Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  Some thought of his own was filling Bolles with heightening and helpless anger.

  “If I could only reach the artillery ammunition column,” he fumed, half-aloud, “I’d fix ‘em yet.”

  “Artillery column? You’d better get to the rear and try to escape the general capture. You’ll look fit after you’ve lived on the fish and rice diet of a prison camp for a year. Why are you waitin’?”

  “I’m waiting to see how much time the General wants.”

  “He’ll get the time Japanese infantry needs to march nine miles— it’s precious little.”

  Bolles started to reply when the man at the receiver interrupted.

  “Message comin’ over, sir,” he said. Bolles took the receiver.

  “Yes,” he called, “Bolles—Santa Symprosa dam.”

  “The General’s orders are that you withdraw toward the center. Other advices confirm the report that our right flank is completely turned. Destroy all supplies. The General also says that you should have obtained information of this movement long before you did. He holds you responsible. We’re completely done for.”

  Bolles’ face became crimson with anger. He mumbled something into the mouth-piece.

  “What’s that?” came clearly over the wire. “Didn’t you get the message?”

  “Didn’t get a word of it,” growled Bolles. “Something the matter with the line.” And he reached out where the black thread of the buzzer lay along the ground, grasped it in a strong hand, and before ten witnesses deliberately jerked it asunder.

  ‘Wow, Lime,” he bantered as he got to his feet, “I’ll bet you a month’s pay against your Whippy saddle that I hold the Japs in the cañon until— until—until the General gets away.”

  There was one idea dominant in the mind of Eblee’s chief-of-staff. That was, to get as many men as his limited time would let him aboard the trains that lay waiting in black and puffing ranks on the newly built switches of the main base, and away toward the safety of the states. He kept a brave show of force on the front where three successive Japanese attacks had been repulsed on the preceding days, but back at the base, where the night was lighted to a ghastly day by the flames of the fires that were forever saving great hillocks of supplies from Japanese capture, and the shrieking of locomotive whistles drowned all sound, and the confusion of hurrying men made passage perilous, regiment after regiment was being loaded on anything that ran on wheels. He had hoped for ten hours, and when that time had dragged by, and a second relay of freight cars came rumbling out of the desert, he stopped long enough to say to the General:

  “It’s not as bad as we thought, sir. Five brigades of the First Field Army have been entrained. New cars are here and there aren’t any more reports from Bolles.”

  “It’s bad enough,” groaned Eblee. “Think of Washington—think of the States! After we’d reported a victory, too. Oh, I don’t want to go back— I don’t want to go back—”

  Looming like a specter in the red glare, a staff-officer galloped straight for temporary headquarters and began calling the general’s name.

  “Here—” said Eblee wearily, “here—I suppose it’s all over now.”

  The boy threw himself from his horse and stood panting and trying to speak. A group of disconsolate correspondents looked up from the brims of their pulled-down hats, and finally rose and drew closer. No one interfered with them.

  “Message—from Major Bolles—sir,” gasped the aide. “He presents Mar—shal Tsushima’s un—conditional surrender—Fifty thousand men— sir—colors and guns—for God’r sake—get troops there—general, it’s a—bluff—and it may bust—any moment—”

  The Japanese advance, marching up the floor of Santa Symprosa cañon, heard firing on the plateau above them and on both flanks. Their service of information had been perfect, and the firing disturbed no one. They knew that they could reach the Santa Symprosa dam before any considerable force could cut them off. They had placed flank guards in advance of their columns on both sides of the canon’s walls—guards with strength enough to brush Bolles’ little force aside without so much as stopping. Field Marshal Tsushima glanced smilingly up at the cliffs that rose a sheer five hundred feet on either side of his massed columns, but he did no more.

  Ten minutes later an aide signaled down from above. An officer stopped to take the message, but the staff did not draw rein. Then the man galloped up and turned in his report.

  The General began reading it, marching, but before he was half through it he raised his hand for “halt.” There was more signaling and at last, that signaling became frantic. The firing had ceased and the whole Japanese army was receiving word to stand fast. There was a ripple of excitement that became a questioning murmur. For Field Marshal Tsushima, after more wig-wagging and many exclamations, dismounted and made a scrambling, painful way up a zigzag trail to the top of the canon, to a consultation with an American major, who had given good and sufficient reasons for not coming down.

  Marshal Tsushima was met by officers of the right flank guard and conducted to a large flat rock on which were spread maps, tracings and blue prints of the Santa Symprosa dam. A white flag of truce was leaning against a tree, and an officer in American khaki was languidly explaining something to an interpreter, who was excitedly retailing it to a pushing, craning circle of Japanese officers.

  “You can see for yourself, sir,” Bolles drawled, when the gist of his previous talk had been retailed to the general, “the dam is three hundred feet high and half-a-mile long. Here are the figures on the water it backs up,” and he proffered a closely-covered sheet, sprinkled with Greek symbols and footed by an underscored result, in which the word “gals” tailed off a row of figures that covered the bottom of it from edge to edge. “Here is a contoured map of the canon, showing the ‘fall’ we get. You see—the gorge narrows again, below here, about opposite where your supply-trains are now. Labor could have been saved by building the dam there, but it wouldn’t have given the tremendous ‘head’ of water we need here, for power. Now, sir, we have the whole Symprosa dam fairly honey-combed with Rack-a-Rock. Here is an elevation of the front face—we weren’t taking any chances, you perceive. There are about three tons of explosive—more or less.” The last sheet was a wide blue print on which had been traced with red ink the current lines of an electric detonator that ramified to power charges indicated on the wall of the dam. “As I started to say, sir, you can see from this that fourteen minutes after I give the signal to the look-out, standing over there on the peak of Conduit Point, all the ground that your army now occupies will be covered with a torrential flood of fifty feet of water. A few of your men might escape—but it’s extremely doubtful.” Bolles hesitated a little and stammered becomingly.

  “You will understand, sir,” he went on, “that when the time came for me to act, I found myself unable to take the responsibility for such an unprecedented destruction of human life, without giving you some opportunity of avoiding it.”

  There was bickering and there was bluster, and many requests for armistices, and time to consult superiors—deprecations of unheard of methods of warfare, and diplomacy, and references to the precepts of the Geneva Convention. Bolles had not played twenty years of poker for nothing. He made one great concession when he allowed a detail of Japanese officers to be conducted to the dam. One sight of it was enough.

  At a black box of a friction detonator a young officer was waiting with his hand on the plunger, intently watching a sergeant who stood on the opposite wall, a red flag held horizontally and well away from his body. From the base of this box a cable of black cords lay fifty yards across the ground to the cañon wall and there ramified into many strands that ran to different points across the curving face of the dam. A sentinel kept the investigators at a respectful distance. A troop of dismounted men heightened the effect from the shelter of every rock and tree, prepared for and safe from any terrific explosion that might occur.

  The stupendous audacity of “Bolles’ Bluff”
may be bruited down the ages, but history holds no moment of more acute suspense than the one Bolles suffered while the Japanese staff was jargoning its report to its general. What they were saying was:

  “Sir, there is an officer standing over the dam who holds in the crook of his finger the life of every man in the gorge.”

  What Bolles’ rather vulgar imagination feared they were saying was: “Sir, the cables are cavalry lariats, blackened with harness dressing, the charges are mud-daubs on the wall, the detonator—if all the rest were real—is, on its face, inadequate, and this man has the American Doctor Cook kicked into a corner and begging for mercy as the teller of historic and colossal lies.”

  But it was not until the last Japanese prisoner had toiled up the incline that leads out of the Symprosa cañon, and the last wagon of the captured supply train had gone creaking into park, that even Eblee was informed of the details of the surrender of Tsushima. And that was when Major Barwell Carruthers, Military Observer for the British Army, handed to the General a splotchily stained and (at close range) palpably counterfeit electric detonator.

  “Allow me to present you, sir,” he begged, “as a suggested pedestal for Major Bolles’ statue in your Hall of Fame, one empty, but forever glorified, hard-tack box.”

  And beyond the desert, a nation, not yet fully enlightened, was aflame with joy.

  Pearsons Magazine

  February, 1905

  SUBMARINED

  by Walter Wood

  WALTER Wood was a “natural” for the role of writer of war stories of the future. He was an authentic naval expert with a number of books on the subject, including Famous British War Ships and Their Commanders (Hurst & Blackett, 1891), The Battleship (K. Paul, French, Tribner & Co., 1912), and his most famous work, The Enemy in our Midst, The German Invasion (J. Long, 1917). Wood was a prolific magazine writer of both fiction and nonfiction, a heavy percentage of it involved with the sea.

  In Submarined, Walter Wood was not only early warning the public of the deadly danger of the submersible in warfare, but he was also suggesting means of counteracting it. In this brief incident, neither country is identified, but the story accurately predicts the mood of the period before World War I.

  Any credit to Wood for anticipating the submarine menace was to be usurped by A. Conan Doyle when, in the July 1914 issue of The Strand Magazine, he published a story titled Danger!, which finds Great Britain picking a quarrel with an unspecified small country that possesses eight submarines, and being defeated by the mass destruction of its merchant shipping. Doyle, in his story, also urged the construction of a channel tunnel to France, so England would have an alternative sea route. So close was Doyle’s publication to the beginning of the actual U-boat threat to England that previous anticipations were forgotten.

  THE Samson, first-class battleship, lonely, and for the time disabled as a fighter, blundered through a thick fog and a heavy sea. She was down by the head, in spite of all the pumps could do, and the leaks were gaining slowly. The ship drove through the stormy darkness into a cheerless dawn; but the fog passed with the night, and the daybreak showed that she had been steering straight for a sullen, rocky coast. “That lift in the fog saved us,” remarked the Captain to the Commander, who was standing by his side. “Ten minutes more and few of us would have had breath enough left to pray.”

  Already the Samson was going full speed astern with her engines. “In a roundabout way it’s luck,” said the Captain, “for since the water is coming in faster than we can pump it out, I’m going to run in here until we’re patched up. We’re in the enemy’s territory, it’s true, but better that than foundering.”

  An hour later the Samson was snug in a natural harbor, and on her divers were at work. Some officers and men were ashore, sweeping the bleak land with glasses, to see whether their coming was known, and a boat—the only serviceable one that was left to the Samson—had been sent out to watch for the enemy.

  “Look here, and see how safely we could ride if it weren’t for the submarines,” said the Captain to the Commander. “I know every yard of the region, and it’s all like this.” He drew with a pencil on a slip of paper a rough but clear plan of the anchorage and entrance. “Here’s the ship, snug and safe in deep water. Here’s the entrance, deep and narrow, a mere neck, with shoal water on each side. To get in at all a ship must exactly hit the middle, otherwise she’s done for. We don’t need to stay here more than twenty-four hours, we can patch her up well enough in that time to steam home; and our friends are so busy elsewhere that they’ll scarcely have time to give a thought to an out-of-the-way spot like this. Ah! they’re signaling from the shore that they can see nothing. That’s good—excellent!”

  “Yes, but—” the Commander finished his sentence with a look seaward and a sweep of the arm.

  “Um,” murmured the Captain with a troubled look.

  The boat came alongside, and the officer in command reported that one of the enemy’s torpedo boats had dashed into view, stopped for an instant, and had gone back the way she came.

  “So they’ve spotted us,” said the Captain. He called his officers into his cabin, and held a hurried council of war. Every man was invited to speak freely, and each did so, except Harden, the torpedo lieutenant. For the most part the officers favored the idea of the Commander, which was that the Samson should put to sea at once, and trust to Providence and her engines to escape from her predicament.

  “Unfortunately,” replied the Captain, “it can’t be done. We can’t get out of the channel—it’s ebb tide. Depend upon it, though, we’ll get out on the next flood. What we must consider is what to do until then. You haven’t spoken,” he said with a smile, turning to Harden. “Come, you’ve had some original ideas at maneuvers. What do you say, Mr. Harden?”

  Harden stepped forward quietly. “Well, sir,” he said, “of course, as most submarines are now provided with a ‘natiscope’ attachment to the periscope, they can see to maneuver at night. I feel sure we shall be attacked at night. But I have an idea. Perhaps it isn’t much; I’ll just explain it my own way.” When he finished the officers clustered earnestly about him. Harden was an authority on submarines and how to circumvent and destroy them.

  For a full minute there was silence. The Captain, with folded arms, looked steadily at the young man. “Your scheme is just possible, I believe,” he said very gravely. “But there is one point on which there can be little or no doubt. You might destroy any submarine that tried to reach us—but you would lose your own life.”

  “The ship would be saved, sir.”

  Again there was silence. “Well, I shall let you try,” the Captain said. “We have only one mine left. I wish you luck. If you want help, I will ask for volunteers.”

  There was a chorus of eager voices. Not an officer present seemed to value his life to the extent of a penny candle.

  “No, sir,” said Harden. “I can do it better alone.”

  “Will you have a diver with you?” asked the Captain. “There’s the gunner—he’s good at the work.”

  “If I may do it entirely by myself—at the finish, I’d rather, sir,” replied the torpedo lieutenant; and it was settled so.

  “As for these submarines,” resumed the Captain to the Commander as they returned to the deck, “my fervent prayer is like Nelson’s of something else— ‘curse them all.’ It isn’t what I call honest fighting. There seems no way of guarding against them.”

  The clumsy torpedo-nets were laced together and were lowered around the Samson from the ends of her great steel booms, but because of the net-cutters of the enemy’s torpedoes the Captain had not unbounded faith in this method of protection.

  “Before you actually begin operations,” said the Captain to Harden, “look at this chart of the harbor—I made it myself. Everything is in your favor so far as the water and the bottom go, for the one is as clear as crystal and the other level as a tennis-lawn. And the depth is not too great, I take it, for comfortable work in longish spells
?”

  “It ought to be child’s play, sir,” said Harden.

  They bent over the chart together.

  “Now,” said the Captain, after the scrutiny, “make a trial trip, and come up and tell me exactly what you think. If you then believe that the plan won’t work, tell me. We may have to try other means, for there is plenty of daylight, and no submarine will dare to strike before dark.”

  Harden had trained as a diver, and had trained thoroughly. He was the only man in the Samson who could bear the enormous pressure of the water at one-hundred-and-sixty-feet depth. He knew his apparatus, his captain and his assistants, and had blind faith in them all, which is half the battle with a diver. But in view of the task before him, he was glad that the extreme depth at which he must now work did not exceed thirty feet at low water, which was only just enough to float the ship. At high water ten feet more had to be reckoned, so that at the worst the depth was only forty feet.

  Harden’s dress was of the latest pattern, and was fitted with a telephone which established communication between the diver and the Samson.

  He went over the side and down the ladder.

  Messages passed between the torpedo lieutenant and the Captain, and in half an hour Harden had come to the surface to talk with the Captain. After that he went down again over the side.

  At the outset Harden worked on the seabed in the company of two blue-jacket divers, handling carefully a watertight, iron cylinder which had been lowered from the battleship. This was an observation mine, and contained seventy-two pounds of gun-cotton. Since it was their only one, it was too precious to risk as a defense to the harbor entrance, for a submarine might escape it.

  At last the torpedo lieutenant clambered up out of the water and was helped to the deck.

  “Well?” said the chief kindly. “But before you talk, get your wind back. You must be pretty well compressed.”

  “I am a bit winded,” answered Harden.

  “Yes,” said the Captain anxiously, “that’s bothering me. How long can you hold out?”