A faint cheer came from the loopholed wall, and I heard a cry of disgust from my own men. Looking back I saw them bending over the corpse of what had been one of the Eurasian telegraph people. It was horribly mutilated.
A little farther on another lay dead, mutilated in the same hideous manner. It made me sick to look at them.
In fact the whole place was a shambles. There must have been nearly a hundred—perhaps more—bodies dotted about in little white heaps near the fence and the breastwork, the heaps being more scattered between the breastwork and the wall where the Maxim had caught them in their final rush. Along the foot of the wall corpses lay singly. What grand-looking men they were, too, with fierce high-bred faces. It was a horrid business.
The edge of civilization! Yes! I was there again, and the only satisfaction this slaughter gave was the knowledge of what the fate of those two poor frightened women would have been had the attack succeeded.
I don't want, in this yarn, to worry anyone with the thoughts which flashed through my head on this or that occasion, but I should like to write just this and have done with it. To stand quietly, as I was doing then, on that slope where not many minutes previously four or five hundred raging men in the prime of life had rushed up with the one idea in their souls to "kill or die", "kill or die", and to see now the huddled, white-cloaked figures lying all round, so calm and still and dignified by death, made me feel wearily sad.
It was my duty to kill them—I was sent there, on the edge of civilization, to do so—and it had fallen to my lot to do it. "Kismet!"
It was only one more wave of fanatical, unthinking, misdirected barbarism broken again as it tried to wash back the advance of civilization, and civilization cannot and must not cease to roll back such waves, in the eternal progress of the world. I remembered the day I had walked so jauntily out of the Admiralty with every contempt for the roar and bustle of traffic and trade, and every nerve tingling with delight at soon leaving it for the edge of civilization; and now that I was there, and had done a man's work with the tools and engines of war which civilization had put in my hand, I was neither pleased nor proud.
It was all too cruel, too brutal, all so meaningless and useless a waste of life. These men had died because we prevented them, by every means in our power, from obtaining more rifles. They only wanted them to carry on their family and tribal blood feuds, to raid other tribes, and to shoot our own soldiers across the Indian frontier. But to these poor wretches this was their whole duty in life, and they knew that the telegraph-cable was one of their chief enemies—it could give warning of attempts to land arms; it could summon ships from below the horizon to prevent them being landed: so they had laid down their lives in the endeavour to destroy it, and had left their waiting wives to teach their fatherless children black hatred of the white man, and to bring them up with the one idea, later on, when they were big enough to hold a rifle, of trying to revenge their fathers' deaths and beat back—in their turn—advancing civilization.
Standing among all these heaped-up corpses I could not help thinking what a wailing there would be when these grand men did not return to their village fastnesses in those grim mountains standing up like a huge wall against the horizon.
A rifle suddenly went off close to me. Turning, I saw Webster open his breech and jerk out a cartridge.