Samoans, and they answered in good part. One fellow was leaping,

yelling, and tossing his axe in the air, after the way of an
excited islander. "FAIMALOSI! go it!" said Hufnagel, and the

fellow laughed and redoubled his exertions. As soon as the boats
entered the lagoon, fire was again opened from the woods. The

fifty blue-jackets jumped overboard, hove down the boats to be a
shield, and dragged them towards the landing-place. In this way,

their rations, and (what was more unfortunate) some of their
miserable provision of forty rounds got wetted; but the men came to

shore and garrisoned the plantation house without a casualty.
Meanwhile the sound of the firing from Sunga immediately renewed

the hostilities at Fangalii. The civilians on shore decided that
Spengler must be at once guided to the house, and Haideln, the

surveyor, accepted the dangerous errand. Like Hufnagel, he was
suffered to pass without question through the midst of these

platonic enemies. He found Spengler some way inland on a knoll,
disastrously engaged, the woods around him filled with Samoans, who

were continuously reinforced. In three successive charges,
cheering as they ran, the blue-jackets burst through their

scattered opponents, and made good their junction with Jaeckel.
Four men only remained upon the field, the other wounded being

helped by their comrades or dragging themselves painfully" target="_blank" title="ad.痛苦地；费力地">painfully along.
The force was now concentrated in the house and its immediate patch

of garden. Their rear, to the seaward, was unmolested; but on
three sides they were beleaguered. On the left, the Samoans

occupied and fired from some of the plantation offices. In front,
a long rising crest of land in the horse-pasture commanded the

house, and was lined with the assailants. And on the right, the
hedge of the same paddock afforded them a dangerous cover. It was

in this place that a Samoan sharpshooter was knocked over by
Jaeckel with his own hand. The fire was maintained by the Samoans

in the usual wasteful style. The roof was made a sieve; the balls
passed clean through the house; Lieutenant Sieger, as he lay,

already dying, on Hufnagel's bed, was despatched with a fresh
wound. The Samoans showed themselves extremely enterprising:

pushed their lines forward, ventured beyond cover, and continually
threatened to envelop the garden. Thrice, at least, it was

necessary to repel them by a sally. The men were brought into the
house from the rear, the front doors were thrown suddenly open, and

the gallant blue-jackets issued cheering: necessary, successful,
but extremelycostly sorties. Neither could these be pushed far.

The foes were undaunted; so soon as the sailors advanced at all
deep in the horse-pasture, the Samoans began to close in upon both

flanks; and the sally had to be recalled. To add to the dangers of
the German situation, ammunition began to run low; and the

cartridge-boxes of the wounded and the dead had been already
brought into use before, at about eight o'clock, the EBER steamed

into the bay. Her commander, Wallis, threw some shells into
Letongo, one of which killed five men about their cooking-pot. The

Samoans began immediately to withdraw; their movements were
hastened by a sortie, and the remains of the landing-party brought

on board. This was an unfortunatemovement; it gave an
irremediable air of defeat to what might have been else claimed for

a moderate success. The blue-jackets numbered a hundred and forty
all told; they were engaged separately and fought under the worst

conditions, in the dark and among woods; their position in the
house was scarce tenable; they lost in killed and wounded fifty-

six, - forty per cent.; and their spirit to the end was above
question. Whether we think of the poor sailor lads, always so

pleasantly behaved in times of peace, or whether we call to mind
the behaviour of the two civilians, Haideln and Hufnagel, we can

only regret that brave men should stand to be exposed upon so poor
a quarrel, or lives cast away upon an enterprise so hopeless.

News of the affair reached Apia early, and Moors, always curious of
these spectacles of war, was immediately in the saddle. Near

Matafangatele he met a Manono chief, whom he asked if there were
any German dead. "I think there are about thirty of them knocked

over," said he. "Have you taken their heads?" asked Moors. "Yes,"
said the chief. "Some foolish people did it, but I have stopped

them. We ought not to cut off their heads when they do not cut off
ours." He was asked what had been done with the heads. "Two have

gone to Mataafa," he replied, "and one is buried right under where
your horse is standing, in a basket wrapped in tapa." This was

afterwards dug up, and I am told on native authority that, besides
the three heads, two ears were taken. Moors next asked the Manono

man how he came to be going away. "The man-of-war is throwing
shells," said he. "When they stopped firing out of the house, we

stopped firing also; so it was as well to scatter when the shells
began. We could have killed all the white men. I wish they had

been Tamaseses." This is an EX PARTE statement, and I give it for
such; but the course of the affair, and in particular the

adventures of Haideln and Hufnagel, testify to a surprising lack of
animosity against the Germans. About the same time or but a little

earlier than this conversation, the same spirit was being
displayed. Hufnagel, with a party of labour, had gone out to bring

in the German dead, when he was surprised to be suddenly fired on
from the wood. The boys he had with him were not negritos, but

Polynesians from the Gilbert Islands; and he suddenly remembered
that these might be easily mistaken for a detachment of Tamaseses.

Bidding his boys conceal themselves in a thicket, this brave man
walked into the open. So soon as he was recognised, the firing

ceased, and the labourers followed him in safety. This is
chivalrous war; but there was a side to it less chivalrous. As

Moors drew nearer to Vailele, he began to meet Samoans with hats,
guns, and even shirts, taken from the German sailors. With one of

these who had a hat and a gun he stopped and spoke. The hat was
handed up for him to look at; it had the late owner's name on the

inside. "Where is he?" asked Moors. "He is dead; I cut his head
off." "You shot him?" "No, somebody else shot him in the hip.

When I came, he put up his hands, and cried: 'Don't kill me; I am a
Malietoa man.' I did not believe him, and I cut his head off......

Have you any ammunition to fit that gun?" "I do not know." "What
has become of the cartridge-belt?" "Another fellow grabbed that

and the cartridges, and he won't give them to me." A dreadful and
silly picture of barbaric war. The words of the German sailor must

be regarded as imaginary: how was the poor lad to speak native, or
the Samoan to understand German? When Moors came as far as Sunga,

the EBER was yet in the bay, the smoke of battle still lingered
among the trees, which were themselves marked with a thousand

bullet-wounds. But the affair was over, the combatants, German and
Samoan, were all gone, and only a couple of negrito labour boys

lurked on the scene. The village of Letongo beyond was equally
silent; part of it was wrecked by the shells of the EBER, and still

smoked; the inhabitants had fled. On the beach were the native
boats, perhaps five thousand dollars' worth, deserted by the

Mataafas and over-looked by the Germans, in their common hurry to
escape. Still Moors held eastward by the sea-paths. It was his

hope to get a view from the other side of the promontory, towards
Laulii. In the way he found a house hidden in the wood and among

rocks, where an aged and sick woman was being tended by her elderly
daughter. Last lingerers in that deserted piece of coast, they

seemed indifferent to the events which had thus left them solitary,
and, as the daughter said, did not know where Mataafa was, nor

where Tamasese.
It is the official Samoan pretension that the Germans fired first

at Fangalii. In view of all German and some native testimony, the
text of Fritze's orders, and the probabilities of the case, no