Free Guns to the Far East by V. A. Stuart

wagged his stump of a tail, and Edward Turnour said smiling, “We told you he was our mascot, sir. He didn’t do his job badly, did he?”
    The wounded attended to, the five lately captured junks were taken in tow and the boats paddled slowly but triumphantly down river to where, nearly a mile below the island on which the boom boats had earlier grounded, the Hong Kong and the Starling were waiting at anchor. Phillip supervised the transfer of his two slightly wounded gunners to the Hong Kong and then he and Lightfoot went aboard. It was 3:30 in the afternoon, he realised with some surprise—they had been hard at it for over twelve hours and they were suffering the pangs of hunger and thirst, as well as intense fatigue. But the needs of the wounded had to come first—there were some seventy of them, lying wherever space could be found on the steamer’s deck and below, on the mess deck and in officers’ cabins, many enduring the appalling agony of burns caused by exploding powder in their boats’ magazines. These cases were wrapped in wadding, in the hope of lessening their pain and, on the surgeons’ insistence that to move them to another ship would endanger their lives, the Hong Kong— despite the fact that she had suffered severely from the Chinese roundshot and was in a perilously leaky state—was ordered to convey them posthaste to the Naval Hospital at Victoria.
    Hasty repairs were made and most of the holes plugged and covered with planking but, as she started down river, the vibration of her engines caused some of the plugs below the waterline to work loose and the pumps had to be kept going continuously. Phillip, relieved of responsibility for navigation by the Master of the Encounter— an experienced river pilot who had volunteered his services—managed a glass of lukewarm beer and an attempt at a wash and then, startled by the sound of gunfire, rushed back on deck, expecting to find the ship again under attack.
    In fact she was, but no living gunners fired the shots which sent her reeling; ironically, as she passed through the wilderness of wrecked junks taken during the first attack, it was to find them in flames, their magazines exploding and their guns, which had been left fully loaded, going off spontaneously as they became heated.
    There was no way of avoiding them. The pilot set his teeth and asked for all the speed the engineers could give him and, her paddles churning the flotsam-strewn water to foam, the little steamer ran the gauntlet of indiscriminate but deadly fire, her awning set alight by falling debris and her pumps fighting a losing battle against the water pouring in through her battered planking. Every man on deck, including the slightly wounded, turned-to in an attempt to spare their more helpless comrades from further suffering.
    Phillip, aided by two of the watch, was endeavouring to cut away the blazing awning when a random charge of grape showered down on them from the blindly gaping muzzle of one of the junk’s bow-guns, and he was conscious of a dull sensation of pain in his left arm and shoulder, as if both had been seared by a hot iron. He had stripped to his shirt and trousers and, looking down at his arm he saw—with more astonishment than alarm—that the once-white sleeve was saturated with blood. The pain was slight, the arm itself numb, and when the seaman who had been working beside him, observing his plight, moved to assist him, he shook his head.
    â€œAll right, lad, it’s nothing—only a scratch. You carry on— that awning’s got to come down.”
    â€œAye, aye, sir.” The man obediently returned to his task but he called out over his shoulder, “You ought to get attention, sir. You’re bleedin’ something chronic.”
    He was, Phillip realised ruefully but, with upwards of seventy other wounded men to attend to, the Hong Kong ’s two surgeons had their work cut out, without