We went slowly after a little while--going uphill. I wondered whether they were taking me to San Sebastian, but didn't wonder long, because a minute-gun was fired--about the last of them--and it sounded quite close.
In a minute or two we bumped and rattled across a wooden bridge, and then stopped.
As I was hauled out, they pulled the cloth away from the soft thing beside me, and it was the body of the officer who'd been shot in the square. Ugh! that was rather beastly. An old chap came along--the boss of the fort, I suppose--and jawed to me in French and Spanish, and got savage when I couldn't understand him. He thought I _wouldn't_.
He soon got tired of this, and I was led across the courtyard by a band of ruffians with fixed bayonets and loaded rifles (I saw them load their magazines). We passed behind the crumbling old walls, where a party of soldiers were cleaning out the saluting guns, and I was shoved into a kind of store-room, dug out of the rock or in the thickness of the walls, and shut in there by a big iron gateway of a door, on the outside of which a miserable little beast of a half-nigger sentry leant and smoked cigarettes.
There were seven others in there, all quiet individuals in plain clothes, who rose and bowed to me when I was brought in, thinking at first, I suppose, that I was Gerald. They looked very relieved when they saw that I wasn't. Two of them had rosettes of black and green with the stripes horizontal, so I knew why they were there. One very courteous old gentleman put a cigarette between my lips, lighted it with his own, and then slacked off the ropes round my wrists and arms, the sentry, turning round to watch us, simply shrugged his shoulders when my arms were free again, and I commenced whirling them round and round to try and do away with the numbness and the 'pins and needles.' He just half opened the breech-bolt of his Mauser rifle, pointed very suggestively at the cartridges inside, turned round again, and went on smoking. Somebody offered me an empty cartridge-box and I sat on it, watching the other chaps busy writing things in notebooks or even on their shirt cuffs.
It struck me that possibly they were writing their 'wills.'
Well! that was a funny ending to my first day ashore, if you like, though so long as Gerald got clear away I didn't mind, and so long as Bob and his chum had fetched up at the Club I knew that things would turn out all right.