The Impregnable Women, page 27
But Bauld Buccleugh was short in the arm and hampered by a great depth of bosom, so before she could come to grips with the enemy she was knocked on the head with a sandbag, and that was the end of her fighting for that day. Nor was Kinmont Willie more fortunate, though her long legs took her swiftly over the ground, and her short gymnasium tunic did nothing to hamper her movement, She ran right into the arms of a great ox-eyed, burly-chested, stolid private of the Essex Regiment, who held her fast while another man pulled a sack over her head and down to her knees, where he tied it with a running cord. The raid was defeated, the Borderers tottered and fell beneath the curving blows of soft but heavy loaded truncheons, and one by one the soldiers stuffed them into their ready sacks and tied them round the knees.
But a few of the women, a mere half-dozen, fought their way through the soldiers, and in the blind corner beyond the Gate turned at bay. The Hepburn girl was one of them. A subaltern, with twenty men behind him, called on them to surrender. He was a tall and handsome youth with grave eyes and delicate fine features. He was bareheaded, and his dark hair was wavy as a little pool in the wind. With a sudden shout – of hatred that was strangely charged with another emotion –the Hepburn girl sprang fiercely forward, and with her broken hockey stick struck him heavily on the temple. For a moment she stood looking down at him, and her triumph was half an exquisite remorse. Then she felt a crushing blow on her head, and falling upon her fallen foe, her last thought was to come down upon him as gently as she could. The flood of battle went past them, and they were forgotten.
Now on the causeway there ensued a most desperate mellay. Between the precipitous rock and the outer wall the opposing forces were jammed together like cattle in a pen. There was no room for weapons, no space to swing sandbag or mashie, but soldiers and women fought hand to hand and face to face. The sun poured hotly down, and the narrow canyon was like a baker’s oven. But the women were undaunted, and heat-stroke could not conquer men whose regiments had won their glory on the scorching plains of Baluchistan or in the stifling forests of equatorial Africa. They fought grimly, and with method in their grimness. Those in front sought always to get firm hold of a woman, by neck or wrist, and drag her from the ranks. Then she was thrust and hustled to the rear, and there a sack pulled over her and firmly tied. The prisoners, thus securely bagged, were carried out and laid in rows in the archway or on the pavement beyond the bridge. Some forty or fifty of the strongest and most determined of the women were captured and dealt with in this fashion, and the defence grew gradually weaker.
But the men also suffered heavy casualties, and many were stunned by blows or half-smothered in the press. And sometimes when a man had grappled with an opposing girl his eye betrayed him, and the sight of beauty – a flushing cheek, the glimpse of a white and straining bosom, the pretty volute of some delicate distended nostril – went like an arrow to his heart and spoiled him of strength and of his purpose. But another circumstance of the fighting was even more dangerous.
The women had dressed themselves for battle, but most of them had made a party toilet of it, and in the hot close air of the canyon their mingled perfumes were like a heavy enchantment. They put a spell upon the air. It breathed of musk and roses and languorous jessamine. While desperate women struggled with bombardiers and Grenadiers, the oils of santal and cedarwood strove with the attar of bergamot; and above a thousand straining bodies rose the scent of lavender and of rosemary. Now some errant zephyr brought the smell of white lilac, now of orange-blossom; or, to a more discerning nose, of hydrocinnamic aldehyde and the methyl ether of anthranilic acid. But whether of natural origin or the distillation of a laboratory, the enchantment of the air was too powerful for many a simple soldier, and a hundred staggered from the fight, drunk with an odorous thought of Calypso’s isle, or the drowsy beauty and the fountains of Zobeida’s garden.
The soldiers, however, could with smaller loss suffer casualties twice as heavy as the defenders. Reserves and reinforcements poured steadily through the broken Gate, now undeterred by any bombardment from above, for the refuse buckets were empty, the braziers cold; and steadily they drove the women before them. The attack on the curtain wall, desultory at first, became now more vigorous, and the defenders were thrown into some confusion when a dozen soldiers, reckless of the consequences, came leaping down into the very midst of their tight array. Still they fought stubbornly, and contested every foot they yielded. But then from the rear came a whisper, a growing murmur, a shout of panic. The enemy was inside, the Castle lost! The soldiers had climbed the Rock! Here on the causeway the women would be caught in a trap, with men behind and men in front, and others leaping from the wall above.
They broke and ran. Helter-skelter they fled uphill and through the Portcullis Gate. To their left there were steps in the rock, as steep as the side of a house, that led to the Citadel; but there Lysistrata stood with her Guards about her. Beyond the road, on the level ground before the Hospital and the Governor’s House, a battle was loosely raging. The men were out-numbered, but they were chosen troops, and slowly but surely they were driving the women before them.
The fugitives from the lower causeway were halted by Lysistrata’s ringing voice. ‘What have you lost?’ she cried. ‘Your wits or your courage? You won’t find them that way. There is the enemy, and that’s where you’ll get your courage back, and your wits too. Every one of those soldiers must be driven out. They came in by the Rock, send them back by the Rock. Remember your manners this time, and so long as there’s a man left in the Castle, never turn your backs on him. Now forward, women! Forward, and remember you’re fighting for love and happiness!’
Sullenly at first, the women listened. They wiped their sweaty brows, and pulled resentfully at tattered pieces of their clothing. They were weary and dishevelled. But they took heart again. They grew angry, then combative, ashamed of their retreat and eager to efface its memory in new victory. They reformed their ranks and gathered again into a solid warlike phalanx. Mrs Graham and Miss McNab were now in command, and the battle-torn regiment raised their arms – bare arms leaping out of ragged sleeves – and cheered their order to advance.
Meanwhile Lysistrata had thrown her Guards in a double rank across the road, and before the bristle-hedge of their pikes and halberds, the soldiers were halted, dubious.
The battle in front of the Hospital turned in the women’s favour when the veterans from the lower causeway launched their attack. The men gave ground. But they were wisely led, and instead of trying to maintain a hopeless resistance, they broke and scattered. As individuals they were more than a match for the women, and by solitary action they doubled their effectiveness. Their leader was Julian Brown, and their guerrilla tactics were his device. It was he who had previously set hundreds of soldiers to climbing the Rock from all quarters, and so dissipated the attention of the women. But only one in four of his climbers was an actual assailant and these were all mountain-men that he had recruited from Scrymgeour’s whole army.
He was fiercely proud of his alpine company. In all history, he thought, no officer had ever commanded such a body of men as these – men from the Cumberland fells and the mountains of Wester Ross, from the slopes of Skiddaw and Beinn Eighe; there were Canadians, short of speech but long of leg, from Tête Jaune and Mount Assiniboine; and New Zealanders from the Crags of Hokonui and the stark uplands of Papa-huana, men nimble as goats but of inflexible morality. There were three hundred in all, and every man a mountaineer. Subalterns of the Indian Army, who had spent all their leave on the naked ridges of Kanchenjunga and Nanga Parbat, rubbed shoulders with men who knew every ledge and pinnacle from the Bavarian Wettersteingebirge to the Pic du Midi, from Cimon della Pala to the Sgurr na Bannachdich. A common passion united them, an ardent but ascetic passion, and long days on many a dizzy precipice and vertiginous aiguille had given them nerves of steel and made them tough as whalebone. They had gone up the Castle Rock like firemen up a ladder.
Now their guerilla tactics tired and bewildered the women, and the striking-power of Mrs Graham’s phalanx was nullified by the absence of any stable objective. It was harried by constant attack, and spent its strength on charging an enemy that would not stay to receive it. Like a tide running into eddies and overfalls, the battle appeared to have lost all direction, but in twenty different places broke into furious upheaval to show its fierce persistence.
The main force of the invaders was now at close quarters with Lysistrata’s Guards. Their pikes and halberds, that might well have defeated an impetuous charge of horse, were less effective against the strong but cautious tactics of infantry. Unbroken, the long line of glinting steel had looked perilous enough, but as soon as the line gave way the Guards were thrown into confusion. A sergeant of the Royal Welch, lithe as a cat, a welterweight champion, had been the first to make a gap in the hedge. He provoked a long-point, side-stepped and got inside, parried a thrust from the rear rank, and leaping sideways flung his weight across half a dozen shafts and brought their heads to the ground. Into the breach came a swarm of men.
Elsewhere a private of the Green Howards, taking a thrust through the fleshy part of his left arm, had caught the pike in his hands and pulled the great tawny freckled girl who wielded it, and would not let it go, out of the line and into a sack that his neighbour held ready. Here was another breach, and three or four men, rushing in, forced it wide open. At close quarters a long-hafted pike gave no defence against the soldiers’ clubs, and woman after woman staggered and fell beneath their heavy curving blows. Many of the Guards, dropping their useless weapons, fought with bare hands, and here and there in a towsy scuffle a sturdy private got the worst of it from some raging Amazon. Other women, snatching from the ground a broken shaft or wrenching his truncheon from a staggered soldier, battled their way to the long steep flight of steps in the rock, where Lysistrata stood with a sword in her hand.
Here the remnant of the Guard were fighting fiercely, for the defence of the steps was a vital matter. They led to the Citadel, the topmost part of the Castle. They rose steeply, and were so narrow that two men could hardly stand on them abreast. Nor was it possible to come at them from either side, for the rock was precipitous. It was a place that a swordsman might hold against an army so long as his wrist was strong and his eye keen. But the women were growing tired, their weapons were clumsy and heavy in their hands. One by one they were pulled down, and the soldiers came nearer to Lysistrata, standing with her sword alone.
About two hundred men had been detailed for the assault on the steps. The invaders’ main army, again reinforced, pushed forward up the causeway. A detachment was sent to the assistance of Julian’s mountaineers, and the rest wheeled uphill and came face to face with that part of the garrison which had not yet been in action. There were more than a thousand women here, under the command of Lady Oriole. The greater number were massed in front of Foog’s Gate. It was a strong position, for the road to it rose steeply, and the women had provided themselves with a store of cobble-stones for ammunition. Again and again the soldiers charged, and were beaten back by a heavy fusillade.
By now the sun was almost directly overhead, and the Castle was bathed in heat. Many of the combatants on both sides had grown weary, and when they withdrew from the fight the still hot splendour of the sky abashed them, and they felt a languor in their bones. The high-pitched Castle was a pinnacle in the windless sky, far from earth, and the sun pressed close upon it with plumes of quivering heat. Tired and sweating, their bones melting in the glare of noon, the laggard soldiers lay, and the sun that had dissolved their strength now generated in their blood a strange excitement. They were impatient with the noise of continuing battle, and they resented the struggling sight of men still switt in actor. The travelling solitude of the sky possessed them with a kinder pasion, and forgeeting all other thoughts they looked with longing at the women who lay, weary and dishevelled, in the golden light beside them. Here a bruished and heavy hand touched saftly a softer palm, and there a solider lifted gently to his kness a panting girl. A woman tore from her hanging sleeve a strip of linen to bind a trooper’s bleeding head, and others soldiers and rebel side by side, as though in a trance sat unmoving and stared the one at the other.
But this submission to the heat of the sun had so far been made only by a minority, and elsewhere the battle fiercely continued. On the steps there were still two women who fought in front of Lysistrata, but the one over-reached herself and fell, the other was brought down by a tall limber fellow, strong and truculent, a shoeing-smith in the Gunners, who had thrown off his tunic and shirt and now fought naked to the waist. He had armed himself with the haft of a broken pike, and leaping up the steps he struck hard at Lysistrata. She parried and thrust, but he in turn parried so strongly that she she felt her arm grow numb, and gave ground before him.
But now from above and behind her came a hoarse high shout, and glancing round she saw a huge woman, copper-haired, her great bosom tumultuous in a torn blouse, coming down fast and recklessly to her aid. She carried a great two-handed sword on her shoulder, and pushing past Lysistrata she cried in a rough Glasgow voice, ‘Leave yon billie tae me and ma wee Kisser! Hey-yach! Up the Celtic! Awa hame, ye naked beast, and put a sark on yer shouthers. Hey-yeh-yach!’
Furiously she swung the sword, and the smith gave back in dismay. ‘Is this no a bonny wee Kisser?’ cried the copper-haired woman over her shoulder. ‘I nabbed it the first day we cam here, oot o’ yon hall that was full o’ spears and trash, and hid it in auld Mons Meg. Up the spoot o’ auld Mons Meg. I just minded on where it was, and I thocht tae masel, we’ll gie a guff tae the sodgers. Sodgers! I’ve seen ’em grow! Ay, Christ, ay! Hey-yey-yach!’
The smith, a strong and valiant man, had returned to the attack, but the copper-haired woman swung her sword with such prodigious strength that she beat in his guard and swept him from his feet. She struck with the flat of the blade, and her backward swing took a tall corporal – coming up behind the smith – on the side of the head and toppled him senseless down the stair.
Then, bombastic, she taunted the soldiers and boasted of her strength. ‘Come awa’, ma lucky lads!’ she cried. ‘Come awa’, fish-guts, pudden-heids, you peelie-wally bastards, you! Come and hae a toss wi’ Red Biddy McLafferty o’ the Gallow-gate in Glasgow! I’ve knocked the stuffin’ oot o’ better men than you, and clawed the heid off bluidy Hieland polismen while you were clappin’ yer hands at Charlie Chaplin! Hey-yach! Here’s Red Biddy and her bonny wee Kisser! Come awa’, skiters, lang-luggit rottans, ye lousy libbet scrogs! Up the Celtic! Ay, Christ, ay! There’s a runt wi’ a face like a puddock and a mou’ like a spleuchan. Hey, runt, gie ma wee Kisser a wee sook at yer neb! Hey-yey-yach!’
Chanting her war-song, Red Biddy held the stair against all comers, and Lysistrata, three steps above her, waited with bitter expectancy. She had trusted to hold out the soldiers longer than this. She had hoped to keep them at bay till the Highlanders came. But the Highland women had forty miles to march. They could not reach the Castle till nightfall at the earliest. And now the soldiers were in possession of all the lower part of the Castle, and the Citadel was threatened from both sides. From her high place on the steps she could watch here and there the eddies and fringes of the battle, and she could see that many of the women, worn out by fighting, had already given up the struggle. In the clear hot air she could see far beyond the ramparts, into the town below, and the road that would bring the relieving Highlanders. But there was no use in looking for them yet, nor for many hours to come.
Now from the soldiers crowded on the steps rose a yell of triumph, for Red Biddy, surprised by one of them clambering up the rock, had turned and swung at him, and missed. The sword struck stone, and so heavy was the blow that the blade broke at the hilt, and Red Biddy was weaponless. But she was still undaunted. She flung the hilt at the jeering faces below her, and with a great gesture wiping the sweat from her streaming brow, rubbed her hands on her thighs and shouted another challenge.
‘Come awa’, tawpies, toyterin’ yauds!’ she cried. ‘Come awa’, fattrels, clarty hoors! Up the Celtic! It’s a stair-heid fecht, and it’s a stair-heid fechtin’ made the name o’ Red Biddy McLafferty o’ the Gallowgate in Glasgow! Hey-yeh-yach! You wi’ a mug like a moodly kebbuck, come here an’ taste ma loof! Hey-yach! Wae gae by the stane that brak the sword, and wae gae by yer hale clamjamfry and a’ yer gear and graith. Smell ma nieve! Smell the t’ither, you wi the grozet een and the grutten mou’. If it’s fechtin’ you want, it’s here by the wamefou’ still. Ay, Christ, ay!’
A Canadian sergeant, a grim farmer from the Manitoban prairie, was the first to confront her. He took a savage blow on the face, but gripped her by the arm, and pulled her down into the reaching hands of the soldiers. But Red Biddy was fighting still. She howled her war-cry, and like a boulder that brings an avalanche with it, she swept her enemies before her and tumbled down the rock in the midst of staggered and falling men. But now Lysistrata stood on the stair alone.
The confusion was suddenly stilled, and the angry soldiers made way for an officer. He came swiftly up, and stood two steps below her. It was Scrymgeour, and he was unarmed. Lysistrata raised her sword against him.
‘I have come to ask you to surrender,’ he said harshly. ‘You must know that further resistance is useless, and you will save your people a lot of suffering if you surrender now.’
‘There can be no surrender,’ said Lysistrata, ‘till Britain has proclaimed her peace with France.’
