“I doubt they’ll find us here, but if they do they’ll have to come down the line from the level crossing to get at us.
We’ll go back a mile and lay an ambush in the forest on each side
of the line,” said Bruce.
“Those Arabs won’t be following us, boss. They’ve got themselves women and a whole barful of liquor. Be two or three days before old
General Moses can sober them up enough to move them on.”
“You’re probably right, Ruffy. But we’ll take no chances.
Get that ambush laid and then we’ll try and think up some idea for getting home.” Suddenly a thought occurred to him: Martin Boussier had the diamonds with him. They would not be too pleased about that in
Elisabethville.
Almost immediately Bruce was disgusted with himself.
The diamonds were by far the least important thing that they had left behind in Port Reprieve.
Andre de Surrier held his steel helmet against his chest the way a man holds his hat at a funeral, the wind blew cool and caressing through his dark sweat-damp hair. His hearing was dulled by the strike
of the shell that had cut the truck loose from the rear of the train, he could hear one of the children crying and the crooning, gentling voice of its mother. He stared back up the railway line at the train, saw the great bulk of Ruffy beside Bruce Curry on the roof of the second coach.
“They can’t help us now.” Boussier spoke softly. “There’s nothing they can do.” He lifted his hand stiffly in almost a military salute and then dropped it to his side. “Be brave, ma cheri,” he said to his
wife. “Please be brave,” and she clung to him.
Andre let the helmet drop from his hands. It clanged on to the metal floor of the truck. He wiped the sweat from his face with nervous fluttering hands and then turned slowly to look down at the
village.
“I don’t want to die,” he whispered. “Not like this, not now, please not now.” One of his gendarmes laughed, a sound without mirth, and stepped across to the Bren. He pushed Andre away from it and started firing at the tiny running figures of the men in the station yard.
“No,” shrilled Andre. Don’t do that, no, don’t antagonize them.
They’ll kill us if you do that-“
“They’ll kill us anyway,” laughed the gendarme and emptied the magazine in one long despairing burst. Andre started towards him, perhaps to pull him away from the gun, but
his resolve did not carry him that far. His hands dropped to his sides, clenching and unclenching. His lips quivered and then opened to spill out his terror.
“No!” he screamed. “Please, no! No! Oh, God have mercy.
Oh, save me, don’t let this happen to me, please, God. Oh, my
God.” He stumbled to the side of the truck and clambered on to it. The truck was slowing as it ran into the platform. He could see men coming with rifles in their hands, shouting as they ran, black men in dirty
tattered uniforms, their faces working with excitement, pink shouting mouths, baying like hounds in a pack.
Andre jumped and the dusty concrete of the platform grazed his cheek and knocked the wind out of him. He crawled to his knees, clutching his stomach and trying to scream. A rifle butt hit him between the shoulder-blades and he collapsed. Above him a voice shouted in French.
“He is white, keep him for the general. Don’t kill him.” And again the rifle butt hit him, this time across the side of the head.
He lay in the dust, dazed, with the taste of blood in his mouth and watched them drag the others from the truck.
They shot the black gendarmes on the platform, without ceremony, laughing as they competed with each other to use their bayonets on the corpses. The two children died quickly torn from their mothers, held by the feet and swung head first against the steel side of the truck
Old Boussier tried to prevent them stripping his wife and was bayoneted from behind in anger, and then shot twice with a pistol held to his head as he lay on the platform.
All this happened in the first few minutes before the officers arrived to control them; by that time Andre and the four women were the only occupants of the truck left alive.
Andre lay where he had fallen, watching in fascinated skin-crawling horror as they tore the clothing off the women and with a man to each arm and each leg held them down on the platform as though they were calves to be branded, hooting with laughter at their struggling naked bodies, bickering for position, already unbuckling belts, pushing each other, arguing, some of them with fresh blood on their clothing.
But then two men, who by their air of authority and the red sashes across their chests were clearly officers, joined the crowd. One of them fired his pistol in the air to gain their attention and both of them started a harangue that slowly had effect. The women were dragged up and herded off towards the hotel.
One of the officers came across to where Andre lay, stooped over him and lifted his head by taking a handful of hair.
“Welcome, mon ami. The general will be very pleased to see you.
It is a pity that your other white friends have left us, but then, one is better than nothing.” He pulled Andre into a sitting position, peered into his face and then spat into his eyes with sudden violence.
“Bring him! The general will talk to him later.” They tied Andre to one of the columns on the front verandah of the hotel and left him there. He could have twisted his head and looked through the large windows into the lounge at what they were doing to the women, but he
did not. He could hear what was happening; by noon the screams had become groans and sobbing; by midafternoon the women were making no sound at all. But the queue of shufta was still out of the front door of the lounge. Some of them had been to the head of the line and back to the tail three or four times.
All of them were drunk now. One jovial fellow carried a bottle of
Parfait Amour liqueur in one hand and a bottle of Harpers whisky in the other. Every time he came back to join the queue again he stopped in front of Andre.
“Will you drink with me, little white boy!” he asked.
“Certainly you will,” he answered himself, filled his mouth from one of the bottles and spat it into Andre’s face. Each time it got a big laugh from the others waiting in the line.
Occasionally one of the other shufta would stop in front of Andre, unsling his rifle, back away a few paces, sight along the bayonet at Andre’s face and then charge forward, at the last moment twisting the point aside so that it grazed his cheek. Each time Andre could not suppress his shriek of terror, and the waiting men nearly collapsed with merriment.
Towards evening they started to burn the houses on the outskirts of town. One group, sad with liquor and rape, sat together at the end of the verandah and started to sing.
Their deep beautiful voices carrying all the melancholy savagery of Africa, they kept on singing while an argument between two shufta developed into a knife fight in the road outside the hotel.
The sweet bass lilt of singing covered the coarse breathing of the two circling, bare-chested knife fighters and the shuffle, shuffle quick shuffle of their feet in the dust. When finally they locked together for the kill, the singing rose still deep and strong but with a triumphant note to it. One man stepped back with his rigid right arm
holding the knife buried deep in the other’s belly and as the loser sank down, sliding slowly off the knife, the singing sank with him, plaintive, regretful and lamenting into silence.
They came for Andre after dark. Four of them less drunk than the others. They led him down the street to the Union Mini&re offices.