Brown on Resolution

by C. S. Forester

  His example was infectious. The other survivors of the landing party rose simultaneously and flung themselves clown the cliff. Brown smashed the spine of one of them as he gathered himself for his last leap, but the other two reached the water’s edge—and safety—unhurt save for gashes and scratches. Three men now crouched in the steam pinnace; they were the only unwounded survivors of a landing party of twenty-one.

  But to the puzzled, fuming officers on Ziethen, their appearance by the pinnace meant relief from the worry of guessing what had happened to the landing party. The bridge semaphore began a series of staccato gesticulations, sending question after question to the dazed, conscience-stricken trio crouching in the lee of the rock edge. Sitting with their feet in the water (for if they stood their signalling hands came into Brown’s view and within reach of his bullets) they produced a couple of handkerchiefs and signalled back—misspelt, badly signalled sentences went limping back to the cruiser, where dozens of pairs of keen eyes read off the halting words. Happily most of the questions could be answered in one word.

  “Where is the rest of the party?”

  “Dead.”

  “Where is Lieutenant Sturmer?”

  “Dead.”

  “How many men opposed you?”

  “One.”

  One question, however, the gesticulating semaphore demanded again and again, and the bothered sailors’ blundering best constituted unsatisfactory replies.

  “Where is the escaped prisoner?” demanded the semaphore repeatedly, and the wretched men beside the pinnace struggled vainly to satisfy their persistent captain.

  ‘Up the cliff,’ they signalled, and ‘Hidden,’ and ‘We do not know’ and ‘In the same place as he was this morning,’ and similar hopeless answers which drove Captain Lutz into a state of blind fury, which was not alleviated by the knowledge that part of the crew was reading off the answers and that the whole would know of them within the hour.

  Exasperated officers raked the face of the cliff with powerful glasses, but there was no possible chance of their finding Brown in that way. The crew were furious with rage at the killing of the landing party. The last man shot by Brown in the bo’sun’s chair had been smitten through both hips, and had lain shrieking with agony until the Surgeon reached him—and every shriek had been heard by the men. They were annoyed with their officers, and they thirsted, one and all, for the blood of the man who had put this shame upon their ship. And von Lutz knew all about it, as a good officer should. This insolent runaway had undone all the good effected by the victory over Charybdis, and only his death would restore good feeling. Von Lutz appreciated the need of good feeling in a crew about to set out on a voyage of half-senseless destruction with certain defeat sooner or later at the end of it. Besides, he must not allow the men to stay idle. Von Lutz had every possible motive when he issued orders to prepare for a landing at once of the largest party Ziethen could put on shore without entirely crippling herself—two hundred men. The news ran round the lower deck to the accompaniment of a buzz of joy.

  Meanwhile the work of repair must go on. The Kapitan-Leutnant received his orders from the Captain. Some sort of screen for the workers must be arranged, so that the men at work on the injured plating could be hidden from the view of the rifleman on the cliff. A working party hurriedly fell upon the task of preparing booms and awnings—further delay for Ziethen.

  Brown in his eyrie on the cliff might have found time heavy on his hands were he not so wholly absorbed in the possibility of the need for immediate action. The sun was slowly roasting him alive on the bare rock as though he were on a grid-iron. More than once he was forced to have recourse to one of his two water-bottles, and it was a worse torture to have to tear his lips away after a couple of grudging mouthfuls than it was to bear the thirst which preceded and followed them. Already one bottle was half empty, however, and Brown refused to allow himself anything approaching indulgence in the warm, metal-flavoured fluid. He sternly thrust back the cork and buckled the bottles to his belt. Small beauty is there in war—no one could find beauty in the tumbled bodies of the dead down below or in the tortured wounded calling feebly for water on the scorching rocks. But beauty could be found in that gesture of Brown’s; one lone man—boy, rather—unwatched, unordered, putting aside the drink he craved at the call of what he considered his duty. He set his small white teeth while the sweat ran down his face and caked the streaked lava dust which grimed it, his rifle ever to his hand, suffering and enduring without regret or hesitation. The suffering and self-sacrifice and uncomplaining heroism which war has demanded, had they only been given to causes which mankind deems ignobler, could in the million years of man’s existence have eliminated the need for suffering anywhere within mankind’s sphere of activity. Brown, had this been pointed out to him, would not have thought such an end worth achieving at any price—most certainly not at the price demanded.

  He took advantage of the lull to run the pull-through down his rifle barrel again. He looked with attention to the breech mechanism, for the lava dust was a serious clog to its smooth working. He counted his cartridges and settled them more handily in his pouches. He thought about having a meal, but put the idea aside; he was not at all hungry, and excitement and the sun pouring down on to his back between them were not likely to allow him to be for some time. Still time dragged on.

  Meanwhile, bent over the meagre charts of Resolution that were all any ship could boast, Captain von Lutz and his officers were planning the attack upon Brown which should put an end to the tiresome incident. This time nothing was to be left to chance. There was to be no repetition of the blunder of the morning, when too few men were flung idly upon an impossible climb in the face of a weapon of precision. The campaign was mapped out with real German thoroughness. All men were to carry food and water. Each landing party was allotted a different section of the island to beat through. As the small-arm supplies were; limited, each party was carefully arranged in sections of beaters and riflemen. There was to be no taking of the bull by the horns. Brown’s flanks were to be turned and he was to be forced upon the move first before he was directly attacked. The riflemen in the tops were to continue their watch for him—a bullet could travel from Ziethen to the island as easily as from the island to Ziethen. The hunt was to be continued all night if necessary. The capture or death of the quarry was to be broadcast by a prearranged whistle signal, whereupon the landing parties were to return immediately to the boats. All possible arrangements seemed to have been made; the only flaw was that the men who made the plans were still unaware of the difficulty of movement upon the island.

  Brown, idling away the weary minutes, became aware of great activity on board Ziethen. The semaphore messages in German had of course been unreadable to him, and they had been the last incident of note, having occurred two hours ago. Now men began to show themselves here and there on the upper deck and boat deck. They exposed themselves no more than they could help, and Brown, firing rapidly when opportunity occurred, kept them harried. He hit at least four men, who dropped upon the upper deck, lying still or crawling away to shelter, and his shots were answered from the ship by hidden riflemen—who, all the same, had no knowledge of his exact position, and whose efforts in consequence caused him little trouble. A boom suddenly was run out on the starboard side abaft the bridge (Brown got in two shots into the little group he could see) and from it dropped a long strip of awning which quite screened the damaged area from his present position. At the same time another canvas screen was run up across the upper deck at the stern, and despite the elevation of his position he could not quite see over it. He sent three bullets through it, however, before he realized that this was a mere waste of priceless ammunition. The bridge semaphore wig-wagged again hysterically, and the result of its message was seen shortly, when the three wretched men in the steam pinnace left their shelter under the rock and made a wild dash back to the ship. The pinnace steered an erratic enough course, for the helmsman was lying flat on his bac
k under the gunwale in his desperate anxiety to avoid fire, all the same Brown could do her no harm and she soon shot round Ziethen’s stern out of sight into safety. The sound of bustle and activity even came across the lagoon to Brown’s ears, but the screens hid everything from view save the ship’s stern, upper works, and starboard side as far as the outboard screen, and he could not form any accurate idea of what was going on. He soon knew, however.

  Out from Ziethen’s port bow, where they had been manned out of his sight, shot four boats. The steam pinnace led, towing the other three, and they were all four crammed with men. A bubble of rifle-fire rose from Ziethen at the same time and now a new menace was added—machine guns. Two of these raved at him from Ziethen’s fore-top, traversing slowly backward and forward across the suspected area, at each new traverse taking a line lower down the cliff. Bullets were sending the dust flying everywhere; the cactus was dropping here and there as the fleshy stems were cut through. Under that leaden hail Brown forced himself to think clearly. He could do little to stop those boats—the death of a dozen men would not stop them—and to fire he must expose himself a little in that deadly horizontal rain. It was not worth the risk. Brown crouched down into the hollow on the top of the saddle, behind the twin lava blocks which had served their turn so well. The sharp rap of a bullet upon one of them and the sound of others close above him made the propriety of the movement apparent immediately after. Then the hail passed on.

  Brown, squirming round on his stomach, peered between the blocks, could see nothing, and squirmed round further to where he could see round them. The string of boats, instead of making straight for him, had dashed out through the opening of the lagoon, and even as he caught sight of them, had swung round to port, to his part of the island but on the outside, the sea face. His position was to be taken in reverse. It was then that Brown looked anxiously at the sun; there were still three hours more of daylight—only three hours, thank God.

  The persistent beating of the machine-gun bullets started a little avalanche of rock thirty yards away on the right, and this disturbance attracted the attention of all the marksmen on the ship; bullets rained upon the spot until a wide dust cloud arose from it, drifting away on the hardly perceptible wind. Then the firing stopped; ammunition had been used in prodigious quantities, and even small-arms ammunition must not be allowed to run short on a raiding cruiser. From the ship came a rattle and buzz of machinery, and the creaking of tackle. Brown knew that the repairs were in progress, and he knew too that it would be hard for him to interfere for a while; it made him frown in anguish. But while his face of the cliff was being raked by a dozen glasses, and while a score of marksmen, finger on trigger, were waiting anxiously for any sign of movement, he dared not make an open attempt to shift his position so as to be able to fire round the screen. Behind him, too, he knew that men were being landed at the outer margin of the island; soon they would be climbing up the outer face. Then they would reach the crest. His saddle of rock was dominated from one or two points on the crest. If the enemy reached one of those points in daylight he was certain of death. If he moved from where he was by daylight he was certain of death. His life depended upon the coming of night. It may be at once taken for granted that Brown had no particular concern about the loss of his life; he was not yet oppressed by the fear of death. All he prayed for was the opportunity to continue to delay Ziethen at Resolution. He had done all he could at present, all the same. With dogged determination he lay upon his ledge of rock waiting for night—or for the firing from the crest which would presage his death. There is a sublime, hard satisfaction in awaiting death when one has done all that could be done to avert it. Brown knew that satisfaction, even while he kept the cruiser under patient observation lest any further opportunity should display itself.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE STEAM PINNACE, towing empty boats this time, suddenly shot into view through the break in the cliffs and dashed up to Ziethen; in a quarter of an hour she shot out again with the boats full of men once more. Machine guns and rifles opened again from the ship upon the cliffs to prevent him from firing, but, as before, he had no intention of doing so. But he saw the boats turn to port as they had done the first time before the cliffs cut them from his view. That meant that the sweep across the island by a line of men, which Brown keenly foresaw, would only take place across a limited length; if he could only move along the island sufficiently far he would evade the sweep. Two hundred men, which was Brown’s accurate estimate of their number, at ten-yard intervals cover two thousand yards and the outside edge of Resolution is about four thousand yards in circumference. Brown realized that he must transfer himself to a point rather more than halfway round the island if he were to have any chance of escape.

  Yet he could not move at all till nightfall. He waited on with anxious patience, not knowing from one minute’s end to another when fire would be opened upon him from the crest of the island. Even Brown, with his sturdy, thoughtless resignation of Fate and Duty, cast anxious glances upward at the sun as it sank steadily in his face.

  The seaward face of Resolution is very like the inner face, save that the angle of ascent is much less steep. The inner face is the nearly vertical wall of the throat of a crater; the outer face is the hardened remains of the lava flow. But on the outer face the blocks of lava resulting from sudden cooling are just as razor-edged and difficult of negotiation, and the cactus is just as impenetrable. The German landing party proceeded with German thoroughness. The first half was lined out along the seashore at accurate intervals, and was kept waiting until the second half was brought from the ship and lined out in continuation of it. Every man knew his job, which was to push straight up the face of the island ahead of him, keeping correct alignment and spacing, scanning every bush and cranny for the fugitive. The Lieutenant in command raced from one end of the line to the other in the steam pinnace, saw that everything was in order, and took up his position in the centre of the line. He gave the word and the line began its ascent.

  Alas for the accurate alignment! The weary climb up the seaward face was of necessity reduced in pace to that of the slowest, and the slowest was very slow. Not until it was really attempted could anyone guess the fiendish difficulty involved in moving about on Resolution. The frightful heat radiated from the rocks—which were nearly too hot for the naked hand—was the least of the difficulties. Cactus and lava combined to lacerate feet and hands. Two ankles were sprained in the first half-hour. The clumsy, rigid line made excruciatingly slow progress. Thirst descended instantly upon the sweating, swearing sailors, and the shirkers among them—there must always be shirkers in any large body of men—began to hang back and hold up their fellows. The fuming officers did their best by example and exhortation to keep the men on the move, but cramped living in a cruiser in the tropics is not the best preparation for a difficult piece of mountaineering. Here and there parts of the island were really unscalable, and men were compelled to move to one side to climb at all; but as soon as the difficulty was evaded the petty officers, with the pedantic adherence to orders resulting from an over-strict discipline, held up their section of the line until the intervals were corrected. No one could see very far to the left or right, thanks to convexity of the face and the lunatic roughness of the surface, so that any attempt to command or lead the whole line on the part of the Lieutenant was quite hopeless. Bound by its first rigid orders, the line crawled up the face of the island at a pace much slower than even the slowest among them could have proceeded alone.

  An hour before nightfall (at least an hour, that is to say, later than he had expected to reach the crest) the exasperated Lieutenant sent word along the line for each man to push on as best he could. But it takes time to pass orders from mouth to mouth along an extended line, and only one-third of the distance had been covered when they were issued. The sun sank gaudily into the purple sea and night fell with dramatic rapidity to find Brown still unfired at, and two hundred German sailors spread out and tangled in th
e darkness over a mile of leg-breaking rock.

  Brown waited with sturdy, unyielding patience for complete darkness. Throughout the afternoon he had been peering down the cliff below him, mapping out in his mind a path down the cliff—a handhold here, a foothold there, a slide lower down. When night came he was ready; his hands were bound about with strips torn from his jumper, his equipment fastened about him, his mind as resolute as ever. He was glad that the German landing party had not caught him, but it was a temperate gladness, in no way to be associated with thankfulness. It did not occur to him to be thankful. Without a regret or a thought save for the business in hand, he climbed off the shelf which had been his fortress for twelve hours and swung himself down. The cruel lava tore and hacked at him as he slid and tumbled down the cliff. The razor edges tore through his shoes and cut deep into his feet. The cactus spines scratched great cuts into his body, making long lines like the marks of a tiger’s claws. He wrenched ankle and knee so that they pained him excruciatingly. Yet he kept in his mind the various points to be aimed at, and it was not long before he had covered the three hundred feet of descent and had reached the place of his landing the day before.

  The first, ill-fated German landing party had reached the island a hundred yards away to his right, and it was there that the tumbled, tossed bodies of its dead lay along with the dozen wounded whose pitiful cries had climbed the rock to Brown’s ears all the afternoon. Gladly would Brown have gone to them, have tried to tend their hurts and given them the water for which they had moaned unceasingly, were it not that to do so would have imperilled the execution of his duty. As it was, he shut his ears to the pitiful sounds, just as he had done all day, and proceeded with his task. Nothing could weigh in the scale at all against his conception of what he had to do. Several of the wounded died that night.