Fortunately for Zoe, she was not called upon to meet Wylie again for the present. The Assembly, before receiving Maurice’s pronouncement on the subject of the usages of war, had declared emphatically in favour of retaining Ahmed Pasha and proceeding to the capture of the tower of Segreti. Maurice and Wylie had urged in vain the danger of finding their forces divided by a surprise attack delivered at the narrowest part of the isthmus; not a man would support them in withdrawing from the first spot liberated on the mainland. If Ahmed Pasha was to be held, it was very clear that Segreti must be taken, since its defenders, should they be well supplied with ammunition, could render the village untenable. That they had not done so already was presumably due to lack of supplies, since they had left off wasting cartridges on long shots, and only fired when they saw any considerable body of insurgents together, but this might be merely a ruse. Wylie had urged that since the tower was to be taken, it would be best to storm it, but this advice ran counter to all the instincts of his followers. A frontal attack on an enemy ensconced behind stone walls was out of the question in their eyes. A foe might be ambushed, surprised, taken in the rear, but never attacked in front. The cutting-off of the water-supply, now nearly completed, would soon begin to cause the garrison inconvenience, and the insurgents need only post themselves round the tower at a discreet distance, to see that no one escaped.
This last comforting doctrine Wylie opposed with more success. Jalal-ud-din’s apparent supineness hitherto had inclined the insurgents to consider him a negligible quantity, but they allowed themselves, after much argument, to be convinced that he could not possibly remain passive under the cutting-up of the Ahmed Pasha detachment. His obvious objective was the tower of Segreti, since to relieve that would mean also the recapture of the village, while to allow the garrison to be annihilated would expose him to eternal disgrace—as well as to very mundane penalties from his master. This fact having been impressed upon the minds of the Assembly, Wylie was empowered to take such means, short of storming the tower, as commended themselves to him for repulsing the expected Roumi force, and he transferred his headquarters to Ahmed Pasha the same evening. His first duty on the morrow was to try and induce the garrison of the tower to surrender, which he did by pointing out that their water was now cut off, and that they must be short both of provisions and ammunition. Their reply was simply to invite him to come up and attack them, assuring him that they had plenty of ammunition left to repel any force he could muster. In the meantime they jeered both at his promise of a safe-conduct to the Roumi lines if they surrendered, and his warnings of their certain fate if they remained obstinate. Since nothing would induce his unsatisfactory and independent troops to embark upon the series of harassing night assaults and feigned attacks with which he would have tried to tire out the defenders and exhaust their stores, his only hope was to prepare a warm reception for the relieving force.
In this course he had the satisfaction of finding that his men were thoroughly with him. A guerilla warfare was something they could understand, and his previous training had sharpened their natural faculty for taking advantage of the rugged nature of the country. There were two possible ways of approach for a force coming from the direction of Therma—one by paths through the hills, the other along the sea-shore—and under Wylie’s orders the insurgents rendered both as difficult as possible. The work on the shore had to be conducted with the greatest secrecy, in view of the presence of the warships, which were apt to turn their search-lights landwards at inconvenient moments during the night; but the track was already so rough, and so frequently interrupted by projecting headlands, that there was little likelihood of its being chosen for the advance. More attention was therefore bestowed on the inland route, and the two days which were all the breathing-space that Jalal-ud-din allowed his foes were turned to good account. Great excitement prevailed on the third night after the capture, when Wylie’s scouts came in to announce that a column was actually advancing with the Pasha himself in command, and that it was guarding a train of baggage-animals conveying supplies for the garrison of Segreti. Wylie made a final inspection of his force, saw that the members of the various bands were at the posts he had assigned them, and not at those to which their own sweet will inclined, and hurried back for a final conference with Maurice, who was in command at Karakula, lest the moment of the fight should be chosen for an attack upon the isthmus.
The day that followed was a long and exciting one. It seemed that Jalal-ud-din Pasha imagined that the mere sight of his array was sufficient to quell opposition, for he disdained to take the obvious precaution of searching the country ahead of him and on either side of his line of march. Therefore his progress was a succession of small fights. A burst of firing from a scarcely discernible trench on a hillside, or from a thicket that looked too small to shelter a single rifleman; then a halt, during which his troops blazed away lustily, while a detachment detailed for the purpose climbed the hill laboriously to clear out the hornets’ nest, and returned disappointed to report that the assailants had vanished. The number of wounded increased steadily, and the nerves even of the stolid Roumi rank-and-file became affected. There was no opportunity of catching the insurgents in a body, and it was very rarely that even an odd man or two showed themselves. Jalal-ud-din set his teeth and continued to advance. Once through these defiles, his force could sweep away anything that ventured to oppose it, and Segreti must be relieved, even if it were not now as dangerous to turn back as to go on. One more long narrow valley, and the relieving column would emerge on the comparatively level ground round Ahmed Pasha.
This last valley was full of terrors for the Roumi troops. There was no more haphazard firing from the heights; each man here was a marksman, and each bullet found its billet, until no attempt was made to care for the wounded as they fell, for the common impulse to get through and get out hurried every man on. It was a demoralised and disorderly body of men, encumbered and mixed up with driverless mules and horses which had lost their riders, that approached the mouth of the valley at last. The only way open before them was the one leading to the shore, for that to Ahmed Pasha was blocked by a rough barricade of earth, stones, sods, anything that could be obtained, and from it there broke a hail of fire, utterly unexpected. Jalal-ud-din tried to rally his men, but this last surprise was too much for them, and they hurried panic-stricken down the road to the shore, still galled by the fire from the barricade, which did terrible execution upon the mass pressed together in the narrow space. On the shore things were no better, for bullets came from the cliffs behind and the walls and roofs of Ahmed Pasha away to the left, while the defenders of the barricade were beginning to climb over it and form themselves into a line in front.
This was the crucial moment for Wylie’s scheme. Mere slaughter was not what he aimed at. If the provisions and stores convoyed by the column could be secured, Jalal-ud-din and the remains of his force were free to make the best of their way home by the beach. The insurgents’ orders were to strike for the baggage-animals, and let the soldiers alone unless they tried to make a stand, and if they had obeyed them a notable triumph might have been secured. But the sight of the hereditary foe, confused and in retreat, was too much for the mountaineers, and instead of following Wylie into the thickest of the press, they swerved, as if by instinct, to the right, so as to cut off the Roumi retreat. In the wild mêlée which ensued all order was lost, and every man fought the nearest available foe with cold steel, for rifles were useless, save as clubs. Wylie, escaping imminent death over and over again almost by a miracle, used voice and whistle in vain to call off his men, but what he could not do was effected by an outside agent. There was a distant boom, and something came singing overhead, at the sound of which the Roumis promptly flung themselves on the ground. The insurgents, conspicuous in their white kilts or grey homespun among the darker uniforms, stared at them in amazement, but were about to take full advantage of their unlooked-for cowardice when there came another boom, and something fell into the mass of men on the right of the fight and exploded. Wylie was the first to realise what had happened. The Admirals had fulfilled their threat, and were shelling the rebels who had ventured to pass the limit they had laid down. All the ships in sight were firing now, the Magniloquent, as the nearest, leading, and dropping her shells, with terrible precision, exactly where the insurgents were thickest. For a moment they looked about them with a kind of stupid wonder, then, as Wylie had always known they would do if confronted with modern artillery, they broke and fled wildly, with shrieks and cries, the warships completing their discomfiture by planting more shells wherever ten or a dozen men ran together. Rather by good fortune than calculation, a considerable number sought refuge in the mouth of the valley through which the Roumis had come, and here, where shells could only be dropped by guesswork, Wylie got them into some sort of order, pointing out that Jalal-ud-din must run the gauntlet of their fire even now to reach Segreti.
The firing from the ships ceased, and Wylie expected every moment to see the head of the Roumi column appear, but he waited in vain. At last, followed in fear and trembling by one bold man, he crept out to reconnoitre, but to his astonishment found the scene of the battle left solitary. Looking along the seaside road to the right, he saw in the distance a disorderly crowd making its way back towards Therma. Jalal-ud-din’s force was in retreat, considering discretion the better part of valour in spite of the assistance of the ships. Another shell buried itself in the sand unpleasantly near Wylie and his kilted companion, and he returned hastily to his men, sending orders to Ahmed Pasha that a white flag was to be hoisted while he led the search for the dead and wounded. Segreti was not relieved, at any rate, but the supplies for which he had hoped were irrevocably lost, and the warships of the Powers had fired upon the insurgents.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE CONSULS TO THE RESCUE.
The confusion that prevailed in Ahmed Pasha after the fight was nothing short of sickening to the orderly English mind. The mass of the insurgents thought of nothing but holding an Assembly of their own, and shouting their grievances into one another’s sympathetic ears, and at last, in disgust, Wylie left them to do it. Maurice and Dr Terminoff, with a score of men carrying litters, came hurrying from Karakula, and with a few members of Wylie’s force who were able to conquer the desire to talk, set to work to care for the wounded. Each man, as soon as his hurts had been hastily bandaged, was sent to the rear, which meant Eirene’s hospital at Skandalo—a long journey either on mule-back or by litter, but there was no guarantee of even temporary safety at this end of the peninsula. Maurice and Dr Terminoff convoyed the long train of bearers, and Wylie, finding that his forces were still too much inebriated with their own verbosity to have any leisure for their military duties, took advantage of the fact to look after the Roumi wounded. There were not many of these, but he had placed several carefully in a sheltered spot near the shore, and he knew there must be more in the valley. These he brought out and laid near the rest, with the obedient but unwilling help of the few men who had stuck to him, and leaving them guarded, beckoned Prince Romanos quietly out of the Assembly, which had now, by sunset, reached the pitch of excitement at which every one tried to speak at once.
“I am off to the fleet, to get them to take the Roumi wounded on board,” he said. “Keep these fellows on the talk, until they’re got rid of.”