Лорд Дансейни - Guerrilla

"There's the sea," said Hlaka.

"You couldn't get to it," said Malone. "Fleas too thick in that direction. No, you'll have to keep north. There's a lake in that direction, a lake that would do nicely, but it's forty miles away. Can you do forty miles in a night?"

Forty miles in a night was a remark easily made by a man who was used to flying four hundred in an hour, but it was scarcely a remark to make to infantry.

"Yes," said Hlaka.

The cook and Gregor wondered. But Malone knew men better than he knew foreign languages and saw that Hlaka meant what he said, and so bothered no more about it.

"Very well," said Malone. "If you can get to the lake in the night a Sunderland will come for you just before dawn, if I can whistle it up. That's better than flying all the way in the dark. Have you got a sending–set? A wireless that can send out messages?"

"No," said Hlaka.

"Well, plenty of your people have," said Malone. "We must get in touch with them. But you want to watch those Germans, you know. They'll be doing a bit of mountaineering soon."

He knew that Hlaka was well prepared, but felt that, in his capacity of sole representative on this mountain of the empire that was organizing most things, he ought to remind Hlaka of anything that needed to be borne in mind.

"I have sixty–two men waiting for them," said Hlaka, "and rifles for four more when they come."

"Then perhaps you could give me one of the rifles," said Malone, "and I'll do a bit of shooting when the time comes."

Much of this conversation was helped out by signs, and Malone now went through the motions of aiming with a rifle, and pointing to himself and said, " Pour moi. "

Hlaka called, and a rifle was brought, which he gave to Malone, who looked it all over and said: "I can have a fine time with this."

Hlaka explained his theory of only firing at under a hundred yards, so as to preserve ammunition. But Malone said lightly: "Oh, we can send you plenty of that."

It was a long while since anyone else had brushed aside Hlaka's words, but Malone's casual remark lighted new hopes in Hlaka. If the English could replenish his ammunition like that he could go on fighting until Hitler was tired.

"Well, what you want is a Sunderland," said Malone. "Can you get in touch with any of your boys who could send a message for me by wireless?"

"I can send messages all over The Land," said Hlaka, "but even I do not know where the wireless transmitters are. Of course it is death to be found with one."

"Then can you send a message that will be passed on to one of them?" asked Malone.

"Yes, I can do that," said Hlaka.

"What code do you use?" Malone asked him.

"I have a code that I use in the town," said Hlaka, "but there's no one with a transmitter there, because the Germans would locate it at once. And nobody to the north has the key–word. So I shall have to send a messenger."

"Too slow," said Malone. "You should keep pigeons. But never mind. I can send a message in plain, if you can get it passed on to him. I've no key–word either."

"I can send it by helio," said Hlaka, "and it will be spread over the country till it reaches the man with the sending–set."

All this conversation took some time; especially as the two interpreters did not always agree. Complicated technical terms about wireless were the easiest, because in many cases the English word for it was used in that Near Eastern land. Then Malone wrote out his message, addressed to the number of an aerodrome in Egypt, which simply said: "Look for fifty men fishing for carp. If you're waking call them, mother dear. Dick."

Hlaka looked gravely at it when Malone gave it to him, and then handed it on to Gregor and the cook. It did not seem very plain to any of them, but it might be to the Germans, and this had to be considered with every message.

"Will the Germans understand it?" he asked.

"Yes," said Malone, "in a hundred years. They'll work it out and get the right answer; but we'll be gone by then. The second part of it is taken from a poem known to almost every Englishman, and is about early tomorrow morning. That of course will mean dawn to them. The Germans know well enough what books Englishmen read and which poems are popular with us, but all their things are docketed and put away in drawers, and it will take them a little while to find them, before they begin to work it out. The other part is simple enough, or will be to the Sunderland people: they are always thinking about water, because they can't come down anywhere else; and fishing rather implies water. They know where I am, because some of them will have seen me shot down, and there are only two bits of water anywhere near here, and carp suggests fresh water; so it must be that lake. They'll work that out all right, and so will the Germans in a hundred years."

So Hlaka helioed the message over the plain to the north, repeating it again and again. And the Germans carefully took it down and translated it and worked it out, and got at the meaning sooner than Malone had said, but not that day nor that night. And the message, like all Hlaka's messages, went over The Land, and came that afternoon to the men who had a hidden transmitting set, and a minute or two after that it was arriving in Egypt, and the C.O. of the crew of a Sunderland knew that Dick Malone was alive in the Mountain and that he wanted fifty men to be picked up and taken somewhere.

"What are you going to do about tanks?" asked Malone.

But a report had just come to Hlaka that the Germans were moving again, and this aroused the old chieftain, so that some of the awe fell from him which he had felt for his liaison with England that had been brought to him by Malone, and now he pointed to Srebnitz's air–gun leaning against a wall of the cave, and said: "I will shoot them with that."

And Malone, seeing that his question had been a little too childish, and that the old chieftain would be questioned by him no more, replied: "And just the thing for them."

The Germans were now coming up the Mountain on both sides, and had already climbed up at the western end, where none of Hlaka's men were, and were moving along the ridge. At the same time a tank came up the road, from the end of which it would be able to sweep the rocks of the crags with an enfilading fire at men facing southwards. In under two minutes each of Hlaka's men had gone to the rock from which he was going to fight.

More shells came up from the town and from the plain to the north, but ceased even before any Germans came within the distance at which Hlaka allowed his men to fire. Malone was firing away long before the Germans came within the range that Hlaka allowed to the rest, with the disregard for ammunition such as came natural to a man accustomed to firing with eight machine–guns, and with some success too. But Hlaka did not check this representative of England, for he had been much impressed by Malone's easy assurance that plenty more ammunition would be sent him.

The Germans were closing in towards the same point, evidently knowing accurately where Hlaka's men were. Then the air over the Mountain shook with a blow that even the Mountain itself seemed to feel, and air and Mountain seemed to shudder a second time, and then, more lightly, a third, and then a fourth; and far peaks shuddered too, and roared with their great voices. It was the German tank, and the culvert, and several yards of the road, going up in an explosion of guncotton. The broken culvert and the wreck of the tank, lying across the wreck of the road, would prevent any more tanks coming up the Mountain that day. The man who exploded the mine never got back to the rest: Germans were close in front of him, and on two sides, by the time he fired it: he shot five of them, and was bayoneted.