'You did all right, mate,' the gunner giggled again, staring with wide horrified eyes at the piles of dead.
'Refill the water in your condenser, soldier,' Zouga ordered him. 'The gun's over-heating, you'll have a jam when the next wave hits., 'Sir!' The gunner realized suddenly who Zouga was.
'Sorry, sir.'
'Here is your loader.' The number two came up breathlessly. He was a fresh-faced lad, curly-headed and pinkcheeked. He looked more like a choirboy than a machine-gunner.
'Where were you, trooper?' Zouga demanded.
Checking the horses, sir. It was all over so quickly., 'Listen!'
Zouga ordered, as the boy took his place at the gun.
From the treeline, across the bloodied clay pan, came the sound of singing, deep and sonorous in the dawn.
It was the praise song of the 'Moles-who-burrow-under-a-mountain'.
'Stand to your gun, trooper,' Zouga ordered. 'It's not over yet.'
And he turned on his heel and went striding down the line of wagons, reloading the revolver from his belt as he went.
Singing, Bazo strode down the squatting lines of his impi, and they sang with him.
He had held their shattered ranks just beyond the edge of the treeline as they came streaming back from the square of wagons. They were re-grouped now, singing as they screwed their courage for the next assault. What remained of Marionda's impi was mingled with his. They had been in the first wave of the attack, and very few of them were left.
Suddenly there was a great rushing sound in the air above the tree tops, like the onrush of the first wild storm of summer. Then in the midst of the squatting ranks a tall column of smoke and dust and flame sprang into the air, and the bodies of men were flung high with it.
'Kill the smoke devil,' somebody screamed, and another shell burst amongst them, and another, leaping fountains of smoke and flame; and the maddened warriors fired their ancient Martini-Henry rifles at these smoke devils, killing and wounding their comrades on the far side.
'They are not devils,' shouted Bazo, but his voice was lost in the barrage of artillery fire, and the pandemonium of warriors trying to defend themselves against something they did not understand.
'Come!' Bazo bellowed. There was only one way to bring them under control again.
'To the wagons. Forward to the wagons. 'And those close enough to hear him followed, and the others, seeing them go, went bounding after them. They came out of the treeline in a swarm, and the other shattered impis heard the war chant go up, and turned again back onto the open pan of pale grey clay, and immediately that terrible clattering din, like the laughter of maniacs, began again and the air was filled with the flute and crack of a thousand whiplashes.
'They are coming again,' Zouga said quietly, almost to himself. 'This is the fifth time.'
'It's madness.' Mungo Sint John murmured, as the racing ranks came out of the trees and over the lip of the river bank, their plumes seething like the surface of boiling milk as they came onto the guns.
The field guns were depressed to the limit of their travel, the fuses screwed down to their shortest range, and the shrapnel bursts were strangely beautiful in the morning sky, popping open like pods of new cotton, shot through with pretty red fire.
The storm of small-arms fire was like the monsoon rains beating on an iron roof, and as the impis came into the drifting banks of gunsmoke, the dense ranks thinned out, and lost momentum, like a wave sliding up a steep beach.
Once again the wave faltered, and just short of the wagons it stopped, hesitated and then was going back, and the storm of gunfire continued long after the last of them had disappeared amongst the trees. In a kind of insensate fury the Maxim bullets tore wet white slabs of bark off the tree trunks, and then one after the other fell silent.
Standing beside Zouga, Doctor Jameson scrubbed his hands together gleefully. 'It's all over. Their impis are destroyed, shattered, blown away. it's better than we could ever have hoped for. Tell me, Sint John, as a military man, what do you estimate their losses to be so far?'
Mungo Sint John considered the question seriously, climbing up onto one of the wagons the better to survey the field, ignoring the spattering of Martini-Henry rifle fire from the edge of the treeline where a few Matabele snipers were making very poor practice; convinced that raising their sights to the maximum made the bullets more powerful, most of their fire crackled high over the heads of the men manning the wagons.
Standing on the wagon Mungo Sint John lit a cheroot without transferring his attention from the carnage which surrounded them. At last he said gravely, 'Not less than two thousand casualties, perhaps as many as three.'
'Why don't you send a party out to count the bag, Doctor?' Zouga suggested, and Jameson did not recognize the sarcasm.
'We cannot spare the delay, more is the pity. We can still get in a full day's trek. That will look good in the Company report.' He pulled the gold chain from his fob pocket and sprang the lid of his watch with his thumbnail. 'Eight o'clock,' he marvelled. 'It's only eight o'clock in the morning. Do you realize that we have won a decisive battle before breakfast, gentlemen, and that by ten o'clock we can be on our way to Lobengula's royal kraal?
I think we have done our shareholders rather proud.'
'I think,' Zouga cut in gently. 'That we still have a little more work to do. They are coming again.'
'I don't believe this,' Mungo Sint John marvelled.
Bazo paced slowly down the sparse ranks. This was no longer an impi. It was a pathetic little band of desperate survivors. Most of them had bound up their wounds with bloody bunches of green leaves, and their eyes had that strange fixed stare of men who had just looked into eternity. They were no longer singing, they squatted in
