Old "B.-T." ought to have written about this one, not I. He would have done justice to it. I know that I can't.
It all happened in a moment, and we had the yelling brutes all over us, pushing a thin fringe of struggling bluejackets in front of them. They looked huge as they rushed at us in the fog, but the first two or three who came my way must have been pretty sorry that I hadn't forgotten to load my revolver. It was a regular pandemonium for about sixty or seventy seconds, I should fancy. Ching's men were making a strange, squealing, hissing sound; the Yankees had a different row; and our people were grunting and cursing. I could hear the Skipper roar: "Close on the centre!" and his bugler kept on sounding the two "G's" to let us know where the centre was. I found myself near him. He had his coxswain, and a couple of signalmen, and the two mids—Ford and Ponsonby—close to him, and was laying about him with his big stick, and punching fellows in the face with his fist. His coxswain knocked over one brute who was coming for him at the back, and I helped him get rid of another and then lost touch with him, and came across the wounded trying to scramble up and defend themselves with their bayonets, Trevelyan's men standing over them, clubbing their rifles and making a grand fight of it. I saw that they were holding their own, and with a dozen of my own marines at my back, ran and forced my way into a lot of fellows who were trying to cut down Ching's men. I suppose they hated him and his jackets even more than they hated us.
My Christopher Columbus! we did give 'em beans, and I'm precious glad that my sword was the best that could be bought (well, perhaps bought isn't the right word; so I will say obtained), for their heads were as tough as iron, and the wadded cotton coats they wore made it jolly hard to use the point. For all that, though, it tickled one or two of them considerably.
Old Grainger clung to me like my shadow. He always seemed to be handy when I'd got two people to manage at the same time, and we always managed to scoop the pool.
We eased off the pressure round my princess, especially when Parkinson's First Lieutenant, a man nearly forty, came along from the left with twenty or so of his people, shouting, "Rah!—Rah!—Rah!—O!—Ma!—Ha!" and burst in among them and began clubbing. Little Rashleigh suddenly shot into view with a broken sword in one hand and a revolver in the other. His scabbard got between his legs, and he fell sprawling, and would have been killed if Langham hadn't suddenly sprung out of the fog and run a chap through who was standing over him and just going to jab him with a bayonet.
The three machine-gun carriages and the little Chinese field gun were all rallying places for our people, and I suppose I must have got into the "focus of disturbance", as they say about earthquakes, because, although the fog was so thick, I saw nearly all our officers at one time or another, and we got so jammed together—Chinese and marines and bluejackets—that we could hardly move.
I nearly came to grief near that Chinese gun. A wretched chap thought he could prod people from beneath it in comparative comfort, and tried his hand on me, but wasn't quite quick enough. He got me a beastly rip in the leg just above the knee.
Then "Old Lest" seemed to elbow his way along. If you'll believe me, he still had a cigar between his teeth (Whitmore saw it, and his coxswain swears that it was even then alight). He had broken his stick over the heads of two big ruffians, and they bungled against the gun carriage, and just as I thought that it was my turn to do something prompt, he caught them by their pigtails and "wanged" their heads together. That knocked them out of time, and his coxswain saw to it that they were dead.
Well, that was my little show, and I felt dizzy, and Grainger lowered me on to that gun wheel. The old sergeant-major came up streaming with blood and loaded my revolver for me, and Grainger wiped a lot of blood stuff off my face, which was interrupting the view of the surrounding scenery. People seemed to be leaving off fighting; our fellows were cheering like mad, and the buglers began sounding the "fall in" and the "cease fire".
I was all right in a second or two, and went back to my old place in the rear, and my people began limping back, calling each other and falling in, talking twenty to the dozen, and wiping their bayonets with tufts of grass.