The Green Flag | Page 5

in at the tail of the words. Captain Foley heard them, and
Subalterns Grice and Murphy heard them; but there are times when a
deaf ear is a gift from the gods.
"Steady, Mallows!" cried the captain, in a pause of the grunting
machine-gun. "We have the honour of Ireland to guard this day."
"And well we know how to guard it, captin!" cried the same ominous
voice; and there was a buzz from the length of the company.
The captain and the two subs. came together behind the marching line.
"They seem a bit out of hand," murmured the captain.
"Bedad," said the Galway boy, "they mean to scoot like redshanks."
"They nearly broke when the blacks showed on the hill," said Grice.
"The first man that turns, my sword is through him," cried Foley, loud

enough to be heard by five files on either side of him. Then, in a lower
voice, "It's a bitter drop to swallow, but it's my duty to report what you
think to the chief, and have a company of Jollies put behind us." He
turned away with the safety of the square upon his mind, and before he
had reached his goal the square had ceased to exist.
In their march in front of what looked like a face of cliff, they had
come opposite to the mouth of the gully, in which, screened by scrub
and boulders, 3,000 chosen dervishes, under Hamid Wad Hussein, of
the Baggaras, were crouching. Tat, tat, tat, went the rifles of three
mounted infantrymen in front of the left shoulder of the square, and an
instant later they wore spurring it for their lives, crouching over the
manes of their horses, and pelting over the sandhills with thirty or forty
galloping chieftains at their heels. Rocks and scrub and mimosa
swarmed suddenly into life. Rushing black figures came and went in
the gaps of the bushes. A howl that drowned the shouts of the officers,
a long quavering yell, burst from the ambuscade. Two rolling volleys
from the Royal Wessex, one crash from the screw-gun firing shrapnel,
and then before a second cartridge could be rammed in, a living,
glistening black wave, tipped with steel, had rolled over the gun, the
Royal Wessex had been dashed back among the camels, and 1,000
fanatics were hewing and hacking in the heart of what had been the
square.
The camels and mules in the centre, jammed more and more together as
their leaders flinched from the rush of the tribesmen, shut out the view
of the other three faces, who could only tell that the Arabs had got in by
the yells upon Allah, which rose ever nearer and nearer amid the clouds
of sand-dust, the struggling animals, and the dense mass of swaying,
cursing men. Some of the Wessex fired back at the Arabs who had
passed them, as excited Tommies will, and it is whispered among
doctors that it was not always a Remington bullet which was cut from a
wound that day. Some rallied in little knots, stabbing furiously with
their bayonets at the rushing spearmen. Others turned at bay with their
backs against the camels, and others round the general and his staff,
who, revolver in hand, had flung themselves into the heart of it. But the
whole square was sidling slowly away from the gorge, pushed back by

the pressure at the shattered corner.
The officers and men at the other faces were glancing nervously to the
rear, uncertain what was going on, and unable to take help to their
comrades without breaking the formation.
"By Jove, they've got through the Wessex!" cried Grice of the Mallows.
"The divils have hurrooshed us, Ted," said his brother subaltern,
cocking his revolver.
The ranks were breaking, and crowding towards Private Conolly, all
talking together as the officers peered back through the veil of dust.
The sailors had run their Gardner out, and she was squirting death out
of her five barrels into the flank of the rushing stream of savages. "Oh,
this bloody gun!" shouted a voice. "She's jammed again." The fierce
metallic grunting had ceased, and her crew were straining and hauling
at the breech.
"This damned vertical feed!" cried an officer.
"The spanner, Wilson!--the spanner! Stand to your cutlasses, boys, or
they're into us." His voice rose into a shriek as he ended, for a
shovel-headed spear had been buried in his chest. A second wave of
dervishes lapped over the hillocks, and burst upon the machine-gun and
the right front of the line. The sailors were overborne in an instant, but
the Mallows, with their fighting blood aflame, met the yell of the
Moslem with an even wilder, fiercer cry, and dropped two hundred of
them with a single point-blank volley. The howling, leaping