The Lieutenant came on deck and ordered Pollard to call out to the returning boats, giving them an accurate bearing.
Presently Swinburne, with his empty sleeve ripped, his face dark with powder and dirt, and his one eye blazing with battle, came aboard.
"We brought them all the way back to Limehouse, Lieutenant. And we left them jumping up and down and swearing purple'
"Casualties?"
"We suffered three dead and nine wounded, two of them seriously. All officers returned safely." He took the glass Mawkey was handing him and drained it thankfully. "We must have cut them up pretty badly, though there was nothing to shoot at but rifle fire and we used pneumatics as much as we could. Whatever it was for, it came off very well."
"Very good, Swinburne. You'd better get back to your boat and see to it.
Pollard, check the redistribution of the troops and stand by to weigh anchor in fifteen minutes."
"Yessir."
"We're bound upriver," he said to Swinburne.
"Then you're not going to attack the Tower?" said Swinburne. "They've built it up again, but I think we could do it. If we'd thrown the Second Regiment west of that place, we could have had it tonight when we sucked the garrison out."
"Carry on, Swinburne. Orders, Pollard. The Lieutenant went below and turned in, instantly asleep.
Chapter VIII
All that night the flotilla eased slowly upriver. The fore part was spent in locating and skirting the remains of fallen bridges and sunken vessels, with no slightest glimpse of the shore or sky to aid them. A gunboat went so solidly aground that it had to be unloaded, its mortar transferred and the craft fired. Behind them the blaze was but a dull glow which turned the pea soup faintly red. Firing was heard in that direction, interspersed by the occasional thunder of a larger gun. But evidently the river in general and not the flotilla was the target, for nothing came near.
With the morning came a heavy, cold rain which somewhat dispelled the haze for all its wetness, and the brigade found itself far upriver from London, in fact, approaching the half-tide lock just below Richmond.
Soldiers swathed in their rainproofs looked questioningly at the barrier.
The tide was later here and it was just passing into the second half of the flood. Along the footbridge of the lock, which was in repair, a small force was gathering, evidently the garrison of some nearby fortress. Others were dragging two 'field pieces down the slope from the terrace, but these, as yet, were far off.
When the flotilla came to within two hundred yards of the lock, both sides opened fire. But orders went swiftly back and the last six boats, under the command of Toutou, eased in to the shore and unloaded. Gian was impatient, but he knew his fire would damage the lock.
Toutou wasted no time in his attack. He curved far out through the heavy brush and formed his line. The garrison immediately drew up there, only to be raked from the flank by a merciless fire from Carstone and two mortar shots from Gian. Toutou swept up and through and, tossing bodies away from the runway, opened the lock and guarded the flotilla through. Sergeant
Chipper took twenty men and lanced up the slope to capture the field pieces, which he destroyed.
Once through, the flotilla paused, anchoring in midstream, until Toutou, under orders, mined and destroyed the lock. And even then they did not go on, but lay at lazy anchor, watching downstream.
About four, the vanguard of the shore forces put in an appearance about half a mile downriver, word of which was hastily brought to the fleet. But the Lieutenant was in no hurry. He waited until the vanguard was within shelling range and then had Gian drop two mortars into them. The vanguard hastily drew back. In half an hour the main body was seen, skirting Terrace Hill as though to cut off the flotilla from the upriver side. Two more mortars were dropped by way of promise and the flotilla, taking advantage of the very strong wind which had sprung up with the thickening of the rain, upped sail and continued west, past Richmond, and around the S bend which led to Kingston.
The wind slacked down with the rain, and clouds began to scurry, belly to earth. The lowpressure area was somewhere in their vicinity and the wind they got now was very uncertain, constantly shifting. Visibility thickened as the day faded. The rain stopped entirely at dark and it seemed to the shore forces that the stage was set for an ideal battle in their favor.
They sent patrols up with the dusk and these met a very strong fire. The shore troops then got their artillery into position in the woods and scurried about, gaining the ire of every farmer in the surrounding countryside for their destruction of fences for barricades.
At seven *lock the shore batteries opened up into the black and churned the river expanse before Twickenham where the fleet had anchored. They were very thorough about it, supplementing the guns with machine-gun fire. A force, meanwhile, scoured the banks for a mile both ways, getting everything that would float and then manning barges and lighters and rowboats with all the weight they would take They were certain now that the fleet was short on ammunition for no fire answered them and they knew that a force without many bullets will wait until the last possible moment.
Valiantly they launched their attack upon the inky river. Twice or thrice they fired on their own boats. They drifted with the current for a little way and then combed back. They set up excited, angry yells.
The flotilla was gone!
It had not passed Teddington pound lock.
It had not made the shore.
They abandoned their leaky vessels in favor of firmer land and hastily began to rake the countryside and shores for any sign of the Fourth Brigade.
They found none.
With sweeps and sails and current, but all in the heaviest of silence, the flotilla sped through the night, downstream to London. Past hamlet and bar, point and ruined castle they swept on their way.
And by four of the following morning, having negotiated wrecked bridges and derelicts and spits, they dropped quiet anchors just off the Tower but all the way across the pool. They were not lazy now, but keyed to high pitch for the coming action.
The gunboats were disposed above and below the fortress, out of range of the land batteries but within range for their own guns. Some forty boatloads, then, hastily checking their equipment for the last time and memorizing their duties, warped in to the shore and effected a swift but silent landing amid the debris of buildings and wharves.
The Lieutenant, muffled in his cloak and helmet, crouched in the cover of a pile of stone and waited. Three-quarters of his forces, or three hundred and sixty men, were silent in the rubble-strewn dark about him.
It lacked about an hour of dawn and, with the usual consistency of London weather, a few stars were trying to shine in the murk. It would be a reasonably clear day.
Presently, to the east of the Tower, firing began. Swinburne had engaged the garrison as he had once before. And it was a startled garrison which tumbled from their bunks to snatch rifles and form inside the newly made east entrance. A sortie was made, driving the attacker back. And the raiding party seemed to be just as afraid to come to terms this time as it had the last.
The battle drew slowly away to the eastward, toward Limehouse.
Reinforcements went out to settle the business once and for all. And when the garrison's sortie was nearly a mile from the Tower, its officers were dismayed to hear artillery upon the river which, by its sound, was certainly not their own, but good guns.
The Lieutenant crouched low. He could make out his gunboats now and he knew that Gian had the range. Solid shot was blasting away at the Middle Tower, the outermost rampart. The gate crumpled and, as though Gian had counted its bolts and measured its thickness with exactness, he wasted not one shot too many upon it. He transferred his fire to the Byward Tower, firing so as to blast any gate which might be there. Then he shifted two mortars and dropped a savage spray of shrapnel into the Outer Ward.
Without waiting for Gian to finish the job, the Lieutenant leaped up and waved his troops forw
ard. They rushed through the Middle Tower and across the damaged bridge. The gate of the Byward Tower needed a grenade to finish the bursting of its lock and then they were in the Outer Ward. Gian had already begun to drop shells into the Inner Ward, having shelled the gate east of the Wakefield Tower until it could be breached. A few shots were fired down from the Bloody Tower as the troops rushed by, but as the defenders had to lean out to aim, they were dropped before they had gotten more than two men.
The Lieutenant scrambled over the rubble of the gate and leaped down into the Inner Ward. The mortars had cleared away the fence and now all that was left was the White Tower.
Just as bombs had failed to destroy it, Gian's artillery could make but little dent upon this ancient Norman keen for its walls were fifteen feet thick. But there were doors and windows on those walls and now grenadiers came up with their bags of grenades, exploding one after another against the door. It gave ever so little under the onslaught.
Soldiers were firing down from the Tower now that Gian had stopped shelling. Snipers in the Fourth began to take their toll of the remaining defenders.
The Lieutenant saw that they were balked. He ordered the snipers to cover the slots and the bulk of his troops to withdraw to the Outer Keep. Then, gathering up a heavy bag of grenades, he rushed to the door, pulled the pin of one and chucked the whole into a slight break near the bottom. He swept around the side of the wall and pressed himself against it.
In a moment the grim old courtyard was torn with the thunder of this concerted explosion. The brigade yelled and dashed forward across the pavement.
They were within the keep and dashing toward the upper floors when a machine gun met them from a landing. Half a squad dropped. Grenadiers came to the fore and succeeded in pitching up a grenade to silence the gun.
Up swarmed the assault party. Each landing found a few defenders, but these, too, were vanquished.
In twenty-three minutes of 'attack, according to Gian's chronometer, the Tower of London had passed into the hands of the raiders.
But there was no Hogarthy. A shivering staff informed the Lieutenant that Hogarthy had gone with the main garrison, up the river in pursuit of the elusive gunboats.
But the Lieutenant was not disappointed. He liked it that way. And when he had had a breather and a glass of ale from Hogarthy's special stock, sitting the while in Hogarthy's chair of office in the frowning old mom, he began to issue his commands again.
Swinburne had stopped running when the firing had begun from the river and had let the garrison run into a gantlet of fire which brought them to swift surrender. And, having worked so hard to take them, he was astonished indeed when the Lieutenant ordered him to take them outside the walls, to place but three men over them and thereby let them escape.
It was done. And the soldiers fled west toward Hogarthy's forces.
Meantime the boats were unloaded and the Fourth Brigade assigned to barracks in the old towers. They were fed and allowed to rest, except for those under Weasel, who had gone out to contact Hogarthy's vanguard a mile or two from town, when Hogarthy appeared.
The Lieutenant drank another glass of Hogarthy's special ale and broke out his pack of cards.
What happened to Hogarthy is history. How he floundered eastward through the mud, in haste to contact the invaders before they could repair the gates and walls and so entrench themselves. How he camped at dusk some three miles from Tower Hill, well aware that his troops, fagged out from days of stumbling along the river bank, must have rest.
The sortie which sucked Hogarthy out of that camp before he could even get his troops fed was led by Carstair, who battled back through the dusk to Tower Hill with every evidence of panicked flight.
The place where the battle was fought was well chosen by the Lieutenant, for it was flanked all around, at that time, with the wreckage of great buildings while the center was reasonably clear. It was into this that Gian dropped a murderous mortar fire and across this that Carstone swept his guns. Those facts in themselves would have accounted for Hogarthy's defeat.
But the main cause was weariness. Hogarthy's rabble bad been whipped by their own Father Thames, and when they came to battle they were so exhausted that they cared not whether they stayed, or died, or fled. When the Lieutenant dosed upon them from the west, from the very direction to which so many tried to flee, all fight was knocked out by the mere sight of a solid barrier of rifle fire. Hogarthy was dug out of a swamp two days later and dragged into the Tower by an exuberant Bulger.
The town, however, had already paid its homage to the Lieutenant and the countryside all about was anxiously sending food to make peace with this fox of a conqueror.
"I've got Hogarthy below," said the excited Bulger. "All the people we met said it was him!"
"Good," said the Lieutenant, glancing up from a pile of documents. "Shoot him."
"Yessir," replied Bulger, speeding away.
Chapter IX
For years the soldier government ran smoothly, holding sway over England and Wales. A steady, calculating hand dealt adequately with the redistribution of the land and rehabilitation of the towns, for what war had failed to do, the Communists had done by way of wrecking any semblance of social system.
There were seven hundred and fifty thousand people within the Lieutenant's boundaries and, if fully half of these were under twenty, the restoration of central power was only made the easier by making old forms not only obsolete but also unknown.
The government took its taxes in tenths of production and upon the basis of stores held against emergency was able to issue a scrip which was valued as being backed by food. Government police were maintained by their posts and any political abuses were quickly stopped because they could be quickly reported.
Most of the work was directed at the land, very little of it toward manufacturing beyond the clearing out of certain sites to improve the appearance of the country. Youth was avid in its studies and though most of the libraries had been burned by bombs and Commies, there was still enough printed data to supply the working background of a very elementary kind of civilization.
The first great problem which jolted the Lieutenant was the amazing intricacy of industry. At first there was some talk of opening a clothing factory, but this led to the necessity of repairing a foundry, which meant that a smelter had to be run, which finally ended, not in the field with flax, but in the mines with iron and coal. It was given up. A few handicrafters had been able to set up some hand looms which were fairly efficient, even though built out of bedsteads and rifles and tractor parts.
Three districts swiftly came to be employed for clothing and blankets, and as the government took its tenth and, in turn, made it possible for the weavers and tailors to eat and keep warm, everyone was happy.
Of building stone there was no lack. But the forests, destroyed far back by incendiary bombs along with the cities, furnished nothing but scrub saplings. And so youth became clever with stone.
A treaty was early concluded with the man who styled himself King of Scotland, for animals were to be had there but gunpowder and coal were not. Hence, a rather interesting trade was begun by sea.
The Thames' influence was again felt upon England. Boats, of sorts, were to be had in abundance and these, rigged out of old books on sail and only ballasted by their ruined, starved engines, began to creep up and down that waterway and even out and up the coast.
The happiness of a country is directly dependent upon the business of that country. And here everyone had seven times more projects to accomplish than he could ever hope to complete in his lifetime, and there was the grand goal of making a destroyed country live again. Everyone, therefore, was happy. And there was no worry whatever about politics.
The Lieutenant sat in audience for four hours each day, his fatigue cap on the back of his head, his elbows on his battered desk and his chin cupped attentively in his hands. He seemed oblivious of the fact that he was against a background used by half the kings of England.
He would listen to a young farmer's rambling account of how things were going up in Norfolk without any indication of the fact that agriculture bored him to the point of fainting. And he would sift out the problems and solve them without much effort, and the farmer would go away happy and content that the government, for once, was in the hands of the grandest fellow alive.
To the Lieutenant would come a woman who claimed she had been hardly used by the sergeant-major court of her district, in that the sergeant major would not compel her husband to take her best friend also to wife despite the fact that there was too much work for just one and that her friend was not needed in her present home. The Lieutenant would listen to the husband's protest that he doubted he could handle two women when he could barely manage one's uncertainties. And the Lieutenant, smiling, might say, like as not: "Snyder, I regret to say the deed is done. You have just been married to a second wife. Make a note of that, Mawkey." And Mawkey would grin and write it all in a book, and the farmer, now that the thing was done, determined to be cheerful about it if the Lieutenant thought it was right.
Only two things found the Lieutenant swift and savage in his action. The reiteration by some person that the B.C.P had assigned him such and such or had decreed thus and so. Having discovered that the B.C.P., like all such governments, had manhandled affairs for the benefit of a few yes-men, the population was usually reduced by one before the hour was out. The other was discourtesy to a soldier who had served on the Continent.
In the early part of his first winter, the Lieutenant had sent Bulger and Weasel with a small command across the channel with written invitations to all field officers to return speedily with their commands. Bulger and Weasel had spent three months on the task, traveling at lightning speed and shortening their work by making every command contacted a party to the message's circulation. By the following spring most of the B.E.F had come back. A few, of course, had founded their own spheres in Europe and would not give them up but these were very rare, for almost all the officers and men wished to return home and hailed the Lieutenant as a savior for having accomplished the feat.