“‘To-day it is my turn, to-morrow it may be yours,’” replied Captain Farmer, looking as grim as the Taku Fort as he translated the sentence for the other’s benefit. “The Emperor of China had best bear this in mind, for there’ll be a pretty fine kick up, I tell you, when they come to hear of this business in England!”
“You are right there, sir,” agreed Commander Nesbitt. “There will be a jolly row about it in the papers and in Parliament, I know! But it is none of our fault; we have done nothing to be ashamed of, for we’ve done our best!”
“Ay, though defeated we’re not disgraced,” said the captain, as he came down the poop-ladder to go into his cabin. “It’s a sad affair, though, a sad affair. We’ve lost Bitpin and Stormcock and Morgan and that poor lad Jackson amongst the officers killed, besides those wounded, and I can’t say yet how many men, but between thirty and forty, I fear!”
“Yes, sir, it is a bad job,” replied the commander, bending his head and looking grave for an instant, but the next moment a bright look came in his face and he shook his fist at the distant forts; “but we’ll pay you out yet, pigtails and all, for this day’s work!”
“Let us hope so,” said the captain, as he crossed the quarter-deck and disappeared from view beneath the break of the poop, going into his own cabin to send in his report to our senior officer, Admiral Hope, who was subsequently invalided home, being so dangerously wounded as to be incapable of attending to any other business after forwarding his dispatches home. “And, the sooner the better, Nesbitt—the sooner the better!” Both officers judged the feeling of their countrymen well, but quite twelve months elapsed before all our preparations were completed for retaliating on the Chinese and proving to them, in that forcible mode which seemingly only appealed to their reason, that “the worst piece of work they ever did in their lives was to tread on the tail of the British lion,” as Doctor Nettleby observed to Mr Jellaby in my hearing later on the same day.
Chapter Twenty Nine.
A Good “Deal.”
In the meantime, the fleet sailed away from the scene of action, after honourably burying the dead and destroying our sunken vessels; so that the Chinese, who had a weak habit at that time and in later years, too, of indulging in fiction when referring to their martial exploits, should not be able to boast of having captured our ships, the Candahar putting in at Hong Kong to refit later on, after visiting Shanghai again on leaving the Gulf of Pechili.