“You shall be shot to-morrow,” said Gerard.
“Lieutenant, it is right.”
But on the morrow nobody had any time to think of shooting Popa. At a very early hour, in the dewy silence of sunrise, the gates of the fortified camp were thrown back, and the stream of soldiers, solemnly emerging, went curling down into the rice-fields, with a long glitter of guns. All eyes were fixed on the farther frontier of forest, where stretched, half-hidden, the low, sullen line of the enemy’s defence. A couple of advance forts, whose small cannon were proving especially troublesome, had been marked out for the morning’s attack. Of late these operations had been greatly restricted, and the men now sent out accepted gratefully a possibility of painless death. For the shadow of cholera lay lurid upon the camp.
Gerard was indeed in luck, as Streeling had said, after all these wistfully patient months. He had taken a sick man’s place, and was acting as a (mounted) captain.
In the slow splendor of the burning daybreak, across that vast expanse of increasing sun, the “right half of the seventeenth battalion,” separating from the main body, advanced with half a company of sappers, under cover of artillery, against the fortifications of Lariboe. They were barely within range when the enemy opened fire from his lilas or little cannon, almost immediately backing up the discharge with the flat bang of numerous blunderbusses and the rarer whistle of the breech-loader. The roar of his resistance now became continuous, and soon his intrenchments ran like a torrent of flame under rapidly thickening clouds.
At a distance of some two hundred and fifty paces the troops halted, momentarily, to send back a volley in reply. Then on they went again, silently filling up the gaps in their ranks, while, after the custom of Eastern warfare, a hailstorm of curses and abusive epithets now mingled with the deadlier missiles that poured into their midst. At fifty paces the order was given to charge.
The men, rushing forward to their special point of attack, found themselves arrested by an outer hedge of thick bamboo bushes, with a broad border of bamboo spikes. Once close up against this position they were somewhat more sheltered from the fire of the central line, and, moreover, protected by the artillery behind them; but the garrison of the fort did not leave them one moment unharassed. They were now compelled to unsheathe their knives, and, with the aid of the sappers, they began calmly carving a passage through the dense obstruction of the bamboos.
A few terrible minutes elapsed. Some of the soldiers, cut by the spikes, flung themselves in furious effort against this living wall; others recoiled for a moment, disheartened by the groans of the wounded around them, feeling hopelessly arrested between advance and retreat. Then, as death still continued to blaze down upon them, amid the taunts of the enemy, they rushed bravely to their task again, cheered by their officers, who well knew the strain of such an obstinate impediment. Every moment of delay was calamitous. Through an opening the fort became visible, lying well back behind a field, its ramparts vaguely crowded with brightly turbaned heads. And half-way between hedge and fort rose insolently the banner of Acheen’s Sultan, with its crescent and klewangs, over a stuffed doll, intended for a caricature of the idolized Dutch General, ignominiously hanging by the feet.