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Two thousand men, unshaved and tousled, with pain in their joints from those trench nights, were listening. "As soon as you get there, you must set to work. It doesn't matter whether it's a black night or a full moon; without making a sound, close to the enemy, you must fill the sand-bags for the fortifications." Every man on the hill had been doing just that thing for a year.
The way to the observation post was sometimes a little vague, especially in frost-and-thaw weather, when parts of the communication trenches slithered down under the weight of sand-bags. The young officer who walked with luminous eyes and eager step found it necessary to crawl on his stomach before he reached his lookout station from which he looked straight across the enemy's trenches.
The crowd loves daring, and so it welcomed Stephen with braves, but it knew, as he knew, that he was only doing his duty by the Company, only showing the Saco that man was master, only keeping the old Waterman name in good repute. "Ye can't drownd some folks," Old Kennebec had said, as he stood in a group on the shore; "not without you tie sand-bags to'em an' drop 'em in the Great Eddy.
The Emma Gees had taken possession of a bank building, about the best in town, and had strengthened it, inside and out, with steel and sand-bags until it looked as though it would withstand any bombardment.
On the preservation of that post depended the whole fortune of the day, for Parma had already received the welcome intelligence that the Palisade now Fort Victory had been regained. He instantly ordered an outer breast-work of wool-sacks and sand-bags to be thrown up in front of Saint George, and planted a battery to play point-blank at the enemy's entrenchments.
On the 24th, a public meeting appealed to the British and American consuls. At half-past seven in the evening guards were landed at the consulates. On the morrow they were each fortified with sand-bags; and the subjects informed by proclamation that these asylums stood open to them on any alarm, and at any hour of the day or night. The social bond in Apia was dissolved.
Bayonets were fixed on the rifles that lay along the parapet of sand-bags in front of the row of brown shoulders. Back of them in the yard was a section of infantry in reserve, also with bayonets fixed, ready to fill the place of any who fell out of line, a doctor and stretchers to care for the wounded, and a detachment of engineers to mend any breaches made in the breastwork by shell fire.
A great report set the air vibrating; the voice of my sergeant-major shouted: "It's gone up, sir!" a burst of rapid rifle and machine-gun fire, spreading all along the line, showed that the bombers had leapt out of the protection of the trenches and gone over the parapet and, almost before I had apprehended all these things, I had scrambled over the sand-bags, and was in the open beneath a shower of earth that, blown by the mine into the air, was dropping in clods and particles.
It is all going on very well, only as I said it will take time By the way, tell Joseph to get me one of your smokingcaps; once in dressing-gown and slippers a smokingcap is not out of the way, and I am getting bald, my dear Captain. How infernally cold it is here! These windows face the north, and there are no sand-bags. Mademoiselle de V.," he added, turning to my aunt, "you will catch cold."
My scheme of defence consisted in blocking up all the door and window openings throughout the building with a good substantial wall of sand-bags, leaving here and there small loopholes just wide enough to admit of a musket being pointed through them.
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