From where "B.-T." and I were standing, I should think that we could see at least seven hundred Chinamen, and away on the left, we could see any number more hurrying: from the town.
"Buck up, old chap! Don't look so blooming bored!" and I slapped him on the back. "We'll have our work cut out in the next half-hour, when we are doing rearguard."
"Keep your beastly fists to yourself," he growled.
Old "Blucher" had bounded back to the Captain directly our Maxim had begun firing.
"Old Lest" and his little lot were in the rear of our hill—at the bottom of it—waiting for Parkinson to go on past them, farther back. We saw Parkinson drop his wounded people and sweep past and away towards two small rising bits of ground, about four hundred yards in the rear, and the Skipper, picking up his wounded, followed slowly.
Then came our turn as rearguard.
My Christopher Columbus! we had about all we could do to keep the beggars back. The heathen Chinee was simply seeing "red", and came charging across the paddy fields, rushing up towards the slope in front of us, and getting round both our flanks. They thought that they'd got us in a hole, I expect, and they spared a couple of hundred fellows to sneak away to the right, behind some banks, hoping to catch the Skipper in the open. They would have done it too, and got right on top of him before he could have spotted them, had not "B.-T." taken half his company down the hill at a run, and posted himself behind a couple of broken-down huts and a bit of another bank, and given 'em "beans" as they went doubling along below him. It was really a race who should get to the bank first, and old "B.-T." won.
They were now actually crawling up the hill in front of my chaps, dodging among the "scrub" and among the grave mounds, and they were getting round my left rear as well. There must have been four or five hundred of them, and they were taking cover so well, that it made it confoundedly difficult to hit them.
Langham caught a few of them in the open with the Maxim; but it's such a jolly extravagant kind of weapon as regards ammunition, and puts a dozen cartridges into a chap before another can take his place, and get his own share.
Young Withers was in command of the other half of "B.-T.'s" company of bluejackets on my left. I sent one of my chaps across to him to tell him to retire, and he began to fall back steadily. He was keeping his head, but looking very white. Langham's Maxim section began to haul their gun back, and everyone was a bit flurried. Two men got bowled over. One sprang straight up, with one hand clawing the air, and I knew that he was shot through the heart. I've seen a good many men do that in my time, and they all had been shot through the heart.