Лорд Дансейни - Guerrilla

Srebnitz was among the first of those to go down, with his rifle slung from his shoulder and various provisions strapped about him. The dark and the emptiness seemed cold to him. Then the rope nearly burned his leg; and sooner than he expected he touched the ground among myrtles. The noise that he made, and that his comrades made, seemed to him to be certain to be heard by the Germans, if they were only eighty yards away, but no shot came from them.

At the foot of the precipice he waited anxiously, with a few others, to protect the men on the ropes if the Germans should move. But still no sound came from the Germans, and more and more mountaineers came down the ropes and Srebnitz soon felt the confidence that is given by numbers. This was the thinnest part of the German line, for the precipice was unclimbable, and most of the Germans had moved away from it either to left or right, and most of those that did approach it had been easily seen from the high edge and shot, but Hlaka expected to meet with supports and reserves as he went down their slope.

He drew up his men in two ranks, shoulder to shoulder, and led them straight down through the myrtles. They met only two Germans: a few shots were fired, and they were through the line; and that was two more rifles for Hlaka's men. Half a dozen shots did not entirely give away Hlaka's plan, but he hurried for fear that the Germans should find it out. Two hundred yards further down he met more Germans, men coming up the Mountain to strengthen the line that had surrounded him, and he went straight through them with a burst of firing on both sides. He lost one man here, killed or wounded; there was no time to see which. Indeed, like Napoleon in Egypt, and, as they say, some German field–marshals, wounded men on either side were details that did not fit into Hlaka's plan; his own wounded were a sacrifice that the sacred cause for which he fought might well demand, as he saw it, and the German wounded were something he never spoke about, and about which his men never troubled him.

The second burst of firing must have shown clearly the way that Hlaka was taking, but he moved his men over the ground with the speed of mountaineers, which he hoped would outdistance the Germans, quite unfamiliar with his native mountains. Not all his men were mountaineers, and several had joined him only the day before; but Hlaka's pace was the pace of the fastest, and he left the slowest to make themselves his rearguard, and to follow as they could. Very lights were fired, turning the night to a queer green, full of flickering shadows, but they did not discover Hlaka's men. And they came to good oak–scrub and felt they were safe. The line closing in on the peaks was now wholly behind them, and no Germans were likely to be ahead of them any longer, except the men with the batteries in the plain. But Hlaka knew exactly where these were.

They went on unmolested and the slope became gentler, and the dark bulk of the Mountain rose behind them, and before them were all the stars. While Very lights still soared and flickered vainly behind they came to the last sweep of the slopes that draped the Mountain. Then Srebnitz heard a voice saying in words with no meaning to him, for they were in a foreign language: "Well done, Chief. You've come to a road."

And sure enough their feet touched a road, which is always a strange and welcome thing to men who have been for a time in the wilds. It was not long since Srebnitz had seen a road, and yet even he felt the thrill of it. Travel for a time in the wilds, and you will perhaps meet no more thrilling thing as you come away. What a wonderful thing a desert would be in a city. How children would play in its sand, how young men fare out into it from the last street. Think of the camels waiting where the buses end their journeys. The noise and the smoke behind, the quiet and the mirage before. As strange as that is a road to the men of the wilds.

Even there Hlaka did not wait for his rearguard, but dropped connecting files to keep in touch with them, and got his men into fours and marched them down the road at a pace of five miles an hour.

"How are you going to do the forty miles tonight, Chief?" asked Malone.

Hlaka beckoned up Gregor, who interpreted, and Hlaka told Malone his plan, a plan that had been in his mind ever since the time when he had briefly said that men could do what wild sheep had done. Men had not the strength nor the speed of the wild sheep, but man's brains made up for that. Whether he has used his brains wisely, who can say? But his brains have certainly achieved wonderful things, and a motor's engine is one of them. From one of the farms that supplied Hlaka's needs, as all the farms in The Land were willing to do when they could, Hlaka had obtained a lorry, which was not far away on the road along which they marched. It was a small lorry and could not hold more than twelve men with their rifles and few provisions; but Hlaka's plan which he now told to Malone, with the help of Gregor, was that the lorry should pick up the last twelve men, and take them twenty miles and then return for the last twelve again, and take them twenty miles also, again returning.

Hlaka had calculated that during the night there would be time for the lorry to take all his men on one journey, they would rest in the lorry and continue to march when set down. He calculated that his men could easily march twenty miles in the night, in addition to which each man would do twenty miles by lorry.

"A simple sum, Chief," said Malone as soon as he understood Gregor's interpretation. "Forty miles."

Malone approved the simple arrangement and felt that, as the only Briton present, he should express that approval. "Very good, Chief," he said.

And very soon the lorry passed them, going without lights, to pick up Hlaka's rearguard.

All that night Hlaka's men marched or sat in the lorry; marching, after the first half–hour, at an easier pace. Hlaka did not expect to meet any Germans, as they were all concentrated on the Mountain; and he was not molested during his night–march. Once the lorry met a cycling patrol, consisting of a German corporal and two men, and they were all shot by the men in the lorry. One of the bicycles was damaged; the other two were taken by Hlaka's infantry. Sometimes the men that marched rested briefly beside the road; but none of them rested long, except in the lorry, and before dawn they saw the pale cold gleam of the lake to which Hlaka had said he would come, forty miles away from the Mountain. There they waited, while time dragged slowly. But, however slowly time passed over the waiting men, dawn seemed to be coming swiftly, and there was no sign of the Sunderland.

Hlaka looked towards Malone, and Malone was uneasy, but he smiled confidently; and Hlaka saw his uneasiness under the smile and said nothing.

Hlaka cast his eyes about the countryside now emerging from night, trying to find some place where his men might hide and rest during the day. For a lorry could not go down the road by day unobserved by the Germans, and his men would have had to have fought one of those battles that he avoided, a battle in the open such as history notices; nor could they have marched another twenty miles at all without rest. More and more of the country came out of the darkness, while Hlaka observed its crops, its rocks and its bushes, planning where he would put his men if the Sunderland did not come.

Hlaka sent the lorry into a grove of trees that was not far from the road. Day was coming up rapidly. The men looked at each other; there was light on their faces, and the night that had covered them was all gone. A flash came over a low hill to the right, that was from a cloud immediately over the sun, and Hlaka decided to take his men from the lake to hide them as well as he could.

At that moment there came a hum like the sound of the pulse in one's ears. Hlaka listened, and all his men. The sound grew. All of them turned their eyes to the south, from which the sound was humming, and there came the Sunderland. In barely a minute it had come down to the lake and its floats plunged into the water, and Malone was smiling a perfectly genuine smile. Hlaka looked at him, and Malone knew without an interpreter what Hlaka wished to say.