The gale shrieked and howled; the rain stung my face. Seawards, out of the pitchy blackness of the night, the waves bellowed as they pounded the foot of the hill in one incessant roar; the burning ships and warehouses, the crackling of musketry in the town below, the constant explosions from the doomed ships, all made of the harbour a very inferno, from out of which the cold, clear search-light flashed pitilessly on the slaughter-house round me.
Twenty English and two hundred or more Chinamen lay there sleeping their last long sleep.
Oh, the pity of it all!
My worst enemy could not accuse me of being sentimental, and that night all feeling whatever seemed numbed; but as I recognized the dead faces of Hunter, Richardson, and a dozen men whom I knew, the only thought was one of bitterness that men should throw away their lives so comparatively uselessly, and the selfishness of it all made me feel almost angry with them.
Hunter's family I knew. He left a wife and two children. Richardson had only recently married; and little did they reckon, they and the other poor fellows, when they volunteered for this expedition in their lust for change, for excitement, for self-glorification or chance of promotion, the misery they were to inflict.
Who bears the bigger share when the man goes out to war?
Is it the man, with his cares forgotten as the shores of England slip down below the horizon, with the hot blood coursing through his body and the fighting instinct of the male animal to bear him along, or is it the woman he leaves behind him—the mother, wife, or sweetheart—who is left to her humdrum daily duties, with her heart full of empty pains and aching fears, to hope and long and dread for news, day after day, week after week?
It seems foolish to write this, but all through that ghastly night, turn my thoughts how I would, they ever came back to the bitterness, the selfishness, the pity of it all.
Every now and again some wounded man wanted attention—one man became delirious, and at intervals uttered horrible shrieks. Pattison also became delirious, and I had to keep a man watching lest he should tear off his bandages.
About three in the morning one of my men thought he heard a cry for help down the sea slope of the hill, and we searched by the light of the signal lantern for nearly an hour, but found no one.