion with the natives' elation. What numbers had he to deal with? Would his little force of untrained men be swept upon and overwhelmed? He would have been spared a period of racking suspense if he could have divined the facts which he was not to know till much later. Sergeant Morgenstein and the Arabs, having escaped from the plantation, did not take the twenty-mile road to Bismarckburg, but struck southward to the highway to Neu Langenburg, a distance only half as great. On this road they met a half company of askaris marching towards Bismarckburg. The German officer in command, on learning what had happened at the plantation, tapped the telegraph wire and asked for instructions. Ordered to make a forced march and deal with the mutiny--what resistance was to be expected from a mob of undisciplined blacks?--he pushed on to the plantation, only to find it deserted.

Darkness forbade instant pursuit; but at the earliest glimmer of dawn he started to follow up the very plain tracks of the absconded rebels.

It was perhaps twenty minutes after the disappearance of the enemy scouts when Mwesa detected a movement deep in the thin woodland opposite. Tom fixed his eyes intently on the spot the boy pointed out, and presently saw several forms moving forward amid the brushwood. There were signs that others were coming up behind them. They were scarcely distinguishable in the shade of the trees, and darted so quickly from cover to cover that even a crack shot could hardly have picked them off.

Tom felt that an attempt to check the advance while the enemy were still in the wood would be sheer waste of ammunition. The most of his men had not handled fire-arms for years; they had probably lost whatever skill they might once have had; the younger men had only begun their musketry course. He must at least wait for the inevitable rush across the open; then, perhaps, the negroes, unskilled though they were, might be lucky with some of their shots. If the enemy were in no great strength, the mere show of resistance might achieve his end--delay.

The askaris, finding their advance unopposed, gained confidence, were less careful in taking cover, and presently formed up in line just within the forest fringe. Suddenly a white helmet showed itself above them, a little in their rear; a word of command rang out, and the askaris, twenty strong, charged with a wild yell in double line across the open. Tom gave a shrill whistle, marked his man and fired. His shot was followed by a ragged volley from his men. This time his aim was true; one or two askaris fell to the shots of the negroes; the rest wavered, and at a second volley scurried back into the forest, losing another on the way.

Tom had not fired a second time, but had watched the forest. It was plain from movements he observed there that the German had held part of his force in reserve. The slight losses suffered in feeling for the opposition had probably rea.s.sured him as to the character of the resistance he had to meet; the next attack would be made in strength.

Ignorant of the numbers opposed to him, Tom thought it prudent not to await a second attack, and gave his men the order to retire quietly.

They marched on for about half a mile, and then came to a rocky ridge flanking the track, which it commanded for a considerable distance.

Here Tom determined to make a second stand.

It was nearly half an hour after he had posted his men before there was any sign from the enemy. Then he heard in the distance the sharp crackle of a volley, followed by shouts. He guessed that the askaris were charging across the open s.p.a.ce under cover of strong rifle fire.

Abruptly the sounds ceased, and Tom could not help chuckling as he saw in his mind's eye the blank faces of the askaris when they found their entrance into the forest unopposed.

But he remembered that he had a German officer to deal with. A trained soldier would be put on the alert by the disappearance of his enemy. He would probably suspect that he was being lured into a trap, and Tom desired nothing better. The German would feel his way forward cautiously, slowly, fearing an ambush in every gloomy spot. He might take an hour to cover the distance of a few minutes' walk.

Tom seized the opportunity of making good his retreat to the nullah.

Putting on their best speed, the little party overtook the tail end of the column of carriers at the spot where the askaris had been ordered to drop their loads. Now that he was himself able to keep an eye on them, Tom made them mount their bales again, and march on towards the nullah.

He left two good men to watch for the enemy, and followed with the rest.

Tom with his rearguard of riflemen had come within half a mile of the nullah when Mushota came bounding along the column towards him, jostling any carrier who was in his way. The lad spoke excitedly to Mwesa, who turned a crestfallen face to his master and said--

"He gone; all same run away."

"Who?"

"Old ma.s.sa, sah."

"Reinecke?"

"Yes, sah. He grab rifle quick, fella no can do nuffin. He shoot one man, den go bang into forest, no can catch him. He gone sure nuff."

Tom's manner of receiving the news was a surprise to the negroes. Far from being agitated, storming, threatening punishment for the unwary guards, he smiled. Reinecke's escape was in a certain degree a relief to him. It had been necessary to remove the German from the plantation; but after the people had reached the nullah he would have been an incubus.

"Good riddance," thought Tom. "I hope I have seen the last of him."

CHAPTER X--A BREATHING s.p.a.cE

On arriving at the entrance to the nullah, Tom found that Mirambo had already herded the women and children beyond the first bend, something less than a quarter of a mile away, and was superintending the bestowal of the stores still farther up, on natural ledges in the steep bank.

At the southern extremity the nullah was about sixty yards wide. In the middle a shallow stream rippled over the rocky bottom, disappearing in places beneath tangled ma.s.ses of vegetation. Trees of many kinds grew on the steep walls, acacias and euphorbias predominating, and on both sides of the stream there were many patches of scrub, mimosa, and thorn, rendering the pa.s.sage by no means easy. But these natural obstacles must be supplemented by art if the place was to be made even tolerably secure, and Tom lost no time in putting the necessary works in operation.