Lucky indeed it was that the Chinese let us alone till we could get the wounded down on the beach behind a bank, light several fires to comfort them, and gradually warmed our fellows up again.
I suppose that if they had charged out of the fog again, our men would have roused themselves and put up just as good a fight; but I must say that I felt most extremely anxious till we had the sea at our backs, and that bank at the top of the beach with a deep ditch below it in front of us.
We had hoped to find our boats lying off waiting for us, and tried to attract attention by shouting and firing rifles. Eventually we heard one of the gunboats begin firing a gun every half-minute. It turned out to be the _Omaha_, and presently she began to make a signal with her fog siren. We knew that she was feeling her way in towards us, by the sound of the blasts coming nearer; but of course we could see nothing whatsoever through that maddening nightmare of dirty fog, and out of it came the moaning blasts of the _Omaha’s_ siren with the message: "Have seen nothing of your boats since this morning. _Omaha’s_ boats have been sent down the coast to where gunboats’ brigade originally landed, and have not come back."
We well knew that that meant a night to be spent on the bleak shore till the fog should clear away and allow the boats to find their way to us.
It was then that the tired men were set to work collecting drift wood and making fires under the bank, whilst Rashleigh and Trevelyan had to line the bank itself, and guard our two flanks across the beach.
Although the fires were fairly large ones, they could not be seen fifteen paces from the far side of the bank. That will give you some idea how dense was the fog, so that we were quite safe in making them, and we brought the wounded across and settled them as comfortably as possible. When I talk about the wounded, I mean, of course, the badly wounded, men who were obliged to lie or sit perfectly still; but besides these, nearly everyone was slightly wounded, but could still handle a rifle.
Trevelyan had brought a tin of tea tabloids—he always had some dodge up his sleeve—and with the water in our bottles, we made enough tea to give the wounded and my poor little princess a hot drink.