Henry Dorling - Pincher Martin, O.D. - A Story of the Inner Life of the Royal Navy

'And what happened then?' queried some one.

'I found the bally battle in full swing,' Wooten went on. 'Guy Fawkes Day wasn't in it, and both sides were blazing away for all they were worth, and making a hell of a row. However, they weren't doing much damage to each other. I anchored my hooker about a couple of hundred yards from the shore, where we could get a decent view of what went on, manned my two six-pounders and the Maxim, and hoisted an ensign and a large white flag – wardroom tablecloth it was – in a boat, and then went ashore to see Johnson. Things were pretty lively, and shells were bursting and bullets were whistling all over the place. The rebel attack was to come off that night, and as there could be only one end to it, I took Johnson and his missus, the two missionaries, the two shopkeepers, and Heaven alone knows how many Christian Chinese off to my ship. The upper deck was fairly packed with 'em. Then we sat down to watch the sport. One of the shopkeepers, I may say, was a Scotsman, and the other a Yank, and they wanted me to order the rebs. to shove off out of it and leave Kiang-fu alone. They had a lot of valuable stuff in their godowns 13 13 A 'godown' is a warehouse. waiting to be shipped down the river, and said the whole lot of it 'u'd be looted if the city fell.

'I cursed them for a couple of tizzy-snatchers,' he resumed, grinning at the recollection; 'I told 'em they ought to be jolly thankful to have got off with their lives; and asked 'em how the dooce I could dictate to five thousand ruddy cut-throats with Mauser rifles and Lord knows how many field guns – decent guns, too; none of your clap-trap rubbish. I had exactly thirty men all told, a broken-winded eighty-ton gun-boat, two six-pounders, and one Maxim. Pretty tall order, wasn't it? However, I was still yapping to 'em on deck when I heard a sort of phut , and a bally bullet buried itself in the deck about a foot off my leg. It came from the direction of the rebel trenches, about five hundred yards off, and some silly blighter had evidently eased off a rifle at us for the fun of the thing. I heard one or two more bullets come whistling overhead – damned bad shooting they made – so sent all the refugees over to the lee side of the deck out of harm's way. Then I trained my guns on the rebs., and hoisted all the ensigns I had. They knocked off firing then, so I got into the boat with the consul, the wardroom tablecloth, and the largest ensign I could find, and pulled ashore.' He paused.

'Had you any weapons with you?' somebody asked.

'Lord, no!' said Wooten. 'Doesn't do to let a Chinaman see you're frightened of him. I took a walking-stick, and Johnson had a white umbrella. I was in a dooce of a funk, though, and when we landed we found a whole bally company of soldiers waiting to receive us.'

'What! a guard of honour?' asked Chase.

'Don't you believe it. They had fixed bayonets and loaded rifles, and I felt rather nervous as to what was going to happen. You see, there wasn't another British ship within a hundred miles of us. However, I landed with the consul, and a Chinese officer with a drawn sword came forward to receive us. He wasn't a bad fellow, and talked quite decent English, with an American accent. I asked him what the dooce they meant by having the troops there as if they wanted to scupper us, and told him who the consul was, and that I was the C.O. of the man-of-war, and that, on behalf of his Britannic Majesty, we wished to see his General. He said the old bloke was having his afternoon caulk, and that they daren't wake him. I said he'd better roust the old josser out, and be damned smart about it. He hummed and hawed a bit over that, and then said that if we'd come along with him he'd take us to the headquarters, and see if we could have an interview. I wasn't going to kow-tow to any bally Chinaman, though, so I told him that if he didn't take steps to have the General brought to us in less than half-an-hour I'd raise hell's delight. It's no use being anything but dictatorial with Chinamen,' he went on to explain; 'and if you can bluff 'em into believing that you've got the whip-hand they generally knuckle under. We had some more talkee-talkee, and then he did go off with his men, and jolly glad I was to see the last of 'em. Twenty minutes later the General arrived. He was rather a fine-looking old boy, with no pigtail, and was dressed up in khaki and a sword. He had a couple of A.D.C.'s with him. He couldn't talk English, so I asked him through the consul what he meant by allowing his troops to fire on my ship, and said that I should have to report it, and so on. He said they hadn't done it. I said they had, and that if he came on board I'd jolly soon prove it. Well, after a lot of jawbation we got him into the boat, with the A.D.C.'s, took him off to the ship, and showed him the bullet-mark in the deck. He got in a bit of a funk then, so Johnson and I drew up a document in Chinese and English, in which he said he was sorry for what had occurred, and so on. It went on to say that he agreed to abandon the siege of Kiang-fu, as British interests were at stake, so we'd more or less cornered him. He signed like a lamb, wily old devil; but then we remembered that no document is valid in China unless it's stamped with the official seal of the man who signed it. We asked him where the seal was, but he hadn't got it on him. Johnson asked him where it was, and he said he'd got it in his old headquarters, about ten miles downstream. He volunteered to go and fetch it, but we weren't having any. The upshot of the whole affair was that we sent one of the A.D.C.'s ashore to order the siege to be stopped, and the rebels to retire, and took the General and the other A.D.C. down the river. Then we sent the A.D.C. ashore to get the seal, and had the document properly stamped. That's all, I think.'

'But did the rebels retire?' asked the commander.

Wooten nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'They left the place like lambs, and the Imperialist colonel inside nearly fell on my neck and wept. The two shopkeepers gave me a box of a hundred cigars between them! Damned nasty cigars, too!'

His listeners laughed.

'And what happened to you?' asked Chase.

'Oh,' smiled Wooten, 'I sent the document to the admiral, with a covering letter, and jolly nearly got badly scrubbed for exceeding my duty and abducting the General. However, it was all right in the end, and I believe the old man was secretly rather pleased with what I'd done.'

'So he jolly well ought to have been,' remarked one of the watch-keepers.

'M'yes, but he was a man who didn't say much. However, a month later a British colonel and a couple of other officers came down from Pekin to confer with me about putting Kiang-fu in a state of defence in case the rebels came again, for by that time the powers that be had come to the conclusion that if they did capture it, it wouldn't do us any good. The colonel and I went ashore together, he with his two officers, and I with a sheet of paper and a pencil.

'"You'd better loophole that wall," he started off, pointing at a solid stone affair about three feet thick. "This house had better be demolished, and you'll have to dig a trench along here, with decent sand-bag head-cover. I should think a hundred and fifty rifles will be enough to man it, provided you have a couple of Maxims at each corner. Over there we'll have an emplacement for a field-gun, and there another trench."

'He went on like that the whole of one grilling forenoon, and by the time he'd finished I'd totted up my figures, and found he'd used the best part of a thousand men.

'"That's all right, sir," said I; "and when may I expect the regiment?"

'"Regiment!" he said, rather surprised. "What regiment d'you mean?"

'"The regiment for doing all this work and garrisoning the place, sir," said I innocently. "You've been talking about knocking down houses, erecting barricades, and digging trenches right and left. I've only got thirty men."