Men of Men

Wait lads." The front rank was fifty yards away, sweeping in out of the gentle silky grey rain mist.

"Pick your man! Pick your man!" Twenty yards, chanting and drumming to the rhythm of their pounding bare feet.

"Fire!"Gunfire rippled around the tight little circle, not a single blast but with the spacing that told that every shot had been aimed, and the front rank of attackers melted into the soggy earth.

The breech blocks clashed, and the gunfire was continuous, like strings of Chinese crackers, and an echo came back, the slapping sound of lead bullets striking naked black flesh.

At two places the warriors burst into the ring, and for desperate seconds there were knots of milling men, and the banging of revolvers held point blank to chest and belly. Then the black wave lost its impetus, hesitated and finally drew back, the surviving warriors slipping back into the forest, leaving their dead scattered in the wet grass.

"We did it, we sent them off!" someone yelled, and then they were all cheering.

"A little early to celebrate," Clinton murmured drily.

"Let them shout," Wilson was reloading his pistol. "Let them keep their courage up." He looked up from the weapon at Clinton. "You'll not be joining us then?" he asked. "You were a fighting man once."

Clinton shook his head. "I killed my last man over twenty years ago, but I will look to the wounded and do anything else you want of me."

"Go around to each man. Collect all the spare ammunition. Fill the bandoliers and dole "em out as they are needed."

Clinton turned back to the centre of the circle, and there were three new men there, one was dead, shot in the head, another with a broken hip, and the third with the shaft of an assegai protruding from his chest.

"Take it out!"his voice rose as he tugged ineffectually at the handle. "Take it out! I can't stand it."

Clinton knelt in front of him and judged the angle of the blade. The point must lie near the heart. "It's better to leave it," he advised gently.

"No! No!"The man's voice rose, and the men in the outer circle looked back, their faces stricken by that hysterical shriek. "Take it out! Perhaps it was best after all, better than lingering, shrieking death to u

"Hold his shoulders," Clinton ordered quietly, and a trooper knelt behind the dying man. Clinton gripped the shaft. It was a beautiful weapon, bound in decorative patterns with hair from an elephant's tail and bright copper wire.

He pulled and the wide blade sucked with the sound of a boot in thick mud, and it came free. The trooper shrieked only once more, as his heart's blood followed the steel out in a bright torrent.

The waves of warriors came again four times before noon. Each time it seemed impossible that they could fail to overwhelm the waiting circle, but each time they swirled and broke upon it like a tide upon a rock, and then were sucked back into the forest.

After each assault the circle had to be drawn a little smaller, to take up the gaps left by fallen horses and dead and wounded men, and then the Matabele musketeers would creep in again, moving like quick and silent shadows from mopani to mopani, offering meagre targets, the bulge of a shoulder around the stem of a mopani trunk, little cotton pods of gunsmoke in the patches of green grass, the black bead of a head bobbing above the summit of one of the scattered termite nests as a warrior rose to fire.

Wilson walked quietly around the circle, talking calmly to each man in turn, stroking the muzzle of a restless horse, and then coming back into the centre.

"Are you coping, Padre?"

"We are doing fine, Major."

The dead were laid out with what little dignity was left to them, and Clinton had covered their faces with saddle blankets. There were twelve of them now, and it was only a little past noon, another seven hours of daylight.

The lad who had lost his eyes in the first volley was talking to somebody from long ago in his delirium, but the words were jumbled and made little sense. Clinton had bound his head in a clean white bandage from the saddle-bag of the grey, but the bandage was now muddied, and the blood had seeped through.

Two others lay still, one breathing noisily through the hole in his throat from which the air bubbled and whistled, the other silent and pale, except for a little dry cough at intervals. He had been hit low in the back, and there was no use nor feeling in his lower body. The others, too gravely wounded to stand in the circle, were breaking open the waxed paper packages of cartridges and refilling the bandoliers.

Wilson squatted on his haunches beside Clinton.

"Ammunition?" he asked softly.

"Four hundred rounds," Clinton replied as softly.

"Less than thirty rounds a man,"Wilson calculated swiftly. "Not counting the wounded, of course."

"Well, look at it this way, Major, at least it is no longer raining."

"Do you know, Padre, I hadn't even noticed." Wilson smiled faintly, and looked up at the sky. The cloud belly had risen and at that moment a pale ghostly silhouette of the sun appeared through it; but it was without warmth and so mild that they stared at it without paining their eyes.

"You are hit, Major," Clinton exclaimed suddenly. He had not realized it until that moment. "Let me look at it., "It's almost stopped bleeding. Let it be." Wilson shook his head "Keep your bandages for those others."

He was interrupted by a shout from one of the troopers in the outer circle.

"There he is again!" And immediately firing rifles whipcracked, and the same voice swore angrily.

"The bastard, the bloody bastard "What is it, soldier?"

"That big induna, he's moving about again out there; but he's got the devil's luck, sir. We just wasted a packet of bullets on him."

As he spoke, Clinton's old grey horse threw up his head and fell on his knees, hit in the neck. He struggled to rise again, then rolled over on his side.

"Poor old fellow!" Clinton murmured, and immediately another horse reared up, thrashed frantically at the air with his fore hooves and then crashed over on his back.

"They're shooting better now," Wilson said quietly.

"I would guess that is Gandang's work," Clinton agreed.

"He's moving from sniper to sniper, setting their sights for them and coaching their fire."

"Well, it's time to close the circle again."

There were only ten horses still standing; the others lay where they had fallen, and their troopers lay belly down behind them, waiting patiently for a certain shot at one of the hundreds of elusive figures amongst the trees.

"Close up." Wilson stood and gestured to the ring of troopers. "Come in on the centre He broke off abruptly, spun in a half circle and clutched his shoulder, but still he kept his feet.

"You're hit again!" Clinton jumped up to help him and immediately both his legs were struck out from under him, and he dropped back onto the muddy earth and stared at his smashed knee caps.

It must have been one of the ancient elephant guns, the four-to-the-pounders that some of the Matabele were using. It was a weapon that threw a ball of soft lead weighing a quarter of a pound. It had hit him in one knee and torn through into the other.

Both his legs were gone; one was twisted up under his buttocks, and he was sitting on his own muddy riding boot. The other leg was reversed, the toe-cap of his boot was dug into the mud and the silver spur stuck up towards the swirling cloud belly of the sky. Gandang knelt behind the trunk of the mopani tree and snatched the Martini-Henry rifle out of the hands of a young brave; "Even a baboon remembers a lesson he is taught," Gandang fumed. "How often have you been told not to do this."