Brown on Resolution (13 page)

Slowly the sights came into line. Through the U of the backsight could be seen a tiny triangle of white—the white of the jumper of the man on the bo’sun’s chair. Up into the U crept the wedge of the foresight; it moved steadily upward until its tip was exactly in line with the top of the U. There it stayed for a tiny instant of time, the while Brown, mindful of his musketry training at Harwich, and his periodical practices since, steadied his breathing, took the first pull of the trigger, and slowly squeezed the trigger back further through the final tenth of an inch. Then the rifle went off and the echo of its report ran menacingly round the circle of the cliffs.

Maschinistmaat Zimmer had set cheerfully about his task of drilling out the rivets about the broken plate. He whistled to himself as he adjusted his tools, and he even cracked a joke or two with the three other men swinging beside him in the bo’sun’s chairs. Tools and machinery had ever been a joy to him, and the prospect of using them, even after all this time, still cheered him up. He had no thought for his native Hamburg, nor even for the pretty young blonde wife whom he had not seen for eighteen months. He applied himself without a thought or a care to the work in hand. Then something hit him hard on the left side close to his heart, and for an instant of time he knew pain, agonizing pain, before darkness shut in upon him. He was dead as his knees gave way under him and he fell back over the rail of the chair; his feet caught under the lower rail, and he hung head downwards, grotesquely inert. A bright splash on the plate where he had been working showed where the bullet which had passed through him had flattened. There was another widow now in Hamburg.

But no one at all-paid any attention at that time to the dead body of Maschinistmaat Zimmer hanging by its knees, and certainly no one thought at all about his widow. Leading Seaman Brown saw him fall, snicked the bolt of the Mauser out and in, aimed again coolly and rapidly, and fired. The other man on Zimmer’s bo’sun’s chair fell dead even as he looked round to see what had happened to Zimmer; one man on the other chair died as he turned to see whence came the firing; the fourth man crumpled up as, panic-stricken, he sprang towards the Jacob’s ladder to safety.

Brown fired three more shots into the groups of men who swarmed to the side of the ship on the upper deck out of curiosity; they took effect, and in a few seconds the upper deck was deserted as far as Brown could see.
Ziethen
swung idly at her anchors, grey and grim, with her big guns peering dumbly forth. At her side, absurdly small, the white corpse of Maschinistmaat Zimmer dangled head downward, and above him lay two white splotches which were the bodies of his mates. The fourth man had fallen into the sea.

It was an apt picture of the simultaneous power and helplessness of modern machinery. On the one hand lay
Ziethen
, with her ten 6-inch guns and her hundreds of crew and her horse-power reckoned in thousands, and on the other a lad of five foot eight, aged twenty, dominating her and enforcing his will upon her. But Brown was only powerful in consequence of his rifle, the handiest, neatest, most efficient piece of machinery ever devised by man. Not for the first time was the rifle altering the course of history. Brown was not a marvellously good shot, but to hit four men with four shots at a quarter of a mile when they are entirely exposed and conspicuous in white against a dark background does not call for marvellous shooting. Brown could handle his weapon in good workmanship fashion, and that is all the rifle demands. He had won the first trick, and he snuggled down into his niche on the saddle of rock to await the next development. A head appeared beyond
Ziethen
’s foremost funnel, upon the bridge. He fired quickly, missed, and felt annoyed with himself.

On board the
Ziethen
there was annoyance at the tiresome incident; it would have remained mere annoyance save that four men had been killed. Were it not for the fury roused by the death of these men, messmates and friends, the attitude of
Ziethen
’s officers and men would have been one of exasperated amusement—amusement that one man should dare to pit himself against an armoured cruiser, and exasperation at the delay to the repairing of the ship. From points of vantage—portholes, turret sighting slits—they scanned the cliffs anxiously to obtain a glimpse of this lunatic Englishman who was acting in so odd a manner. Captain von Lutz, the angriest man on the ship, strode out upon the bridge; but a bullet smacked against a stanchion close at his ear and sang off into the distance. Even Captain von Lutz, one of the cleverest minds in the Imperial German Navy, marked out for high command in the near future, did not realize the difficulty of the task before him. He gave abrupt orders to clear away the steam pinnace, which had lain alongside since the night before, so that a landing party could arrest this irritating fellow and bring him on board to be dealt with.

Brown lay patiently in his niche. Where he lay he could command the stern and the whole starboard side of the ship. His rifle was pushed forward between two blocks of lava which gave him almost perfect protection; the straggling cactus was an efficient screen, and the bulge of the saddle and the nick in its tip gave him command of most of the face of the cliffs even where he lay. He was perfectly satisfied with his position; he saw that his magazine was filled and submitted patiently to the scorching heat, which was beginning to roast him slowly on his slab of naked rock.

Suddenly the next development made itself apparent. Round
Ziethen
’s stern, shooting swiftly for the shore, came her steam pinnace, with twenty men aboard her. Brown’s rifle cracked out again and again, taking swift toll before the men in her flung themselves down under shelter. The helmsman dropped, shot through the breast, but the officer in command, the gold flashing on his white coat, grasped the tiller and held her to her course as Brown’s next bullet tore the cap from his head. Next second the boat was out of sight under the steep drop of the bare rock at the water’s edge. Brown recharged his magazine.

The lieutenant in command of the landing party realized, in the instant that he grasped the helm, that this was not going to be the simple arrest of a nearly helpless man which he had anticipated. It dawned upon him that a man with a rifle a hundred yards away can take a severe toll of a mass of men rushing upon him. There was a further lesson in addition to this which he was to learn, but that was yet to come. At present he made the arrangements which seemed satisfactory to him. He restrained the tendency of his men to bundle out of the pinnace and rush wildly up the slope. Under shelter of the steep bank he spread his men out over the fifty yards of the bank’s extent. He saw that they had their rifles loaded. He got them all into position, and then he gave the word for a simultaneous rush.

But here began the second lesson. No one who had not attempted it could realize that the word ‘rush’ had no place in the vocabulary of Resolution. The dreadful razor-edged blocks of lava and the clustered clinging cacti made anything like rapid progress impossible. An active man could move about Resolution as fast as a snail in a garden, as Brown had discovered the night before.

Brown, motionless in his cranny, saw appear below him a line of men’s heads at the water’s edge, and he promptly put a bullet through one of them. The other heads developed shoulders and bodies and legs and came towards him, falling out of sight behind lava blocks, rising into full view again as they struggled over, creeping up towards him at an absurd, ridiculously slow pace. He fired slowly and deliberately, waiting for each shot until a man had heaved himself up into full view. A man’s whole body at a hundred yards makes a superb target. Brown had fired six shots and hit six men before the ‘rush’ died away. No man seeing his companions killed at each side of him could bring himself to heave himself up and expose himself to the next shot. The dozen survivors stayed behind the cover they chanced to have at hand, and lay without attempting to make further upward progress. They pushed their rifles forward and began to fire up at the hidden death above them. The clatter and rattle of musketry began to resound round the island, shattering its stillness.

Yet, despite the numerical odds against him, all the advantages were still with Brown. No one yet in the attacking party had a clear knowledge of his hiding place; thanks to the two close blocks of lava and the cacti, he was thoroughly hidden. To an attacker all that might be in sight was a rifle muzzle and two or three square inches of face in deep shadow, and it would call for keener eyes, if unaided by chance, than the human race possessed to detect that much in the possible thousand square yards of rock and cactus where he might be hidden. Brown was not hampered to any such extent. He was higher up and could see farther over the edges of the lava blocks. He had more enemies to shoot at, and those enemies occupied positions taken up by chance in the heat of the moment. He was cool and unflurried by exertion. He knew the line his enemies had reached.

Bullets began to shriek overhead in the heated air, to raise clouds of pumice-dust when they hit the rock, or to cut their way rustling through the fleshy cactus leaves. Not one came within ten yards of Brown. Coolly, cold-bloodedly even, he began to take toll of his attackers. Here there was a shoulder, there a leg, over there a head and shoulders completely exposed. He took deliberate aim and fired, shifted his aim, fired again, slewed round carefully to avoid any exposure of himself, and fired once more. Each shot echoed flatly round the cliff; in that heated air the noise of the report was no guide whatever to the position of the marksman. Shot alter shot went home. Wounded men lay groaning in hollows and crevices. Dead men lay with their faces on their rifles. Very soon the few survivors dared not fire back, but crouched down in the advantageous bits of cover they chanced to be in, afraid to move lest this deadly enemy should send a bullet winging to their hearts. The firing died away. The Lieutenant, mad with rage, leapt to his feet to shout to his men, and received a bullet full in the face which flung him over backward, a kicking, senseless huddle of limbs upon a cluster of spiny cactus. Then silence descended again. Brown blew gently down the breech of his rifle barrel, peered through fierce, narrowed eyes for any sign of his enemies, and resumed his patient, tense waiting, eyes and ears alert for any sign of activity down the cliff, where some rash enemy might be trying to creep unobserved up to him, or along the base of the cliff to outflank him. For an hour nothing happened save for one attempt on the part of an unfortunate to stretch his cramped limbs, an attempt which secured him a bullet through the knee which drained the life-blood out of him in half an hour.

So that a duel of patience ensued between the watcher on the cliff above and the dwindled half-dozen down below. After the rude reports of the rifles the eternal stillness of Resolution once more took possession. The sun climbed steadily upward, pouring down a stream of brassy heat upon the tortured rocks. The lagoon was of a vivid blue, and in the centre of it
Ziethen
swayed idly at anchor. As the heat increased the objects on the island took on a vaguely unreal appearance as the air above them shimmered hazily. Minutes dragged by like hours, but the crouching living sailors at the base of the cliff dared make no movement—not with the groans for help of their late wounded companion still remembered in their ears.

Over on the
Ziethen
everyone was puzzled at what had happened. They had watched the landing; they had seen men fall; they had heard the firing abruptly increase and die away to nothing; but they could not explain the sequence of events. They could still see the pinnace against the shore, and the boat guard sitting therein, but save for three or four dead bodies they could see nothing of the landing party, which was not surprising considering the tangle of rocks and cactus into which it had fallen. The opinion on board suddenly crystallized that the attack must have moved up into some gully unnoticeable from the ship, driving its quarry before it. At that rate the danger to workers on the damage must have vanished. Captain von Lutz, on fire with impatience to have his ship ready for action again, abruptly gave the order for a further party of artificers to recommence work.

Brown, up on his shelf of rock, saw the white-clothed figures, dwindled to the size of dolls, descend the Jacob’s ladders. He gave them plenty of time; they sent up the bodies of their predecessors to the upper deck by a rope hoist, and then they began work. As they began he opened fire, and once again the echoes of his shots ran flatly round the island. The little white figures collapsed pitifully in the bo’sun’s chairs. The sudden firing over their heads roused the men crouching down the cliff and they, wearied with waiting and conscience-smitten about the non-fulfilment of their duty, took up their rifles once again. Someone down there had at last formed a shrewd guess as to where Brown was hidden, and as the rifles resumed their clatter bullet after bullet began to hit the rocks near him. One of them even drove dust into his eyes. Brown realized the danger. He paid no attention at present to the other riflemen firing at him, but, lying deadly still, peered this way and that through the slit between his two blocks of lava for his one keen-eyed or quick-witted enemy. He saw him at last—part of him, anyway. A bit of white jumper and dark collar, a hand and a cheek, deep in the shadow of a rock, and beyond the rock another bit of white which was probably the end of a trouser leg. Their owner was still firing away enthusiastically, and at each shot a bullet came buzzing nearby, or smacked against cactus and rock to go off at a new note. Remorselessly Brown took his aim, sighting for the edge of the collar against the white jumper. At a hundred yards he could not miss; as he pressed the trigger he saw the jumper jerk and his target rolled struggling into view; some fair-haired boy, not so very unlike Brown himself striving ridiculously to hold together his shattered right shoulder with his left hand, the blood pouring through his fingers and his face distorted with pain. Brown did not think twice about it. He turned his attention to the others, whose bullets were ploughing into the cliff face twenty yards on either side of him. One of them he killed, helplessly exposed to fire from above, and the fire of the others ceased abruptly again as they crouched down in their hollows. Even as they did so Brown observed that the boat guard, consumed with curiosity, was standing up trying to see what was going on, and in doing so exposing his head and shoulders over the rim of rock at the edge of the lagoon. Him Brown killed too, without mercy as without rancour.