One,it Is told,retreated to his middle in the lagoon;stood there,loading and firing,till he fell;and his body was found on the morrow pierced with four mortal wounds.The Tamasese force was now enveloped on three sides;it was besides almost cut off from the sea;and across its whole rear and only way of retreat a fire of hostile bullets crossed from east and west,in the midst of which men were surprised to observe the birds continuing to sing,and a cow grazed all afternoon unhurt.Doubtless here was the defence in a poor way;but then the attack was in irons.For the Mataafas about the pilot house could scarcely advance beyond without coming under the fire of their own men from the other side of the Fuisa;and there was not enough organisation,perhaps not enough authority,to divert or to arrest that fire.
The progress of the fight along the beach road was visible from Mulinuu,and Brandeis despatched ten boats of reinforcements.They crossed the harbour,paused for a while beside the ADLER -it is supposed for ammunition -and drew near the Matautu shore.The Mataafa men lay close among the shore-side bushes,expecting their arrival;when a silly lad,in mere lightness of heart,fired a shot in the air.My native friend,Mrs.Mary Hamilton,ran out of her house and gave the culprit a good shaking:an episode in the midst of battle as incongruous as the grazing cow.But his sillier comrades followed his example;a harmless volley warned the boats what they might expect;and they drew back and passed outside the reef for the passage of the Fuisa.Here they came under the fire of the right wing of the Mataafas on the river-bank.The beach,raked east and west,appeared to them no place to land on.And they hung off in the deep water of the lagoon inside the barrier reef,feebly fusillading the pilot house.
Between four and five,the Fabeata regiment (or folk of that village)on the Mataafa left,which had been under arms all day,fell to be withdrawn for rest and food;the Siumu regiment,which should have relieved it,was not ready or not notified in time;and the Tamaseses,gallantly profiting by the mismanagement,recovered the most of the ground in their proper right.It was not for long.
They lost it again,yard by yard and from house to house,till the pilot station was once more in the hands of the Mataafas.This is the last definite incident in the battle.The vicissitudes along the line of the entrenchments remain concealed from us under the cover of the forest.Some part of the Tamasese position there appears to have been carried,but what part,or at what hour,or whether the advantage was maintained,I have never learned.Night and rain,but not silence,closed upon the field.The trenches were deep in mud;but the younger folk wrecked the houses in the neighbourhood,carried the roofs to the front,and lay under them,men and women together,through a long night of furious squalls and furious and useless volleys.Meanwhile the older folk trailed back into Apia in the rain;they talked as they went of who had fallen and what heads had been taken upon either side -they seemed to know by name the losses upon both;and drenched with wet and broken with excitement and fatigue,they crawled into the verandahs of the town to eat and sleep.The morrow broke grey and drizzly,but as so often happens in the islands,cleared up into a glorious day.
During the night,the majority of the defenders had taken advantage of the rain and darkness and stolen from their forts unobserved.
The rallying sign of the Tamaseses had been a white handkerchief.
With the dawn,the de Coetlogons from the English consulate beheld the ground strewn with these badges discarded;and close by the house,a belated turncoat was still changing white for red.
Matautu was lost;Tamasese was confined to Mulinuu;and by nine o'clock two Mataafa villages paraded the streets of Apia,taking possession.The cost of this respectable success in ammunition must have been enormous;in life it was but small.Some compute forty killed on either side,others forty on both,three or four being women and one a white man,master of a schooner from Fiji.
Nor was the number even of the wounded at all proportionate to the surprising din and fury of the affair while it lasted.