Biggles Read Free Page A

overseer at a nearby tea estate. He was a bright boy, who spoke perfect English and who was flattered when the son of Biggles Sahib became his friend.
    For Biggles, this was an important friendship, for Sula Dowla led a gang of other small Indian boys, a raggle-taggle lot, who used to haunt the bazaars, stealing what they could, and waging war on gangs from other districts. Biggles became an honorary member. He spoke Hindi perfectly, was up to any mischief going and, though undersized, could out-wrestle and outrun every member of the gang. He also soon began to organise them. He explained to Sula Dowla that as the son of Biggles Sahib, he could not countenance their criminal activities. Sula Dowla pulled a rueful face and said that his members did it merely for fun. Biggles replied that it would simply lead to trouble and was stupid. It would be far more fun to organise the gang on a proper basis, impose strict discipline on all its members, and plan their forays on the other gangs on sound military principles.
    This was Biggles’ first experience of warfare, and from the start he showed a sort of genius for it. He was a daring leader who carefully rehearsed his followers before each campaign. One oftheir earliest successes was a night-time raid on the headquarters of their deadliest enemies, the much stronger ‘Buffalo Gang’, who had set up camp in a deserted warehouse on the outskirts of the town. Biggles planned the whole attack meticulously, spending several days on what he called ‘intelligence’, sending out members of his gang to watch the warehouse, trailing the leading ‘Buffaloes’ around the town, and finding out which nights the warehouse was inhabited. He and Sula Dowla also spent much time on ‘tactics’, planning the line of their attack, choosing their weapons, and also planning how to meet the enemy when they retaliated — as they surely would.
    Biggles would long remember that first ‘battle’ of his life — assembling his ‘troops’, giving each of them his final orders, and then the excitement of the surprise attack. Biggles knew that they had little chance of beating the ‘Buffaloes’ by sheer brute force — they were too big and numerous for that. Instead, he was relying on a secret weapon to bring terror to the enemy. A few days earlier he had asked his father for some fireworks and
papier-mâché
masks for Guy Fawkes day. (Although they were in India, Biggles’ father was always keen to celebrate the festivals that he had known in England.) His father had agreed, but Biggles had an idea for a special Guy Fawkes celebration of his own. He gave each member of the gang a Guy Fawkes mask, whilst he and Sula Dowla took charge of the loudest of the fireworks. Then they all crept towards the warehouse.
    For a while they lay in wait, and then at Biggles’ signal every boy began a fearful wailing. The racket was enough to wake the dead, and while it was at its height, Biggles and Sula Dowla lit the fireworks and lobbed them through the warehouse windows. Then, as the first of them exploded, Biggles and Sula Dowla led the charge, waving their wooden swords and screaming like banshees. But it was probably the Guy Fawkes masks that did the trick. The sight of them was too much for the ‘Buffaloes’ and they fled, leaving their camp to Biggles and his small victorious gang.
    This was the beginning of a whole series of successful ‘wars’ which Biggles and Sula waged: but although Biggles seems to have enjoyed the planning and organising of what he called the gang’s ‘intelligence section’, there were times when he grew bored with the little town and tired of his friends. When these moods took him he would long to be away and would dream oftravelling — across the hills and the far-off Himalayas to the north and on to China, or westwards to Bombay and then across the seas to Africa. The only books he