Title: At Suvla Bay
 - Being the notes and sketches of scenes, characters and adventures of the Dardanelles campaign, made by John Hargrave ("White Fox") while serving with the 32nd field ambulance, X division, Mediterranean expeditionary force, during the great war.
Author: Hargrave, John
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "At Suvla Bay
 - Being the notes and sketches of scenes, characters and adventures of the Dardanelles campaign, made by John Hargrave ("White Fox") while serving with the 32nd field ambulance, X division, Mediterranean expeditionary force, during the great war." ***


AT SUVLA BAY

Being The Notes And Sketches Of Scenes, Characters

And Adventures Of The Dardanelles Campaign

By John Hargrave

(“White Fox” of “The Scout “)

While Serving With The 32nd Field Ambulance, X Division, Mediterranean
Expeditionary Force, During The Great War



               To
             MINOBI

     We played at Ali Baba,
     On a green linoleum floor;
     Now we camp near Lala Baba,
     By the blue Aegean shore.

     We sailed the good ship Argus,
     Behind the studio door;
     Now we try to play at “Heroes”
      By the blue Aegean shore.

     We played at lonely Crusoe,
     In a pink print pinafore;
     Now we live like lonely Crusoe,
     By the blue Aegean shore.

     We used to call for “Mummy,”
      In nursery days of yore;
     And still we dream of Mother,
     By the blue Aegean shore.

     While you are having holidays,
     With hikes and camps galore;
     We are patching sick and wounded,
     By the blue Aegean shore.

                            J. H.


 Salt Lake Dug-out,
         September 12th, 1915.
          (Under shell-fire.)



TURKISH WORDS

     Sirt--summit.
     Dargh--mountain.
     Bair or bahir--spur.
     Burnu--cape.
     Dere--valley or stream.
     Tepe--hill.
     Geul--lake.
     Chesheme--spring.
     Kuyu--well.
     Kuchuk--small.
     Tekke--Moslem shrine.
     Ova--plain.
     Liman--bay or harbour.
     Skala--landing-place.
     Biyuk--great.



CONTENTS


CHAPTER

     I. IN WHICH MY KING AND COUNTRY NEED ME

    II. A LONG WAY TO TIPPERARY

   III. SNARED

    IV. CHARACTERS

     V. I HEAR OF HAWK

    VI. ON THE MOVE

   VII. MEDITERRANEAN NIGHTS

  VIII. THE CITY OF WONDERFUL COLOUR

    IX. MAROONED ON LEMNOS ISLAND

     X. THE NEW LANDING

    XI. THE KAPANJA SIRT

   XII. THE SNIPER-HUNT

  XIII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE WHITE PACK-MULE

   XIV. THE SNIPER OF PEAR-TREE GULLY

    XV. KANGAROO BEACH

   XVI. THE ADVENTURE OF THE LOST SQUADS

  XVII. “OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND!”

 XVIII. TWO MEN RETURN

   XIX. THE RETREAT

    XX. “JHILL-O! JOHNNIE!”

   XXI. SILVER BAY

  XXII. DUG-OUT YARNS

 XXIII. THE WISDOM OF FATHER S----

  XXIV. THE SHARP-SHOOTERS

   XXV. A SCOUT AT SULVA BAY

  XXVI. THE BUSH-FIRES

 XXVII. THE DEPARTUR

XXVIII. LOOKING BACK



AT SUVLA BAY


CHAPTER I. IN WHICH MY KING AND COUNTRY NEED ME


I left the office of The Scout, 28 Maiden Lane, W.C., on September 8th,
1914, took leave of the editor and the staff, said farewell to my little
camp in the beech-woods of Buckinghamshire and to my woodcraft scouts,
bade good-bye to my father, and went off to enlist in the Royal Army
Medical Corps.

I made my way to the Marylebone recruiting office, and after waiting
about for hours, I went at last upstairs and “stripped out” with a lot
of other men for the medical examination.

The smell of human sweat was overpowering in the little ante-room. Some
of the men had hearts and anchors and ships and dancing-girls tattooed
in blue on their chests and arms. Some were skinny and others too
fat. Very few looked fit. I remarked upon the shyness they suffered in
walking about naked.

“Did yer pass?”

“No, ‘e spotted it,” said the dejected rejected.

“Wot?”

“Rupture.”

“Got through, Alf?”

“No: eyesight ain’t good enough.”

So it went on for half-an-hour.

Then came my turn.

“Ha!” said the little doctor, “this is the sort we want,” and he
rubbed his gold-rimmed glasses on his handkerchief. “Chest,
thirty-four--thirty-seven,” said the doctor, tapping with his
tape-measure, “How did yer do that?”

“What, sir?” said I, gasping, for I was trying to blow my chest out, or
burst.

“Had breathing exercises?”

“No, sir--I’m a scout.”

“Ha!” said he, and noticed my knees were brown with sunburn because I
always wore shorts.

I passed the eyesight test, and they took my name down, and my address,
occupation and age.

“Ever bin in the army before?”

“No, sir.”

“Married?”

“No, sir.”

“Ever bin in prison?”

“No, sir.”

“What’s yer religion?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“What?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Ah, but you’ve got to ‘ave one in the army.”

“Got to?”

“Yes, you must. Wot’s it to be--C. of E.?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Church of England. Most of ‘em do.”

Awful thoughts of church parade flashed through my mind.

“Right you are--Quaker!” said I.

“Quaker! Is that a religion?” he asked doubtfully.

“Yes.”

I watched him write it down.

“Right, that’ll do. Report at Munster Road recruiting station, Fulham,
to-morrow.”

We were all dressed by this time. After a lot more waiting about outside
in a yard, a sergeant came and took about eight of us into a room where
there was a table and some papers and an officer in khaki.

I spotted a Bible on the table. We had to stand in a row while he read
a long list of regulations in which we were made to promise to obey
all orders of officers and non-commissioned officers of His Majesty’s
Service. After that, he told us he would swear us in. We had to hold up
the right hand above the head, and say, all together: “Swhelpmegod!”

I immediately realised that I had taken an oath, which was not in
accordance with my regimental religion!

No sooner were we let out than I began to feel the ever-tightening
tangle of red tape.

What the dickens had I enlisted for? I asked myself. I had lost all
my old-time freedom: I could no longer go on in my old camping and
sketching life. I was now a soldier--a “tommy”--a “private.” I loathed
the army. What a fool I was!

The next day I reported at Fulham. More hours of waiting. I discovered
an old postman who had also enlisted in the R.A.M.C., and as he
“knew the ropes” I stuck to him like a leech. In the afternoon an old
recruiting sergeant with a husky voice fell us in, and we marched, a
mob of civilians, through the London streets to the railway station.
Although this was quite a short distance, the sergeant fell us out near
a public-house, and he and a lot more disappeared inside.

What a motley crowd we were: clerks in bowler hats; “knuts” in brown
suits, brown ties, brown shoes, and a horse-shoe tie-pin; tramp-like
looking men in rags and tatters and smelling of dirt and beer and rank
twist.

Old soldiers trying to “chuck a chest”; lanky lads from the country
gaping at the houses, shops and people.

Rough, broad-speaking, broad-shouldered men from the Lancashire
cotton-mills; shop assistants with polished boots, and some even with
kid gloves and a silver-banded cane. Here and there was a farm-hand in
corduroys and hob-nailed, cowdung-spattered boots, puffing at a broken
old clay pipe, and speaking in the “Darset” dialect. At the station they
had to have another “wet” in the refreshment room, and by the time the
train was due to start a good many were “canned up.”

Boozy voices yelled out--

“‘S long way... Tipper-airy...”

“Good-bye, Bill... ‘ave... ‘nother swig?”

“Don’t ferget ter write, Bill...”

“Aw-right, Liz... Good-bye, Albert...”

We were locked in the carriage. There was much shouting and
laughing.... And so to Aldershot.



CHAPTER II. A LONG WAY TO TIPPERARY


Aldershot was a seething swarm of civilians who had enlisted. Every
class and every type was to be seen. We found out the R.A.M.C. depot and
reported. A man sat at an old soapbox with a lot of papers, and we had
to file past him. This was in the middle of a field with row upon row of
bell-tents.

“Name?” he snapped.

I told him.

“Age?”

“Religion?”

“Quaker.”

“Right!--Quaker Oats!--Section ‘E,’ over there.”

But my old postman knew better, and, having found out where “Section E”
 was camped, we went off up the town to look for lodging for the night,
knowing that in such a crowd of civilians we could not be missed.

At last we found a pokey little house where the woman agreed to let us
stay the night and get some breakfast next day.

That night was fearful. We had to sleep in a double bed, and it was
full of fleas. The moonlight shone through the window. The shadow of a
barrack-room chimney-pot slid slowly across my face as the hours dragged
on.

We got up about 5.30 A.M., so as to get down to the parade-ground in
time for the “fall in.”

We washed in a tiny scullery sink downstairs. There was a Pears’ Annual
print of an old fisherman telling a story to a little girl stuck over
the mantelpiece.

We had eggs and bread-and-butter and tea for breakfast, and I think the
woman only charged us three shillings all told.

Once down at the parade-ground we looked about for “Section E” and found
their lines in the hundreds of rows of bell-tents.

Life for the next few days was indeed “hand to mouth.” We had to go on
a tent-pitching fatigue under a sergeant who kept up a continual flow of
astoundingly profane oaths.

Food came down our lines but seldom. When it did come you had to fetch
it in a huge “dixie” and grope with your hands at the bits of gristle
and bone which floated in a lot of greasy water. Some one bought a box
of sardines in the next tent.

“Goin’ ter share ‘em round?” said a hungry voice.

“Nah blooming fear I ain’t--wot yer tike me for--eh?”

Every one was starving. I had managed to fish a lump of bone with a
scrag of tough meat on it from the lukewarm slosh in our “dixie.” But
some one who was very hungry and very big came along and snatched it
away before I could get my teeth in it.

We had continually to “fall in” in long rows and answer our names. This
was “roll-call,” and roll-call went on morning, noon, and night. Even
when your own particular roll-call was not being called you could hear
some other corporal or sergeant shouting--

“Jones F.--Wiggins, T.--Simons, G.-- Harrison, I....” and so on all day
long.

There were no ground-sheets to the tents. We squatted in the mud, and we
had one blanket each, which was simply crawling.

We were indeed in a far worse condition than many savages. Then came the
rain. We huddled into the tents. There were twenty-two in mine, and,
as a bell-tent is full up with eighteen, you may imagine how thick the
atmosphere became. One old man would smoke his clay-pipe with
choking twist tobacco. Most of the others smoked rank and often damp
“woodbines.” The language was thick with grumbling and much swearing. At
first it was not so bad. But some one touched the side of the tent and
the rain began to dribble through. Then we found a tiny stream of wet
slowly trickling along underneath the tent-walls towards the tent-pole,
and by night time we were lying and sitting in a pool of mud.

About a week later when the sergeant-major told us on parade that we
were “going to Tipperary” we all laughed, and no one believed it.

But the next day they marched us down to the Government siding and
locked us all in a train, which took us right away to Fishguard.

Some of the men got some bread-and-cheese before starting, but I, in
company with a good many others, did not.

The boat was waiting when they bundled us out on the quay.

It was a cattle-boat and very small and very smelly. There were no
cabins or accommodation of any sort: only the cattle-stalls down below.
Six hundred of us got aboard. Out of the six hundred, five hundred
were sick. It was a very rough crossing, and we were all starving and
shivering. I had nothing but what I stood up in--shirt, shorts, and
cowboy-hat, and my old haversack, which contained soap, towel and razor,
and also a sketch-book and a small colour-box.

The Irish sea-winds whistled up my shorts--but I preferred the icy wind
to the stinking cattle-stalls and insect-infested straw below. We were
packed in like sardines. Men were retching and groaning, cussing and
growling. At last I found a coil of rope. It was a huge coil with a hole
in the centre--something like a large bird’s nest. I got into this hole
and curled up like a dormouse. Here I did not feel the cold so much,
and lying down I didn’t feel sick. The moon glittered on the great gray
billows. The cattle-boat heaved up and slid down the mountains. She
pitched and rolled and slithered sideways down the wave-slopes. And so
to Waterford.

From Waterford by train to Tipperary. It was early morning. The first
thing I noticed was that the grass in Ireland was very green and that
the fields were very small.

We had had no food for twenty-seven hours. I found a very hard crust of
bread in my haversack, and eat it while the others were asleep in the
carriage.



CHAPTER III. SNARED


                           “CRIMED”

“Off with his head,” said the Queen.--Alice in Wonderland.

                    “Charge against 31963--
                 Failing to drink some oniony tea;
                           Ha! Ha!
                         What! What!
                     I can have you SHOT!
                      D’you realise that
                    I can have you lashed
                   To a wheel and smashed?
                            What?
                             Rot!
                          Yes--SHOT!
                      D’you realise this?
                         Right--turn!
                           DISMISS!”

                                        Lemnos: October 1915.


Born and bred in a studio, and brought up among the cloud-swept
mountains of Westmorland, amid the purple heather and the sunset in the
peat-moss puddles, barrack-life soon became like penal servitude. I was
like a caged wild animal. I knew now why the tigers and leopards pace up
and down, up and down, behind their bars at the Zoo.

We only stayed a week in the great, gray, prison-like barracks at
Tipperary. We looked about for the “sweetest girl” of the song--but the
“colleens” were disappointing. My heart was not “right there.” We moved
to Limerick; and in Limerick we stopped for seven solid months.

For seven months we did the same old squad-drill every day, at the
same time, on the same old square, until at last we all began to be
unbearably “fed up.” The sections became slack at drill because they
were over-drilled and sickened by the awful monotony of it all.

During those seven dreary months, in that dismal slum-grown town, we
learnt all the tricks of barrack-life. We knew how to “come the old
soldier”; we knew how and when to “wangle out” of doing this or that
fatigue; we practised the ancient art of “going sick” when we knew a
long route march was coming off next day.

We knew how to “square” the guard if we came in late, and the others
learnt how to dodge church parade.

“‘E never goes to church parade.”

“No; ‘e was a fly one--‘e was.”

“Wotchermean?”

“Put ‘isself down as Quaker.”

“Lummy--that’s me next time I ‘list--Quaker Oats!”

By this time I had been promoted to the rank of corporal.

Next to the regimental sergeant-major, I had the loudest drill voice on
the square, and shouting at squad-drill and stretcher-drill was about
the only thing I ever did well in the army--except that, having been a
scout, I was able to instruct the signalling squad.

Route marches and field-days were a relief from the drill square. For
five months we got no issue of khaki. Many of the men were through at
the knees, and tattered at the elbows. Some were buttonless and patched.
I had to put a patch in my shorts. Our civilian boots were wearing
out--some were right through. Heels came off when they “right turned,”
 others had their soles flapping as they marched.

My “batman,” who cleaned my boots and swept out the bunk, had his
trousers held together with a huge safety-pin. The people called us
“Kitchener’s Rag-time Army.” We became so torn, and worn, and ragged,
that it was impossible to go out in the town. Being the only one in
scout rig-out I drew much attention.

“‘Ere ‘e comes, Moik-ell!”

“Kitchener’s cowboy! Isn’t he lovely!”

“Bejazus! so-it-is!”

“Come an’ see Path-rick--Kitchener’s
cowboy!--by-the-holy-sufferin’-jazus!”

I found an old curio-shop down near the docks, and here I used to
rummage among the gilded Siamese idols, and the painted African gods and
drums. I discovered some odd parts of A Thousand-and-One Arabian Nights,
which I bought for a penny or two, and took back to my barrack-room to
read. By this means I forgot the gray square, and the gray line of the
barracks outside, and the bare boards and yellow-washed walls within.

I used to practise “slipping” the guard at the guard-room gate. This
form of amusement became quite exciting, and I was never caught at it.

Next I got a very old and worn copy of the Koran.

By this time I was a full-blown sergeant. I made a mistake in walking
into the sergeants’ mess with the Koran under my arm. It was
difficult to explain what sort of book it was. One day the regimental
sergeant-major said--

“You know, Hargrave, I can’t make you out.”

“No, sir?”

“No;--you’re not a soldier, you never will be--you act the part pretty
well. But you don’t take things seriously enough.”

We were often out on the Clare Mountains for field-days with the
stretcher-squads. Coming back one day, I spotted two herons wading among
some yellow-ochre sedges in a swampy field. I determined there and then
to come back and stalk them. The following Saturday I set out with a
fellow we called “Cherry Blossom,” because he never cleaned his boots. I
took a pair of field-glasses, and “Cherry” had a bag of pastries, which
we bought on the way. We stalked those herons for hours and hours. We
crept through the reeds, hid behind trees, and crawled into bushes, but
the herons were better scouts. We only got about fifty yards up to one.
For all that, it was like my old scout life--and we had had a break from
the gray walls and the everlasting saluting of officers.

There were rumours of war, and that’s all we knew of it. There were
fresh rumours each day. We were going to Egypt. We were to be sent to
the East Coast for “home defence.” That offended our martial ardour.
When were we going out? Should we ever get out? Had we got to do squad
drill for “duration”? Had Kitchener forgotten the Xth Division?

Now and then a batch of men were put into khaki which arrived at the
quartermaster’s stores in driblets. Some had greeny puttees and sandy
slacks, a “civvy” coat and a khaki cap. Others were rigged out in
“Kitchener’s workhouse blue,” with little forage caps on one side. The
sprinkling of khaki and khaki-browns and greens increased every time we
came on parade: until one day the whole of the three field ambulances
were fitted out.

The drill went on like clockwork. It was as if some curse had fallen
upon us. The officers were “fed up” you could see.

And now, just a word as to army methods. Immediately opposite the
barracks was a cloth factory, which was turning out khaki uniforms for
the Government every day.

For five months we went about in civilian clothes. We were a disgrace as
we marched along. Yet because no order had been given to that factory
to supply us with uniforms, we had to wait till the uniforms had been
shipped to England, and then sent back to Ireland for us to wear!

The spark of patriotism which was in each man when he enlisted was dead.
We detested the army, we hated the routine, we were sickened and dulled
and crushed by drill.

The old habit of being always on the alert for anything picturesque
saved me from idiotcy. Whenever opportunity offered, or whenever I could
take French leave, I went off with sketchbook and pencil, and forgot for
a time the horror of barrack-room life, with its unending flow of filthy
language, and its barren desolation of yellow-washed walls and broken
windows.

And then we moved to Dublin.



CHAPTER IV. CHARACTERS


It may be very amusing to read about “Kipps” and those commonplace
people whom Mr. H.G. Wells describes so cleverly, but to have to live
with them in barracks is far from pleasant.

There were shop-assistants, dental mechanics, city clerks, office boys,
medical students, and a whole mass of very ordinary, very uninteresting
people. There was a fair sprinkling of mining engineers and miners,
and these men were more interesting and of a far stronger mental and
physical development. They were huge, full-chested, strong-armed men who
swore and drank heavily, but were honest and straight.

There were characters here from the docks and from the merchant
service, some of whom had surely been created for W.W. Jacobs. One in
particular--Joe Smith, a sailor-man (an engine-greaser, I think)--was
full of queer yarns and seafaring talk. He was a little man with beady
eyes and a huge curled moustache. He walked about quickly, with the
seamen’s lurch, as I have noticed most seagoing men of the merchant
service do.

This man “came up” in bell-bottomed trousers and a pea jacket. He was
fond of telling a yarn about a vessel which was carrying a snake in a
crate from the West Indies. This snake got into the boiler when they
were cleaning out the engine-room.

“The capt’in ses to me, ‘Joe.’ I ses, ‘Yes-sir.’ ‘Joe,’ says ‘e, ‘wot’s
to be done?’

“‘Why,’ ses I, ‘thing is ter git this ‘ere snake out ag’in!’

“‘Jistso,’ says the capt’in; ‘but ‘oo’ ter do it?’--‘E always left
everythink ter me--and I ses, ‘Why, sir, it’s thiswise, if sobe all the
others are afeared, I ain’t, or my name’s Double Dutch.’

“‘Very good, melad,’ ses the capt’in, ‘I relies on you, Joe.’--‘E always
did--and would you believe it, I upped an’ ‘ooked that there great
rattlesnake out of the boiler with an old hum-brella!”

There was a clerk who stood six-foot eight who was something of a
“knut.” He told me that at home he belonged to a “Lit’ry Society,” and I
asked him what books they had and which he liked.

“Books?” he asked. “‘Ow d’yow mean?”

“You said a Literary Society, didn’t you?”

“Oh yes, we ‘ave got books. But, you know, we go down there and ‘ave
a concert, or read the papers, and ‘ave a social, perhaps, you know;
sometimes ask the girls round to afternoon tea.”

I had a barrack-room full of these people to look after. Most of them
got drunk. Once a young medical student tried to knife me with a Chinese
jack-knife which his uncle, a missionary, had given him. He had “downed”
 too much whisky. Just as boys do at school, so these men formed into
cliques, and “hung together” in twos and threes.

Some of them, like the “lit’ry society” clerk, had never seen much of
life or people; had lived in a little suburban villa and pretended to
be “City men.” Others had knocked about all over the world. These were
mostly seafaring men. Savage was such a one. He was one of the buccaneer
type, strong and sunburnt, with tattooed arms. Often he sang an old
sea-song, which always ended, “Forty-five fadom, and a clear sandy
bottom!” He knew most of the sea chanties of the old days, one of which
went something in this way--

     “Heave away Rio! Heave away Rio!
     So fare thee well, my sweet pretty maid!
     Heave away Rio! Heave away Rio!
     For there’s plenty of gold--so we’ve been told--
     On the banks of the Sacrament--o!”

An old Irish apple-woman used to come into the barracks, and sit by
the side of the parade ground with two baskets of apples and a box of
chocolate.

She did a roaring trade when we were dismissed from drill.

We always addressed her as “Mother.” She looked so witch-like that one
day I asked--

“Can you tell a fortune, Mother?”

“Lord-love-ye, no! Wad ye have the Cuss o’ Jazus upon us all? Ye shud
see the priest, sor.”

“And can he?”

“No, Son! All witch-craftin’ is forbid in the Book by the Holy Mother o’
Gord, so they do be tellin’ me.”

“Can no one in all Ireland read a fortune now, Mother?”

“Ach, Son, ‘tis died out, sure. Only in the old out-an’-away parts ‘tis
done; but ‘tis terrible wicked!”

She was a good bit of colour. I have her still in my pocket-book. Her
black shawl with her apples will always remind me of early barrack-days
at Limerick if I live to be ninety.



CHAPTER V. I HEAR OF HAWK


Seldom are we lucky enough to meet in real life a character so strong
and vivid, so full of subtle characteristics, that his appearance in a
novel would make the author’s name. Such a character was Hawk.

When you consider, you find that many an author of note has made a
lasting reputation by evolving some such character; and in most cases
this character has been “founded on fact.” For example, Stevenson’s
“Long John Silver,” Kipling’s “Kim,” and Rider Haggard’s “Alan
Quatermain.”

Had Kipling met Hawk he would have worked him into a book of Indian
soldier life; for Hawk was full of jungle adventures and stories of the
Indian Survey Department and the Khyber Pass; while his descriptions of
Kashmir and Secunderabad, with its fakirs and jugglers, monkey temples
and sacred bulls, were superb.

On the other hand, Haggard would have placed him “somewhere in Africa,”
 a strong, hard man trekking across the African veldt he knew so well;
for Hawk had been in the Boer War.

Little did I realise when I met him on the barrack-square at Limerick
how fate would throw us together upon the scorching sands and rocky
ridges of Gallipoli, nor could either of us foresee the hairbreadth
escapes and queer corners in which we found ourselves at Suvla Bay and
on the Serbian frontier.

I spotted him in the crowd as the only man on parade with a strong,
clear-cut face. I noted his drooping moustache, and especially his keen
grey eyes, which glittered and looked through and through. Somewhere, I
told myself, there was good blood at the back of beyond on his line of
descent. I was right, for, as he told me later, when I had come to know
him as a trusty friend, he came from a Norseman stock. The jaw was too
square and heavy, but the high-built chiselled nose and the deep-set
clear grey eyes were a “throw-back” on the old Viking trail. Although
dressed in ragged civilian clothes he looked a huge, full-grown,
muscular man; active and well developed, with the arms of a miner and
the chest of a gorilla. On one arm I remember he had a heart with a
dagger through it tattooed in blue and red.

I heard of him first as one to be shunned and feared. For it was said
that “when in drink” he would pick up the barrack-room fender with one
hand and hurl it across the room. I was told that he was a master of the
art of swearing--that he could pour forth a continual flow of oaths for
a full five minutes without repeating one single “cuss.”

My interest was immediately aroused. I smelt adventure, and I was on the
adventure trail. Hawk was not in my barrack-room, and therefore I knew
but little of him while in the old country. I heard that he had been
galloper-dispatch-rider to Lord Kitchener in South Africa, and I tried
to get him to talk about it. As an “artist’s model,” for a canvas to
be called “The Buccaneer,” Hawk was perfect. I never saw a man so
splendidly developed.

And Hawk was fifty years old! You would take him for thirty-nine or so.

But “drink and the devil had done for the rest”--Hawk himself
acknowledged it. His vices were the vices of a strong man, and when he
was drunk he was “the very devil.”

He was “the old soldier,” and knew all the ins and outs of army life.
I quickly became entangled in the interest of unravelling his complex
nature. On the one hand he was said to be a desperado and double-dyed
liar. On the other hand, if he respected you, he would always tell you
the naked truth, and would never “let you down.” He knew drink was his
ruin, but he could not and would not stop it. Yet his advice to me
was always good. Indeed, although he had the reputation of a bold, bad
blackguard, he never led any one else on the “wrong trail,” and his
advice to young soldiers in the barrack-rooms was wonderfully clear and
useful.

If he respected you, you could trust your life with him. If he didn’t,
you could “look up” for trouble. He was honest and “square”--if he liked
you--but he could make things disappear by “sleight of hand” in a manner
worthy of a West End conjurer.

He was a miner, and had a sound knowledge of mining and practical
geology which many a science-master might have been proud of. He had the
eyes of a trained observer, and I afterwards discovered he was a crack
shot.

Some months later, when the A.S.C. ambulance drivers were exercising
their horses, he showed himself a good rough-rider, and I recalled
his “galloper” days. And again at Lemnos and Suvla he was a splendid
swimmer. He was an all-round man. Unlike the other men in barracks--the
shop assistants and clerks--Hawk never missed noticing small things, and
it was this which first drew my attention to him.

I remember one night hearing a woman’s voice wailing a queer Hindoo
chant. It came from the barrack-room door. Afterwards I discovered it
was Hawk sitting on his trestle bed cross-legged, with a bit of sacking
and ashes on his head imitating the death-wail of an Indian woman for
her dead husband.

Hawk knew all the rites and ceremonies of the various Hindoo castes, and
could act the part of a fakir or a bazaar-wullah with wonderful realism.

By turns Hawk was a heavy drinker and a clear-brained man of action,
calm in danger.

In those early days of my “military career” I looked upon him only as an
author looks upon an interesting character.

Months afterwards, on the death-swept peninsula, Hawk and I became fast
friends. The “bad man” of the ambulance became the most useful, most
faithful, in my section. We went everywhere together--like “Horace and
Holly” of Rider Haggard fame: he the great, strong man, and I the young
artist scout.

If Hawk was out of camp, you could bet I was also--and vice-versa.

Of Hawk more anon.



CHAPTER VI. ON THE MOVE


We moved to Dublin after seven months of drill and medical lectures in
barracks at Limerick.

After about a fortnight in the Portobello Barracks we crossed to England
and pitched our camp at Basingstoke. Here we had two or three months’
divisional training. The whole of the Xth Division--about 25,000
men--used to turn out for long route-marches.

We were out in all weathers. We took no tents, and “slept out.” This
was nothing to me, as I had done it on my own when scouting hundreds of
times. It amused me to hear the men grumbling about the hard ground, and
to see them rubbing their hips when they got up. It was a hard training.
Still we didn’t seem to be going out, and once again, the novelty of a
new place having worn off, we became unspeakably “fed up.”

Here at Basingstoke we were inspected by the King, and later by Lord
Kitchener.

Then came the issue of pith helmets and khaki drill uniforms, and the
Red Cross brassards on the left arm.

Rumour ran riot. We were going to India; we were going to East
Africa... some one even mentioned Japan! There was a new rumour each
day.

Then one day, at brief notice, we were quietly entrained at Basingstoke
and taken down to the docks at Devonport before anyone had wind of the
matter.

All our ambulance wagons, and field medical equipment in wickerwork
panniers, went with us, and it would astonish a civilian to see the
amount of stores and Red Cross materials with which a field ambulance
moves. And so, after much waiting about, aboard the Canada.



CHAPTER VII. MEDITERRANEAN NIGHTS


Intricate and vivid detail leave a more startling imprint on the
memory-film than the main purport of any great adventure, whether it be
a polar expedition, a new discovery, or such a stupendous undertaking as
that in which we were now involved.

The fact of our departure had been carefully kept quiet, and our
destination was unknown. It might have been a secret expedition in
search of buried treasure. Yet, in spite of all precaution, we might be
torpedoed at any moment and go down with all hands, or strike a mine and
be blown up. We knew that victory or defeat were hanging in the balance,
and perhaps the destiny of nations. But while the magnitude of the
venture has left no impression--I cannot recall that we ever spoke about
it--commonplace details remain.

The pitch bubbling in the seams under a Mediterranean sun; the queer
iridescent shapes of glowing, greenish phosphorus in the nighttime sea;
the butter melting into yellow oil on the plate on the saloon table;
the sickly smell of steam and grease and oil from the engine-room; the
machine gun fixed at the stern with its waterproof hood; the increasing
brilliance of the stars, and the rapid descent of evening upon the
splendid colour-prism of a Mediterranean sunset--these, and thousands of
other intimate commonplaces, are inlaid for ever in my mind.

We went about in our shirts and drill “slacks,” and the scorching
boards of the deck blistered our naked feet. In a few days we became
sun-tanned. Each one of us had a sunburnt V-shaped triangle on the chest
where we left our shirts open.

The voyage was uneventful. The food was poor. There was very little
fresh water to drink. It was July. The heat was fatiguing, and the
sun-glare blinding.

The coast of Algeria on our right looked bare and terribly forsaken.
It had an awfulness about it--a mystery look; it looked like a “juju”
 country, with its sandy spit running like a narrow ribbon to the blue
sea, and its hazy, craggy mountains quivering in the noonday heat.

Hawk and I were in the habit of coming up from our bunks in the
evening. We used to lean over the handrail and watch the wonder of
a Mediterranean sunset transform in schemes of peacock-blue and
beetle-green, down and down, through emerald, pale gold and lemon
yellow, and so to the horizon of the inland sea, in bands of deep chrome
and orange, scarlet, mauve and purple.

Hawk was the only man I discovered in all those hundreds of apparently
commonplace souls who could really appreciate and never tire of watching
and discussing these things.

I had often heard of the blue of the Mediterranean. But I must confess
that I rather thought it had been exaggerated by authors, artists and
poets as a fruitful and beautiful source of inspiration.

I never saw such blues before: electric-blue and deep, seething navy
blue, flecked with foam and silver spray; calm lapis-lazuli blue; a
sort of greeny, mummy-case blue; flashing, silk-shot blue, like a
kingfisher’s feathers. Sometimes the sea was as calm as a mill-pond, and
you could see down and down and down.

There is a certain milky look in the waters of the Mediterranean which
I never saw anywhere else. What it is I do not know, but it hangs in the
water like a cloud. Once there was a shoal of porpoises playing round
us, and they curled and dived and flopped in the warm blue seas.

At night Hawk and I stood for hours watching first one constellation
“light up,” and then another, till the whole purple-velvet of the
Mediterranean night sky was pinholed with the old familiar star-designs.

It struck me as most extraordinary, and almost uncanny, to see the same
old stars we knew in England, still above us, so many hundred miles from
home.

Phosphorescent fragments went floating along beneath us like bits of
broken moonlight.

In watching and talking of these things, I quickly perceived in Hawk
a man who not only noticed small detail and took a real interest in
Nature, but one who had a sound, natural philosophy and a good idea of
the reasonable and scientific explanation of things which so many people
either ignore or look upon as “atheistic.”

We did not yet know whither we were sailing. We knew we were part of the
Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, and that was all.

One day we put in at Malta.

Here the fruit-boats, all painted green and red and white and blue, came
rowing out to meet us. The Maltese who manned them stood upto row their
oars-and rowed the right way forwards, instead of facing the wrong
way, as we do in England. They were selling tomatoes and pears, apples,
chocolate, cigars, cigarettes, Turkish delight, and lace.

Continually they cried their goods--

“Cee-gar-ette!”

“Cee-gar-ette!”

“Tomart! Tomart!”

One man recognised us as the Irish Division, and shouted--

“Irish! Irish! My father Irish--from Dundee!”

Here were diving-boys in their own tiny boats, diving for pennies. They
were wonderfully lithe and graceful, with sun-tanned limbs and dripping
black hair.

Here, too, was a huge old man, who was also diving for pennies and tins
of bully-beef. He was fat and sun-browned, and his muscles and chest
were well developed.

“Me dive for bully-beef!” he shouted. “Me dive for bully-beef!”

Never once did he fail to retrieve these tins when they were chucked
overboard.

The tomatoes were very large and ripe, and the tobacco and cigarettes
exceedingly cheap and good. Most of the men got a stock.

The next day we put to sea again.

It was a real voyage of adventure, for here we were, on an unknown
course, sailing under sealed orders, no one knew whither, nor did we
know what would be the climax to this great enterprise.

Would any of us ever return across those blue-green waters?... Or would
our bones lie, a few days hence, bleaching on the yellow sands? ...
Mystery and adventure sailed with us--and each day the heat increased.
The sun blazed from a brazen sky, the shadow of the halyards and the
great ventilators were clear-cut black silhouettes upon the baking
decks.

The decks were crammed with that same khaki crowd of civilians who had
cursed and sworn and drilled and growled for ten long months in the
Old Country. You imagine what desperate adventurers they had suddenly
become. Some had never been out of Ireland, others had been as far as
Portsmouth, and taken a return voyage to the Isle of Wight. And each day
we zigzagged across the blue seas towards some unknown Fate... death,
perhaps... victory or failure--who could tell?

Until one day a thin, yellowish-white streak appeared upon the sea-line;
little groups of palms huddled together, and here and there a white dome
or a needle-minaret. And so we warped into harbour, through the boom and
past the lightships, to join the crowd of transports and battle cruisers
lying off this muddled city--the city of wonderful colour, Alexandria.



CHAPTER VIII. THE CITY OF WONDERFUL COLOUR: ALEXANDRIA


                          Scarlet-orange;
                          Beetle-green,
                     Flashing like a magic screen.
                          Silken garment,
                          ‘Broidered hood;
                        Richly woven gown;
                     Flashing like a pantomime,
                        In and out Aladdin’s town.

                          Fretted lattice;
                          Dancing girl;
                     Drooping lash and ebon curl.
                          Silver tassel;
                          Scented room;
                         Almond “glad”-eye-look.
                     Queersome figures prowling round,
                         From some kiddies’ picture-book.

                                         Graeco-Serbian Frontier,
                                         J. H., October 1915.


The coal-yards and dingy quays looked gray and chill. Here were
gray-painted Government sheds, with white numbers on the sliding doors,
dull gray trucks, and dirty sidings.

A couple of Egyptian native police in khaki drill, brown belts,
side-arms, red fezes, and carrying canes, both smoking cigarettes,
swaggered up and down in front of an arc-light.

There were dump-yards and gray tin offices, rusty cranes, and a gray
floating quay. Gangs of Egyptian beggars in ragged clothes and a flock
of little brown children continually dodged the native police as we
sailed slowly through the docks. They were the only touch of colour in a
muddle of Government buildings, stores, and transport ships.

We were all crowding to the handrail looking overboard. The Egyptian
sunset had just vanished and the deep blue of an Eastern night held the
docks in a haze of gloom.

The pipe band of the Inniskillings was playing “The Wearin’ o’ the
Green” in that mournful, gurgling chant which we came to know so well.

One of the little Egyptian beggar-girls was dancing to it on the
floating quay down below us by the flicker of the arc-lamp. She was a
tiny mite, with a shock of black hair and brown face and arms. She wore
a pink dress with some brass buttons hung round her neck. She danced
with all the supple gracefulness of the out-door tribes of the desert,
never out of step, always true and rhythmic in every motion of arms and
body.

When the pipes on board trailed away with a hiss of wind and a choking,
gurgling noise into silence the little dancing girl began to sing in
a deep, musical voice--the voice of one who has lived out-of-doors in
tents--

     “Itta long way--Tipple-airy!
     --Long way to go!
     --Long way--Tipple-airy!
     Sweetie girl I know!...”

She sang in broken English, and danced to the tune, which she knew
perfectly.

The khaki crowd aboard whistled and cheered and laughed. Some one threw
a penny. The whole gang of beggars scrambled after it, and there ensued
a scrimmage with much shouting and swearing in Arabic.

We could see the city lit up beyond the dull gray docks.

Next morning we went for a route march through Alexandria. We
marched through the dockyards. Gangs of native workmen in native
costume-coloured robes and bare feet, turbans and red fezes--were
working on the transports, unloading box after box of bully-beef and
biscuit and piling them in huge “dumps” on the quays. Rusty chains
clanked, steam cranes rattled and puffed out whiffs of white steam.

But they did not hustle or hurry. They worked under the direction of
English sergeants and officers, loading and unloading.

At last we got outside the zone of awful ugliness which follows the
British wherever they go. The docks were left behind and the change was
sudden and startling.

It was like putting down a novel by Arnold Bennett and taking up the
Koran.

I did not trouble to keep in step or “cover off.” My eyes were trying
to take in the splendid Eastern scenes. Here were figures which had come
right out of the Arabian Nights.

Was that not Haroun Al Raschid, Commander of the Faithful, disguised
as a water-carrier, with a goatskin bottle slung over his shoulder, and
great yellow baggy trousers and a striped cummerbund?

Here were veiled women and old men squatting under their open bazaar
fronts, with coloured mats and blinds strung across the narrow streets.
Fruit sellers surrounded by melons, and beans, tomatoes and figs and
dates--a jumble of colour, orange, scarlet, green, and gold. Pitchers
and jars and woven carpets; queer Eastern scents; shuttered windows and
flat roofs, mules and here and there a loaded camel, two Jews in black
robes, a band of wild-looking desert wanderers in white with hoods and
veils.

Egyptian women carrying little brown babies; who would believe there
could be such figures, such colour and picturesque compositions?

It was a short march, but we saw much.

So this was the land of Egypt. It was good. What a pity we could see so
little of it...

There were very smartly dressed French women with faces powdered and
painted and scented. Old men with hollow eyes and yellow parchment
skins all creased and wrinkled squatted on the cobble-stones, smoking
hubble-bubbles and long ivory-stemmed pipes.

Arab boys selling oranges ran about the streets. The heat was
stifling--the shadows purple-black, the sunlight glared golden-white on
the buildings and towers and minarets.

Here were curio-shops with queer oriental carvings and alabaster
figures.

It was like a chapter of my _Thousand-and-One Nights_ come true, and I
remembered the gray barracks at Limerick and the incessant drill.

At last we marched back through the docks and aboard the Canada. Next
morning we were sailing far away upon a blue sea. Just a glimpse of
the city of wonderful colour and we were once more creeping closer and
closer to the mystery of our unknown venture.

Many of us would never pass that way again--and each one wondered
sometimes if he would be claimed by that Mechanical Death which none of
us fully realised.

Only a few short hours--a day or two longer--and we should be plunged
into battle. A bullet for one, shrapnel for another, dysentery for a
third, a bayonet or death from weakness and starvation.

The great game of luck was gathering faster and faster. We loafed about
on deck and wondered where we were going and what it would be like...
our minds were thinking of the immediate future. Each one tried to make
out he didn’t care, but each one was thinking upon the same subject--his
luck, fate, kismet. How many would return to old England--should I be
one; or would the Eastern sunshine blaze down upon my decomposing body
on some barren sandy shore?

We passed many of the Greek Islands--some came up pink and mauve out
of the sea, others were green with vineyards; once or twice a little
triangular-sailed boat bobbed along the coast.

The uncertainty was a strain, and we felt utterly cut off, until at
last we sighted a sandy streak, and later a line of volcanic-looking
peaks--the Isle of Lemnos.



CHAPTER IX. MAROONED ON LEMNOS ISLAND


                          LEMNOS HARBOUR

     Within the outer anchorage
     The ancient Argonauts lay to;
     Little they dreamt--that dauntless crew--
     That here to-day in the sheltered bay
     Where the seas are still and blue,
     Great battle-ships should froth and
     hum, And mighty transport-vessels come
          Serenely floating through.

     With magic sail the Argonauts
     Stood by to go about;
     Little they thought--that hero band--
     As they made once more for an unknown land
     In a world of terror and doubt,
     That here in the wake of the magical bough
     Should come the all-terrible ironclad now
          Serenely floating out.

               Written on Mudros Beach: Oct. 7, 1915.


July the twenty-seventh.

The deadly silence...

The tenderfoot on an expedition of this sort naturally expects to find
himself plunged into a whirl of noise and tumult.

The crags were colourless and shimmering in the heat. The harbour was
calm and greeny-blue. One by one, with our haversacks and water-bottles,
belts and rolled overcoats, we went down the companion-way into the
waiting surf-boats. Again and again these boats, roped together and
tugged by a little launch, went back and forth from the S.S. Canada to
the “Turk’s Head Pier”--a tiny wooden jetty built by the Engineers.

I asked one of the straw-hatted men of the Naval Division, who was
casting off the painter, what the place was like--

“Sand an’ flies, and flies an’ sand--nothinkelse!” he replied.

No sooner ashore than the green and black flies came pestering and
tormenting like a host of wicked jinn. The glare of sunlight on
the yellow sand hurt the eyes. The deadly silence of the place was
oppressive--especially when you had strung yourself up to concert pitch
to face the crash and turmoil of a fearful battle.

The quiet isolation and khaki desolation of jagged peaks and sandy
slopes was nerve-breaking.

You could see the thin lines of the wireless station and little groups
of white bell-tents dotted here and there.

Robinson Crusoe wasn’t in it. Sand and flies and sun; sun and flies and
sand.

“Wot ‘ave we struck ‘ere, Bill?”

“Some d---d desert island, I reckon!”

“A blasted heath...”

“Gordlummy, look at the d---d flies!”

“Curse the ---- sun; sweat’s trickling down me back.”

“And curse all the d---d issue...”

“What the holy son of Moses did we join for?”

We growled and groaned and cursed our luck. The sweat ran down under our
pith helmets and soaked in a stream from under our armpits. We trudged
to our camping-place along the shore. One or two Greek natives followed
us about with melons to sell. Parched and choked with sand, we were only
too glad to buy these water-melons for two or three leptas.

The rind was green like a vegetable marrow, but the inside was yellow
with pink and crimson pips--the colour of a Mediterranean sunset.

One day ashore on this accursed island and the diarrhoea set in. I never
saw men suffer such awful stomach-pains before. The continual eating of
melons to allay the blistering thirst helped the disease. Many men slept
close to the latrines, too weak to crawl to and fro all night long. The
sun blazed, and the flies in thousands of millions swarmed and irritated
from early morning till sundown.

At night it was cold. The stars burned white-hot--a calm, fierce
glitter.

Hawk and I “kipped down” (slept) together on a sandy stretch overlooking
the bay. We could see the green-and-red electric lights of the hospital
ships waiting in the harbour--for us, perhaps...

The “graft” (work) was fearful. All day long we were at it: hauling up
our equipment from the beach where it had been dumped ashore. Medical
panniers, operating marquee, tents and tent-poles, cook-house dixies,
picks and shovels, bully and biscuit boxes and a hundred-and-one
articles necessary to the work of the Medical Corps in the field: all
this had to be man-handled through the sand up to our camp about a mile
away. And the sun blazed, and the flies pestered and stung and buzzed
and fought with each other for the drops of sweat streaming down your
face. How long should we be here? When were we going into action?... The
suspense was brain-racking. The diarrhoea increased: everyone went down
with it. Some got the ague shivers and some a touch of dysentery.

We became gloomy and bodily sick. We wanted to get into it--into
action...

Anything would be better than this God-forsaken island. Why the dickens
did they leave us moping here: working in the blazing heat, and crawling
to the latrines in the chilly nights? For goodness’ sake, let’s get out
of it! Let’s get to work!... So the days dragged on.

The natives wore baggy trousers and coloured head-bands. They sat all
day near our camp selling melons, tomatoes, very cheap and tasteless
chocolates, raisins, figs and dates.

We used to go down to swim in the little bay-like semicircle of the
harbour. The water was always warm and very salt. Here were tiny
shoals of tiny fish. The water was clear and glassy. There were pinky
sea-urchins with spikey spines which jabbed your feet. The sandy bed of
the bay was all ribbed with ripples.

The island was humming and ticking like a watch with insect-noises:
otherwise the deadly silence held. There were red-winged grasshoppers
and great green-gray locust-looking crickets which whistled and
“cricked” all night.

We had to fetch our water from the water-tank boats, about a mile and a
half distant, and haul it up in a water-cart.

Gangs of natives were working under the military authorities. There
were Greeks and Greek-Armenians, Turks and Ethiopians, Egyptians and
half-breeds of all kinds from Malta and Gib. They were employed in
making roads and clearing the ground for huts and camps.

And all the time we had no letters from home. We were actually marooned
on Lemnos Island: as literally marooned on a barren desert isle as any
buccaneer of the old Spanish galleon days. We went suddenly back to a
savage life. We went down to bathe stark naked, with the sunset glowing
orange on our sunburnt limbs. Here it was that Hawk proved himself a
wonderfully good swimmer. He was lithe and supple and well-made--an
extraordinary specimen of virile manhood--and he spent his fiftieth
birthday on Lemnos!

One day came the order to pack up and man-handle all our stuff down
to the beach ready for re-embarkation. At last we were on the move. We
worked with a will now. The great day would soon dawn. Some of us would
get “put out of mess,” no doubt, but this waiting about to get killed
was much worse than plunging into the thick of it.

August the 6th saw us steaming out at night towards the great unknown
climax--the New Landing.



CHAPTER X. THE NEW LANDING


A pale pink sunrise burst across the eastern sky as our transport
came steaming into the bay. The haze of early morning dusk still held,
blurring the mainland and water in misty outlines.

Hawk and I had slept upon the deck. Now we got up and stretched our
cramped limbs. Slowly we warped through the quiet seas.

You must understand that we knew not where we were. We had never heard
of Suvla Bay--we didn’t know what part of the Peninsula we had reached.
The mystery of the adventure made it all the more exciting. It was to be
“a new landing by the Xth Division”--that was all we knew.

Some of us had slept, and some had lain awake all night. Rapidly the
pink sunrise swept behind the rugged mountains to the left, and was
reflected in wobbling ripples in the bay.

We joined the host of battleships, monitors, and troopships standing
out, and “stood by.”

We could hear the rattle of machine-guns in the distant gloom beyond
the streak of sandy shore. The decks were crowded with that same khaki
crowd. We all stood eagerly watching and listening. The death-silence
had come upon us. No one spoke. No one whistled.

We could see the lighters and small boats towing troops ashore. We saw
the men scramble out, only to be blown to pieces by land mines as
they waded to the beach. On the Lala Baba side we watched platoons and
companies form up and march along in fours, all in step, as if they were
on parade.

“In fours!” I exclaimed to Hawk, who was peering through my
field-glasses.

“Sheer murder,” said Hawk.

No sooner had he spoken than a high explosive from the Turkish
positions on the Sari Bair range came screaming over the Salt Lake:
“Z-z-z-e-e-e-o-o-o-p--Crash!”

They lay there like a little group of dead beetles, and the wounded were
crawling away like ants into the dead yellow grass and the sage bushes
to die. A whole platoon was smashed.

It was not yet daylight. We could see the flicker of rifle-fire, and the
crackle sounded first on one part of the bay, and then another. Among
the dark rocks and bushes it looked as if people were striking thousands
of matches.

Mechanical Death went steadily on. Four Turkish batteries on the Kislar
Dargh were blown up one after the other by our battleships. We watched
the thick rolling smoke of the explosions, and saw bits of wheels, and
the arms and legs of gunners blown up in little black fragments against
that pearl-pink sunrise.

The noise of Mechanical Battle went surging from one side of the bay to
the other--it swept round suddenly with an angry rattle of maxims and
the hard echoing crackle of rifle-fire.

Now and then our battle-ships crashed forth, and their shells went
hurtling and screaming over the mountains to burst with a muffled roar
somewhere out of sight.

Mechanical Death moved back and forth. It whistled and screamed and
crashed. It spat fire, and unfolded puffs of grey and white and black
smoke. It flashed tongues of livid flame, like some devilish ant-eater
lapping up its insects... and the insects were the sons of men.

Mechanical Death, as we saw him at work, was hard and metallic,
steel-studded and shrapnel-toothed. Now and then he bristled with
bayonets, and they glittered here and there in tiny groups, and charged
up the rocks and through the bushes.

The noise increased. Mechanical Death worked first on our side, and then
with the Turks. He led forward a squad, and the next instant mowed them
down with a hail of lead. He galloped up a battery, unlimbered--and
before the first shell could be rammed home Mechanical Death blew the
whole lot up with a high explosive from a Turkish battery in the hills.

And so it went on hour after hour. Crackle, rattle and roar; scream,
whistle and crash. We stood there on the deck watching men get killed.
Now and then a shell came wailing and moaning across the bay, and
dropped into the water with a great column of spray glittering in the
early morning sunshine. A German Taube buzzed overhead; the hum-hum-hum
of the engine was very loud. She dropped several bombs, but none of them
did much damage. The little yellow-skinned observation balloon floated
above one of our battleships like a penny toy. The Turks had several
shots at it, but missed it every time.

The incessant noise of battle grew more distant as our troops on shore
advanced. It broke out like a bush-fire, and spread from one section
to another. Mechanical Death pressed forward across the Salt Lake. It
stormed the heights of the Kapanja Sirt on the one side, and took Lala
Baba on the other. Puffs of smoke hung on the hills, and the shore
was all wreathed in the smoke of rifle and machine-gun fire. A deadly
conflict this--for one Turk on the hills was worth ten British down
below on the Salt Lake.

There was no glory. Here was Death, sure enough--Mechanical Death run
amok--but where was the glory?

Here was organised murder--but it was steel-cold! There was no
hand-to-hand glory. A mine dispersed you before you had set foot on dry
land; or a high explosive removed your stomach, and left you a mangled
heap of human flesh, instead of a medically certified, healthy human
being.

Mechanical Death wavered and fluctuated--but it kept going. If it
slackened its murderous fire at one side of the bay, it was only to
burst forth afresh upon the other.

We wondered how it was that we were still alive, when so many lay dead.
Some were killed on the decks of the transports by shrapnel.

Our monitors crept close to the sandy shore, and poured out a deadly
brood of Death.

The crack and crash was deafening, and it literally shook the air... it
quivered like a jelly after each shot.

The fighting got more and more inland, and the rattle and crackle
fainter and farther away. But we still watched, fascinated.

The little groups of men lay in exactly the same positions on the beach.
That platoon by the side of Lala Baba lay in a black bunch--stone
dead. We could see our artillery teams galloping along like a team of
performing fleas, taking up new positions behind Lala Baba. So this is
war? Well, it’s pretty awful! Wholesale murder... what’s it all for?
Wonder how long we shall last alive before Mechanical Death blows our
brains out, or a leg off...

Queer thing, war! Didn’t think it was quite like this! So mechanical and
senseless.

And now came the time for us to land. A lighter came alongside, with a
little red-bearded man in command--

“Remind you of any one?” I said to Hawk.

“Cap’n Kettle!”

“Yes!”

He was exactly like Cutcliffe Hyne’s famous “Kettle,” except that he
smoked a pipe. We huddled into the lighter, and hauled our stores down
below. Some of us were “green about the gills,” and some were trying to
pretend we didn’t care.

We watched the boat which landed just before us strike a mine and be
blown to pieces. Encouraging sight... At last we reached the tiny cove,
and the lighter let down a sort of tail-board on the sand.



CHAPTER XI. THE KAPANJA SIRT


One had his stomach blown out, and the other his chest blown in. The two
bodies lay upon the sand as we stepped down.

The metallic rattle of the firing-line sounded far away. We man-handled
all our medical equipment and stores from the hold of the lighter to the
beach.

We had orders to “fall in” the stretcher-bearers, and work in open
formation to the firing-line.

The Kapanja Sirt runs right along one side of Suvla Bay. It is one
wing of that horse-shoe formation of rugged mountains which hems in the
Anafarta Ova and the Salt Lake.

Our searching zone for wounded lay along this ridge, which rises like
the vertebrae of some great antediluvian reptile--dropping sheer down
on the Gulf of Saros side, and, in varying slopes, to the plains and the
Salt Lake on the other.

Here again small things left a vivid impression--the crack of a rifle
from the top of the ridge, and a party of British climbing up the rocks
and scrub in search of the hidden Turk.

The smell of human blood soaking its way into the sand from those two
“stiffies” on the beach. The sullen silence, except for the distant
crackle and the occasional moan of a shell. The rain which came pelting
down in great cold blobs, splashing and soaking our thin drill clothes
till we were wet to the skin and shivering with cold.

We were all thinking: “Who will be the first to get plugged?” We moved
slowly along the ridge, searching every bush and rock for signs of
wounded men.

We wondered what the first case would be--and which squad would come
across it.

I worked up and down the line of squads trying to keep them in touch
with each other. We were carrying stretchers, haversacks, iron rations,
medical haversacks, medical water-bottles, our own private water-bottles
(filled on Lemnos Island), and three “monkey-boxes” or field medical
companions.

Those we had left on the beach were busy putting up the operating
marquee and other tents, and the cooks in getting a fire going and
making tea.

The stretcher-squads worked slowly forward. We passed an old Turkish
well with a stone-flagged front and a stone trough. Later on we came
upon the trenches and bivouacs of a Turkish sniping headquarters. There
were all kinds of articles lying about which had evidently belonged to
Turkish officers: tobacco in a heap on the ground near a bent willow and
thorn bivouac; part of a field telephone with the wires running
towards the upper ridges of Sirt; the remains of some dried fish and
an earthenware jar or “chattie” which had held some kind of wine; a few
very hard biscuits, and a mass of brand-new clothing, striped shirts and
white shirts, grey military overcoats, yellow leather shoes with pointed
toes, a red fez, a great padded body-belt with tapes to tie it, a pair
of boots, and some richly coloured handkerchiefs and waistbands all
striped and worked and fringed.

It was near here that our first man was killed later in the day. He was
looking into one of these bivouacs, and was about to crawl out when a
bullet went through his brain. It was a sniper’s shot. We buried him
in an old Turkish trench close by, and put a cross made of a wooden
bully-beef crate over him.

The sun now blazed upon us, and our rain-soaked clothes were steaming
in the heat. The open fan-like formation in which we moved was not a
success. We lost the officers, and continually got out of touch with
each other.

At last we reached the zone of spent bullets.
“Z-z-z-z-e-e-e-e-e-pp!--zing!” “S-s-s-ippp!”

“That one was jist by me left ear!” said Sergeant Joe Smith, although
as a matter of fact it was yards above his head. Here, among a hail of
moaning spent shots, our officers called a halt, made us fall in, in
close formation, and we retired--what for I do not know.

We went back as far as the old Turkish well. Here Hawk had something to
say.

“Our place is advancing,” said he, “not retiring because of a few spent
bullets. There’s men there dying for want of medical attention--bleeding
to death.”

The next time we went forward that day was in Indian file, each
stretcher-squad following the one in front.

A parson came with us. I marched just behind the adjutant, and the
parson walked with me. He was a big man and a fair age. We went past the
well and the bivouacs. I could see he was very nervous.

“Do you think we are out of danger here?” he asked.

“I think so, sir” (we were three miles from the firing-line). A few
paces further on--

“I wonder how far the firing-line is?”

“Couldn’t say, sir.”

A yard or so, and then--

“D’you suppose the British are advancing?”

“I hope so.” And after a minute or two--

“I wonder if there are any Turks near here...?”

I made no answer, and marvelled greatly that the “man of God” should
not be better prepared to meet “his Maker,” of Whom in civil life he had
talked so much.

It was just then that I spotted it--a little black figure, motionless,
away beyond the bushes on the right.



CHAPTER XII. THE SNIPER-HUNT


He lay flat under a huge rock. I left the stretcher-squads, and,
crawling behind a bush, looked through the glasses. It certainly was a
Turk, and his position was one of hiding. He kept perfectly motionless
on his stomach and his rifle lay by his side.

I sent a message to pass the word up to the leading squads for Hawk.
Quickly he came down to me and took the glasses. He had wonderful sight.
After looking for a few seconds he agreed that it looked like a Turkish
sniper lying in wait.

“Let’s go and see, anyway,” said I.

“Chance it?”

“Yes.”

“Righto.”

Hawk led the way down into the thorn-bushes and dried-up plants. I
followed close at his heels. We crouched as we went and kept well
under cover. Hawk took a semicircular route, which I could see would
ultimately bring us out by the side of the rock under which the sniper
hid.

Now we caught a glimpse of the little dark figure--then we plunged
deeper into the rank willow-growth and bore round to the right.

Hawk unslung the great jack-knife which hung round his waist and
silently opened the gleaming blade. I did the same.

“I’ll surprise him; you can leave it to me to get in a good slash,” said
Hawk, and I saw the great muscles of his miner’s arms tighten. “But if
he gets one in on me,” he whispered, “be ready with your knife at the
back of his neck.”

A few steps farther brought us suddenly upon the rock and the sniper.
Hawk was immediately in front of me, and his arm was held back ready
for a mighty blow. He stood perfectly still looking at the rock, and I
watched his muscles relax.

“See it?” he said.

“What?”

“Dead.”

There was the Turk--a great heat-swollen figure stinking in the
sunshine. As I moved forward a swarm of green and black flies, which
had been feeding on his face and crawling up his nostrils, went up in a
humming, buzzing cloud.

A bit of wood lying near had looked like his rifle from a distance; and
now we saw that, instead of lying on his stomach, he was lying on his
back, and looked as if he had been killed by shrapnel.

“Putrid stink,” said I; “come on--let’s clear out.”

And so our sniper-hunt led to nothing but a dead Turk stewing in the
glaring sunshine. We rejoined the squads. No one had missed us. This
first day was destined to be one of many adventures.



CHAPTER XIII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE WHITE PACK-MULE


That night was dark, with no stars. I didn’t know what part of Gallipoli
we were in, and the maps issued were useless.

The first cases had been picked up close to the firing-line, and were
mostly gun-shot wounds, and now--late in the evening--all my squads
having worked four miles to the beach, I was trying to get my own
direction back to the ambulance.

The Turks seldom fired at night, so that it was only the occasional
shot of a British rifle, or the sudden “pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!” of a
machine-gun which told me the direction of the firing-line.

I trudged on and on in the dark, stumbling over rocks and slithering
down steep crags, tearing my way through thorns and brambles, and
sometimes rustling among high dry grass.

Queer scents, pepperminty and sage-like smells, came in whiffs. It was
cold. I must have gone several miles along the Kapanja Sirt when I came
to a halt and once more tried to get my bearings. I peered at the gloomy
sky, but there was no star. I listened for the lap-lap of water on the
beach of Suvla Bay, but I must have been too far up the ridges to hear
anything. There was dead silence. When I moved a little green lizard
scutted over a white rock and vanished among the dead scrub.

I was past feeling hungry, although I had eaten one army biscuit in the
early morning and had had nothing since.

It was extraordinarily lonely. You may imagine how queer it was, for
here was I, trying to get back to my ambulance headquarters at night on
the first day of landing--and I was hopelessly lost. It was impossible
to tell where the firing-line began. I reckoned I was outside the
British outposts and not far from the Turkish lines. Once, as I went
blundering along over some rocks, a dark figure bolted out of a bush and
ran away up the ridge in a panic.

“Halt!” I shouted, trying to make believe I was a British armed sentry.
But the figure ran on, and I began to stride after it. This led me
up and up the ridge over very broken ground. Whoever it was (it was
probably a Turkish sniper, for there were many out night-scouting) I
lost sight and sound of him.

I went climbing steadily up till at last I found myself looking into
darkness. I got down on my hands and knees and peered over the edge of a
ridge of rock. I could see a tiny beam of light away down, and this
beam grew and grew as it slowly moved up and up till it became a great
triangular ray. It swept slowly along the top of what I now saw was
a steep precipice sloping sheer down into blackness below. One step
further and I should have gone hurtling into the sea. For, although I
did not then know it, this was the topmost ridge of the Kapanja Sirt.

The great searchlight came nearer and nearer, and I slid backwards and
lay on my stomach looking over. The nearer it came the lower I moved,
so as to get well off the skyline when the beam reached me. It may have
been a Turkish searchlight. It swept slowly, slowly, till at last it was
turned off and everything was deadly black.

I started off again in another direction, keeping my back to the ridge,
as I reckoned that to be a Turkish searchlight, and, therefore, our own
lines would be somewhere down the ridge. Here, high up, I could just see
a grey streak, which I took to be the bay.

I tried to make for this streak. I scrambled down a very steep stratum
of the mountain-side and landed at last in a little patch of dead grass
and tall dried-up thistles.

By this time, having come down from my high position on the Sirt, I
could no longer see the bay; but I judged the direction as best I could,
and without waiting I tramped on.

I began to wonder how long I had been trudging about, and I put it at
about two hours.

“Halt!--who are you?” called a voice down below.

“Friend! stretcher-bearer!” I shouted.

“Come here--this way!” answered the voice.

I went down to a clump of bushes, and a man with a rifle slung over his
shoulder stepped forward, and we both glared at each other for a second.

“Do yer know where the 45th Company is?”

“No idea,” said I.

“Any water?”

“Not a drop left.”

“We’re trying to get back to the firing-line but we’re all lost--there’s
eight of us.”

“I’m trying to get to the 32nd Field Ambulance--d’you know the way?”

“Yes; go right ahead there,” he pointed, “and keep well down off the
hills--you’ll see the beach when you’ve gone for a mile or so--”

“How far is it?”

“‘Bout four miles;” and then, “Got a match?”

“Yes--but it’s dangerous to light up.”

“Must ‘ave a smoke--nothink to eat or drink.”

“Well, here you are; light up inside my helmet.”

He did; this hid the lighted match from any sniper’s eye. The other
seven men came crawling out of the bushes to light up their “woodbines”
 and fag-ends.

“Well, I’m off,” said I, and once more went forward in the direction
pointed out by the corporal and his lost squad.

“So long, mate--good luck!” he shouted.

“Same to you!” I called back.

And now came sleep upon me. Even as I walked an awful weariness fell
upon every limb. My legs became heavy and slow. That short rest had
stiffened me, and my eyelids closed as I trudged on. I lifted them with
an effort and dragged one foot after the other. I knew I must get back
to my unit, and that here it was very dangerous. I wanted to lie down
on the dead grass and sleep and sleep and sleep. I urged my muscles to
swing my legs--for I knew if once I sat down to rest I should never keep
awake.

It was while I was thus trying to jerk my sleepy nerves on to action
that I came upon a zigzagged trench. It was fully six feet deep and
about a yard wide. It was of course an old Turkish defence running
crosswise along the great backbone of the Sirt. I knew now that I was
nearing the bay, for most of these trenches overlooked the beach.

There was a white object about ten yards from me. What it was I could
not tell, and a quiver of fear ran through me and threw off the awful
sleepiness of fatigue.

Was it a Turkish sniper’s shirt? Or was it a piece of white cloth, or a
sheet of paper? In the gloom of night I could not discover.

However, I determined to go steady, and I crept up to a dark thorn-bush
and stood still. It did not move. Still standing against the dark bush to
hide the fact that I was unarmed, I shouted--

“Halt! who are you?” in as gruff and threatening a tone as I could
command.

Silence. It did not move. I ran forward along the trench and there
found a white pack-mule all loaded up with baggage; I could make out
the queerly worked trappings, with brass-coins on the fringed bridle
and coloured fly-tassels over the eyes. It was stone dead and stiff. Its
eyes glared at me--a glassy glare full of fear. The Turkish pack-mule
had been bringing up material to the Turks in the trench when it had
been killed--and now the deep sides of the trench were holding it
upright.

I trudged away towards the beach and lay down to sleep at last among the
other men of the ambulance, who were lying scattered about behind tufts
of bush or against ledges of rock.

When weighed down with sleep any bed will serve.

And this was the end of our first day’s work on the field.



CHAPTER XIV. THE SNIPER OF THE PEAR-TREE GULLY


We used to start long before daylight, when the heavy gloom of early
morning swept mountain, sea and sand in an indistinct haze; when the
cobwebs hung thick from thorn to thorn like fairy cats’-cradles all
dripping and beaded with those heavy dews. The guard would wake us up
about 3.30 A.M. We were asleep anywhere, lying about under rocks and in
sandy dells, sleeping on our haversacks and water-bottles, and our pith
helmets near by. We got an issue of biscuit and jam, or biscuit and
bully-beef, to take with us, and each one carried his iron rations in a
little bag at his side.

So we set off--a long, straggling, follow-my-leader line
of men and stretchers. The officer first, then the
stretcher-sergeant--(myself)--and the squads, two men to a stretcher,
carrying the stretchers folded up, and last of all a corporal or a
“lance-jack” bringing up the rear in case any one should fall out.

Cold, dark, shivery mornings they were; our clothes soaked in dew
and our pith helmets reeking wet, with the puggaree all beaded with
dew-drops. We toiled up and up the ridges and gullies of the Kislar
Dargh and the Kapanja Sirt slowly, like a little column of ants going
out to bring in the ant eggs.

Often we had to wait while the Indian transport came down from the
hill-track before we could proceed, and we always came upon the
Engineers’ field-telegraph wires on the ground. I would shout “Wire!”
 over my shoulder, and the shout “Wire!... Wire!... Wire!” went down the
line from squad to squad.

From the old Turkish well I led my stretcher-squads past the gun of the
Field Artillery (mounted quite near our hospital tents) along a track
which ran past a patch of dry yellow grass and dead thistles--here
among the prickly plants and sage-bushes grew a white flower--pure and
sweet-scented--something like a flag--a “holy flower” among the dead and
scorched-up yellow ochre blades and the khaki and dull grey-greens of
thorns. We went along this track, past the dead sniper which Hawk and
I had so carefully stalked. Near by, hidden by bushes and rank willow
thickets lay a dozen more dead Turks, swollen, fly-blown and stinking in
the broiling sun. We hurried on past the Turkish bivouacs--many of the
relics had been picked up by the British Tommies since last I saw the
place: the tobacco had all gone--many of the shirts and overcoats which
had been lying about had disappeared--the place had been thoroughly
ransacked. We trudged past the wooden cross of our dead comrade and we
were silent.

Indeed, throughout those first three days--Saturday, Sunday and
Monday--when the British and Turks grappled to and fro and flung
shrapnel at each other incessantly; when the fighting line swayed
and bent, sometimes pushing back the Turks, sometimes bending in the
British; when the fate of the whole undertaking still hung in the
balance; when what became a semi-failure might have been a staggering
success: in those days the death-silence fell upon us all.

No one whistled those rag-time tunes; no one tried to make jokes, except
the very timid, and they giggled nervously at their own.

No one spoke unless it was quite necessary. Each man you passed asked
you the vital question: “Any water?”

For a moment as he asks his eyes glitter with a gleam of hope--when you
shake your head he simply trudges on over the rocks and scrub with the
same fatigued and sullen dullness which we all suffered.

Often you asked the same question yourself with parched and burning
lips.

One after another we came upon the wounded. Here a man dragging a
broken leg along with him. Here a man holding his fractured fore-arm and
running towards us. Sometimes the pitiful cry, faint and full of agony:
“Stretchers! Stretcher-bearers!” away in some densely overgrown defile
swept with bullets and shrapnel.

And so at last all my squads had turned back with stretchers loaded with
men and pieces of men. I went on alone--a lonely figure wandering about
the mountains, looking and listening for the wounded.

I came now upon a party of Engineers at work making a road. They were
working with pick-axe and spade--clearing away bush and rocks.

“Any water?” they asked.

I shook my head.

“Any wounded?” I said.

“Some down there, they say,” said a red-faced man.

“Damn rotten job that,” muttered another, as I went on.

“Better keep well over in the bushes,” shouted the red-faced man.
“They’ve got this bit of light-coloured ground marked--you’re almost
sure ter git plugged.”

“Thanks!” I called back, and broke off to my left among the sage and
thistle and thorn.

I went now downhill into an overgrown water-course (very much like the
one in which I used to sleep and eat away back by the artillery big
gun). Here were willows and brambles with ripe blackberries, and
wild-rose bushes with scarlet hips. “Just like England!” I thought.

And then, as I crossed the little dry-bed stream and came out upon a
sandy spit of rising ground: “Z-z-ipp! Ping!”--just by my left arm.
The bullet struck a ledge of white rock with the now familiar metallic
“tink!”

I went on moving quickly to get behind a thorn-bush--the only cover near
at hand. Here, at any rate, I should be out of sight.

“Ping!”

“Crack--ping!”

I could hear the report of the rifle. I lay flat on my stomach,
grovelled my face into the sandy soil and lay like a snake and as still
as a tortoise.

I waited for about ten minutes. It seemed an hour, at least, to me. The
sniper did not shoot again. In front of my thorn-bush was an open space
of pale yellow grass, with no cover at all. I crawled towards the
left flank and tried to creep slowly away. I moved like the hands of
a clock--so slowly; about an inch at a time, pushing forward like a
reptile on my stomach, propelling myself only by digging my toes into
the earth. My arms I kept stiff by my side, my head well down.

But the sniper away behind that little pear-tree (which stood at the far
end of the open space) had an eagle eye.

“Ping! z-z-pp! ping!”

I lay very still for a long time and then crept slowly back to my
thorn-bush.

I tried the right flank, but with the same effect. And now he began
shooting through my thorn-bush on the chance of hitting me.

Behind me was a dense undergrowth of thorn, wild-rose bramble, thistle,
willow and sage.

I turned about and crawled through this tangle, until at last I came
out, scratched and dishevelled and sweating, into the old water-course.

The firing-line was only a few hundred yards away, and the bullets from
a Turkish maxim went wailing over my head, dropping far over by the
Engineers whom I had passed.

I wanted to find those wounded, and I wanted to get past that open
space, and I wanted above all to dodge that sniper. The old scouting
instincts of the primitive man came calling me to try my skill against
the skill of the Turk. I sat there wiping away blood from the scratches
and sweat from my forehead and trying to think of a way through.

I looked at the mountains on my left--the lower ridge of the Kapanja
Sirt--and saw how the water-course went up and up and in and out, and I
thought if I kept low and crawled round in this ditch I should come out
at last close behind the firing-line, and then I could get in touch with
the trenches. I could hear the machine-gun of the M--‘s rattling and
spitting.

I began crawling along the water-course. I had only gone three yards or
so, and turned a bend, when I came suddenly upon two wounded men. Both
quite young--one merely a boy. He had a bad shrapnel wound through his
boot, crushing the toes of his right foot. The other lay groaning upon
his back--with a very bad shrapnel wound in his left arm. The arm was
broken.

The boy sat up and grinned when he saw me.

“What’s up?” asked his pal.

“Red Cross man,” says the boy; and then: “Any water?”

“Not a drop, mate,” said I. “Been wounded long?”

“Since yesterday evening,” says the boy.

“Been here all that time?” I asked. (It was now mid-afternoon.)

“Yes: couldn’t get away”--and he pointed to his foot.

“‘E carn’t move--it’s ‘is arm. We crawled ‘ere.”

“I’ll be back soon with stretchers and bandages,” I said, and went
quickly back along the water-course and then past the Engineers.

“Found ‘em?” they asked.

“Yes: getting stretchers up now,” said I. “Awful stink here! Found any
dead?” I asked.

“Yes, there’s one or two round here. We buried one over there yesterday:
‘e fell ter bits when we moved ‘im.”

I went on. Soon I was back in the ditch beside the wounded men. I had
successfully dodged the sniper by following along the bottom of the bed
of the stream. With me I brought two stretcher-squads, and they had a
haversack containing, as I thought, splints and bandages. But when
I opened it, it had only some field dressings in it and some iodine
ampoules.

I soon found that the man’s arm was not only septic, but broken and
splintered.

“Got a pair of scissors?” I asked.

One man had a pair of nail-scissors, and with this very awkward
instrument I proceeded to operate. It was a terrible gash. His sleeve
was soaked in blood. I cut it away, and his shirt also.

I broke an iodine phial and poured the yellow chemical into his great
gaping wound. Actually his flesh stunk: it was going bad.

“Is it broke?” he asked.

“Be all right in a few minutes; nothing much.” I lied to him.

“Not broke then?”

“Bit bent; be all right.”

With the nail-scissors I cut great chunks of his arm out, and all
this flesh was gangrenous, and mortification was rapidly spreading. My
fingers were soaked in blood and iodine.

I cut away a piece of muscle which stunk like bad meat.

“Can you feel that?” I asked.

“Feel what?” he murmured.

“I thought that might hurt. I was cutting your sleeve away, that’s all.”

I cut out all the bad flesh, almost to the broken bones. I filled up
the jagged hole with another iodine ampoule. I plugged the opening with
double-cyanide gauze, and put on an antiseptic pad.

“Splints?” I asked.

“Haven’t any.”

So I used the helve of an entrenching-tool and the stalks of the willow
undergrowth.

I set his arm straight and bandaged it tightly and fixed it absolutely
immovably. Then we got him on a stretcher, and they carried him three
and a half miles to our ambulance tents. But I’m afraid that arm had to
come off. I never heard of him again.

The other fellow was cheerful enough, and only set his teeth and
drew his breath when I cut off his boot with a jack-knife. Wonderful
endurance some of these young fellows have. There’s hope for England
yet.



CHAPTER XV. KANGAROO BEACH


          “COMMUNICATIONS”

     The native only needs a drum,
     On which to thump his dusky thumb--

     But WE--the Royal Engineers,
     Must needs have carts and pontoon-piers;
     Hundreds of miles of copper-wire,
     Fitted on poles to make it higher.
     Hundreds of sappers lay it down,
     And stick the poles up like a town.
     By a wonderful system of dashes and dots,
     Safe from the Turkish sniper’s shots--
     We have, as you see, a marvellous trick,
     Of sending messages double-quick.
     You can’t deny it’s a great erection,
     Done by the 3rd Field Telegraph Section;
     But somewhere--
     THERE’S A DISCONNECTION!

     The native merely thumps his drum,
     He thumps it boldly, thus--“Tum! Tum!”

                        J. H.
                (Sailing for Salonika.)


Kangaroo Beach was where the Australian bridge-building section had
their stores and dug-outs.

It was one muddle and confusion of water-tanks, pier-planks, pontoons,
huge piles of bully-beef, biscuit and jam boxes. Here we came each
evening with the water-cart to get our supply of water, and here the
water-carts of every unit came down each evening and stood in a row and
waited their turn. The water was pumped from the water-tank boats to the
tank on shore.

The water-tank boats brought it from Alexandria. It was filthy water,
full of dirt, and very brackish to taste. Also it was warm. During the
two months at Suvla Bay I never tasted a drop of cold water--it was
always sickly lukewarm, sun-stewed.

All day long high explosives used to sing and burst--sometimes killing
and wounding men, sometimes blowing up the bully-beef and biscuits,
sometimes falling with a hiss and a column of white spray into the sea.
It was here that the field-telegraph of the Royal Engineers became a
tangled spider’s web of wires and cross wires. They added wires and
branch wires every day, and stuck them up on thin poles. Here you could
see the Engineers in shirt and shorts trying to find a disconnection, or
carrying a huge reel of wire. Wooden shanties sprang up where dug-outs
had been a day or so before. Piers began to crawl out into the bay,
adding a leg and trestle and pontoon every hour. Near Kangaroo Beach was
the camp of the Indians, and here you could see the dusky ones
praying on prayer mats and cooking rice and “chupatties” (sort of
oatcake-pancakes).

Here they were laying a light rail from the beach up with trucks for
carrying shells and parts of big guns.

Here was the field post-office with sacks and sacks of letters and
parcels. Some of the parcels were burst and unaddressed; a pair of
socks or a mouldy home-made cake squashed in a cardboard box--sometimes
nothing but the brown paper, card box and string, an empty shell--the
contents having disappeared. What happened to all the parcels which
never got to the Dardanelles no one knows, but those which did arrive
were rifled and lost and stolen. Parcels containing cigarettes had a
way of not getting delivered, and cakes and sweets often fell out
mysteriously on the way from England.



CHAPTER XVI. THE ADVENTURE OF THE LOST SQUADS


Things became jumbled.

The continual working up to the firing-line and the awful labour of
carrying heavy men back to our dressing station: it went on. We got used
to being always tired, and having only an hour or two of sleep. It was
log-heavy, dreamless sleep... sheer nothingness. Just as tired when you
were wakened in the early hours by a sleepy, grumbling guard. And then
going round finding the men and wakening them up and getting them on
parade. Every day the same... late into the night.

Then came the disappearance of a certain section of our ambulance and
the loss of an officer.

This particular young lieutenant was left on Lemnos sick. He really was
very sick indeed. He recovered to some extent of the fever, and joined
us one day at Suvla. This was in the Old Dry Water-course period, when
Hawk and I lived in the bush-grown ditch.

Officers, N.C.O.’s, and men were tired out with overwork. This young
officer came up to the Kapanja Sirt to take over the next spell of duty.

I remember him now, pale and sickly, with the fever still hanging on
him, and dark, sunken eyes. He spoke in a dull, lifeless way.

“Do you think you’ll be all right?” asked the adjutant.

“Yes, I think so,” he answered.

“Well, just stick here and send down the wounded as you find them. Don’t
go any farther along; it’s too dangerous up there--you understand?”

“All right, sir.”

It was only a stroke of luck that I didn’t stay with him and his
stretcher-squads.

“You’d better come down with me, sergeant,” says the adjutant.

Next day the news spread in that mysterious way which has always puzzled
me. It spread as news does spread in the wild and desolate regions of
the earth.

“... lost... all the lot...”

“Who is?”

“Up there... Lieutenant S--- and the squads...”

“How-joo-know?”

“Just heard--that wounded fellow over there on the stretcher... they
went out early this morning, and they’ve gone--no sign, never came back
at all--”

“‘E warn’t fit ter take charge... ‘e was ill, you could see.”

“Nice thing ter do. The old man’ll go ravin’ mad.”

“It was a ravin’ mad thing to put the poor feller in charge... ”

“Don’t criticise yer officers,” said some wit, quoting the Army
Regulations.

The adjutant and a string of squads turned out, and we went back again
to the spot where we had left the young officer the evening before.

The cook and an orderly man remained, and we heard from them the details
of the mystery.

Early that morning they had formed up, and gone off under Lieutenant
S--- along the mule track overlooking the Gulf of Saros. That was all.
There was still hope, of course... but there wasn’t a sign of them to
be seen. The machine-gun section had seen them pass right along. Some
officers had warned them not to go up, but they went and they never came
back.

There were rumours that one of the N.C.O.’s of the party, a sergeant,
had been seen lying on some rocks.

“Just riddled with bullets--riddled!”

The hours dragged on. I begged of the adjutant to let me go off along
the ridge on my own to see if I could find any trace.

“It’s too dangerous,” he said. “If I thought there was half a chance I’d
go with you, but we don’t want to lose any more.”

Those ten or twelve men went out of our lives completely. Days passed.
There was no news. It was queer. It was queer when I called the roll
next day--

“Briggs!”--“Sar’nt!”

“Boots!”--“Sarn’t!”

“Cudworth!”--“Here, Sar’nt!”

“Dean!”--“Sar’nt!”

“Desmond!”--“Sar’nt!”

“D---.”

I couldn’t remember not to call his name out. It seemed queer that he
was missing. It seemed quite hopeless now. Three or four days dragged
on. Everything continued as usual. We went up past the place where we
had left them, and there was no news, no sign. They just vanished. No
one saw them again, and except for the “riddled” rumour of the poor old
sergeant the whole thing was a blank.

We supposed that the young officer, coming fresh to the place, did not
know where the British lines ended and the Turks’ began, and he marched
his squads into that bit of No Man’s Land beyond the machine-gun near
“Jefferson’s Post,” and was either shot or taken prisoner.

It made the men heavy and sad-minded.

“Poor old Mellor--‘e warn’t a bad sort, was he!”

“Ah!--an’ Bell, Sergeant Bell... riddled they say... some one seen
‘m--artillery or some one!”

It hung over them like a cloud. The men talked of nothing else.

“Somebody’s blundered,” said one.

“It’s a pity any’ow.”

“It’s a disgrace to the ambulance--losin’ men like that.”

And, also, it made the men nervous and unreliable. It was a shock.



CHAPTER XVII. “OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND!”


It may be that I have never grown up properly. I’m a very poor hand at
pretending I’m a “grown man.”

Impressions of small queer things still stamp themselves with a clear
kodak-click on my mind--an ivory-white mule’s skull lying in the sand
with green beetles running through the eye-holes... anything--trivial,
childlike details.

I remember reading an article in a magazine which stated that under
fire, and more especially in a charge, a man moves in a whirl of
excitement which blots out all the small realities around him, all the
“local colour.” He remembers nothing but a wild, mad rush, or the tense
intensity of the danger he is in.

It is not so. The greater the danger and the more exciting the position
the more intensely does the mind receive the imprint of tiny commonplace
objects.

Memories of Egypt and the Mediterranean are far more a jumble of general
effects of colour, sound and smell.

The closer we crept to the shores of Suvla Bay, and the deathbed of the
Salt Lake, the more exact and vivid are the impressions; the one is like
an impressionist sketch--blobs and dabs and great sloshy washes; but the
memories of Pear-tree Gully, of the Kapanja Sirt, and Chocolate Hill
are drawn in with a fine mapping pen and Indian ink--like a Rackham
fairy-book illustration--every blade of dead grass, every ripple of
blue, every pink pebble; and towards the firing-line I could draw it
now, every inch of the way up the hills with every stone and jagged rock
in the right place.

Before sailing from England I had bought a little colour-box, one good
sable brush, and a few H.B. pencils--these and a sketch-book which my
father gave me I carried everywhere in my haversack. The pocket-book was
specially made with paper which would take pencil, colour, crayon, ink
or charcoal. I was always on the look out for sketches and notes. The
cover bore the strange device--

                           JOHN HARGRAVE,
                              R.A.M.C.
                        32ND FIELD AMBULANCE.

printed in gilt which gradually wore off as time went on. Inside on the
fly-leaf I had written--

     “IF FOUND, please return to

            Sgt. J. HARGRAVE, 32819, R.A.M.C.
            32nd Field Ambulance,
            X Division, Med. Exp. Force.”

And on the opposite page I wrote--

     “IN CASE OF DEATH please post as soon as possible to

            GORDON HARGRAVE,
               Cinderbarrow Cottage,
                               Levens,
                            Westmorland.”

I remember printing the word “DEATH,” and wondering if the book would
some day lie with my own dead body “somewhere in the Dardanelles.”
 Printing that word in England before we started made the whole thing
seem very real. Somehow up to then I hadn’t realised that I might get
killed quite easily. I hadn’t troubled to think about it.

We moved our camp from “A” Beach farther along towards the Salt Lake. We
moved several times. Always Hawk and I “hung together.” Once he was very
ill in the old dried-up water-course which wriggled down from the Kislar
Dargh. He ate nothing for three days. I never saw anything like it
before. He was as weak as a rat, and I know he came very near “pegging
out.” He felt it himself. I was sitting on the ground near by.

“I may not pull through this, old fellow,” says Hawk, with just a
tear-glint under one eyelid. He lay under a shelf of rock, safe from
shrapnel.

“Come now, Fred,” says I, “you’re not going to snuff it yet.”

“Weak as a rat--can’t eat nothink, PRACtically... nothink; but see here,
John,”--he seldom called me John--“if I do slip off the map, an’ I
feel PRACtically done for this time--if I SHOULD--you see that
ration-bag”--he pointed to a little white bag bulging and tied up and
knotted.

“Yes?”

“It’s got some little things in it--for the kiddies at home--a little
teapot I found up by the Turkish bivouac over there, and one or two more
relics--I want ‘em to have ‘em--will you take care of it and send it
home for me if you get out of this alive?”

Of course I promised to do this, but tried to cheer him up, and assured
him he would soon pull round.

In a few days he threw off the fever and was about again.

Hawk and I had lived for some weeks in this overgrown water-course.
It was a natural trench, and at one place Hawk had made a dug-out. He
picked and shovelled right into the hard, sandy rock until there was
quite a good-sized little cave about eight feet long and five deep.

The same sickness got me. It came over me quite suddenly. I was
fearfully tired. Every limb ached, and, like all the others, I began to
develop what I call the “stretcher-stoop.” I just lay down in the
ditch with a blanket and went to sleep. Hawk sat over me and brought me
bovril, which we had “pinched” on Lemnos Island.

I felt absolutely dying, and I really wondered whether I should have
enough strength to throw the sickness off as Hawk had. I gave him just
the same sort of instructions about my notes and sketches as he had
given me about his little ration-bag.

“Get ‘em back to England if you can,” I said; “you’re the man I’d
soonest trust here.”

If Hawk hadn’t looked after me and made me eat, I don’t believe I should
have lived. I used to lie there looking at the wild-rose tangles and the
red hips; there were brambles, too, with poor, dried-up blackberries. It
reminded me of England. Little green lizards scuttled about, and great
black centipedes crawled under my blanket. The sun was blazing
at mid-day. Hawk used to rig me up an awning over the ditch with
willow-stems and a waterproof ground-sheet.

Somehow you always thought yourself back to England. No matter what
train of thought you went upon, it always worked its way by one thread
or another to England. Mine did, anyway.

It was better to be up with the stretcher-squads in the firing line than
lying there sick, and thinking those long, long thoughts.

This is how I would think--

“What a waste of life; what a waste... Christianity this; all part
of civilisation; what’s it all for? Queer thing this civilised
Christianity... very queer. So this really IS war; see now: how does
it feel? not much different to usual... But why? It’s getting awfully
sickening... plenty of excitement, too--plenty... too much, in fact;
very easy to get killed any time here; plenty of men getting killed
every minute over there; but it isn’t really very exciting... not like I
thought war was in England... England? Long way off, England; thousands
of miles; they don’t know I’m sick in England; wonder what they’d think
to see me now; not a bad place, England, green trees and green grass...
much better place than I thought it was; wonder how long this will hang
on... I’d like to get back after it’s finished here; I expect it’s all
going on just the same in England; people going about to offices in
London; women dressing themselves up and shopping; and all that...
This is a d----place, this beastly peninsula--no green anywhere... just
yellow sand and grey rocks and sage-coloured bushes, dead grass--even
the thistles are all bleached and dead and rustling in the breeze like
paper flowers...

“And we WANTED to get out here... Just eating our hearts out to get into
it all, to get to work--and now... we’re all sick of it... it’s rotten,
absolutely rotten; everything. It’s a rotten war. Wonder what they are
doing now at home...”



CHAPTER XVIII. TWO MEN RETURN


I shall never forget those two little figures coming into camp.

They were both trembling like aspen leaves. One had ginger hair, and a
crop of ginger beard bristled on his chin. Their eyes were hollow and
sunken, and glittered and roamed unmeaningly with the glare of insanity.
They glanced with a horrible suspicion at their pals, and knew them not.
The one with the ginger stubble muttered to himself. Their clothes were
torn with brambles, and prickles from thorn-bushes still clung round
their puttees. A pitiful sight. They tottered along, keeping close
together and avoiding the others. An awful tiredness weighed upon them;
they dragged themselves along. Their lips were cracked and swollen and
dry. They had lost their helmets, and the sun had scorched and peeled
the back of their necks. Their hair was matted and full of sand. But the
fear which looked out of those glinting eyes was terrible to behold.

We gave them “Oxo,” and the medical officer came and looked at them.
They came down to our dried-up water-course and tried to sleep; but they
were past sleep. They kept dozing off and waking up with a start and
muttering--

“... All gone... killed... where? where? No, no... No!.. . don’t move...
(mumble-mumble)... keep still... idiot! you’ll get shot... can you see
them? Eh? where?... he’s dying, dying... stop the bleeding, man! He’s
dying... we’re all dying... no water... drink...”

I’ve seen men, healthy, strong, hard-faced Irishmen, blown to shreds.
I’ve helped to clear up the mess. I’ve trod on dead men’s chests in the
sand, and the ribs have bent in and the putrid gases of decay have burst
through with a whhh-h-ff-f.

But I’d rather have to deal with the dead and dying than a case of
“sniper-madness.”

I was just recovering from that attack of fever and dysentery, and these
two were lying beside me; the one mumbling and the other panting in a
fitful sleep.

When they were questioned they could give very little information.

“Where’s Lieutenant S---?”

“... Gone... they’re all gone...”

“How far did you go with him?”

No answer.

“Where are the others?”

“... Gone... they’re all gone...”

“Are they killed?”

“... Gone.”

“Are any of the others alive?”

“We got away... they’re lost... dead, I think.”

“Did you come straight back--it’s a week since you were lost?”

“It’s days and days and long nights... couldn’t move; couldn’t move an
inch, and poor old George dying under a rock... no cover; and they shot
at us if we moved... we waved the stretchers when we found we’d got too
far... too far we got... too far... much too far; shot at us...”

“What about the sergeant?”

“We got cut off... cut off... we tried to crawl away at night by
rolling over and over down the hill, and creeping round bushes... always
creeping an’ crawling... but it took us two days and two nights to
get away... crawling, creeping and crawling... an’ they kep’ firing at
us...”

“No food... we chewed grass... sucked dead grass to get some spittle...
an’ sometimes we tried to eat grass to fill up a bit.. . no food... no
water...”

They were complete wrecks. They couldn’t keep their limbs still. They
trembled and shook as they lay there.

Their ribs were standing out like skeletons, and their stomachs had
sunken in. They were black with sunburn, and filthily dirty.

Gradually they got better. The glare of insanity became less obvious,
but a certain haunted look never left them. They were broken men. Months
afterwards they mumbled to themselves in the night-time.

Nolan, one of the seafaring men of my section who was with the lost
squads, also returned, but he had not suffered so badly, or at any rate
he had been able to stand the strain better.

It was about this time that we began to realise that the new landing had
been a failure. It was becoming a stale-mate. It was like a clock with
its hands stuck. The whole thing went ticking on every day, but there
was no progress--nothing gained. And while we waited there the Turks
brought up heavy guns and fresh troops on the hills. They consolidated
their positions in a great semicircle all round us--and we just held the
bay and the Salt Lake and the Kapanja Sirt.

So all this seemed sheer waste. Thousands of lives wasted--thousands
of armless and legless cripples sent back--for nothing. The troops soon
realised that it was now hopeless. You can’t “kid” a great body of men
for long. It became utterly sickening--the inactivity--the waiting--for
nothing. And every day we lost men. Men were killed by snipers as they
went up to the trenches. The Turkish snipers killed them when they went
down to the wells for water.

The whole thing had lost impetus. It came to a standstill. It kept on
“marking time,” and nothing appeared to move it.

In the first three days of the landing it wanted but one thing to have
marched us right through to Constantinople--it wanted, dash!

It didn’t want a careful, thoughtful man in command--it wanted dash and
bluff. It could have been done in those early days. The landing WAS a
success--a brilliant, blinding success--but it stuck at the very
moment when it should have rushed forward. It was no one’s fault if you
understand. It was sheer luck. It just didn’t “come off”--and only just.
But a man with dash, a devil-may-care sort of leader, could have cut
right across on Sunday, August the 8th, and brought off a staggering
victory.



CHAPTER XIX. THE RETREAT


It happened on the left of Pear-tree Gully.

Pear-tree Gully was a piece of ground which neither we nor the Turks
could hold. It was a gap in both lines, swept by machine-gun fire and
haunted by snipers and sharp-shooters.

We had advanced right up behind the machine-gun section, which was
hidden in a dense clump of bushes on the top of a steep rise.

The sun was blazing hot and the sweat was dripping from our faces. We
were continually on the look-out for wounded, and always alert for the
agonised cry of “Stretcher-bearers!” away on some distant knoll or down
below in the thickets. Looking back the bay shimmered a silver-white
streak with grey battleships lying out.

In front the fighting broke out in fierce gusts.

“Pop-pop-pop-pop!--Pop-pop!” went the machine-gun. We could see one man
getting another belt of ammunition ready to “feed.” Bullets from
the Turkish quick-firers went singing with an angry “ssss-ooooo!
zzz-z-eeee!... whheee-ooo-o-o! zz-ing!”

“D’you know where Brigade Headquarters is?” asked the adjutant.

“I’ll find it, sir.”

“Very well, go up with this message, and I shall be here when you come
back.”

I took the message, saluted and went off, plunging down into the
thickets, and at last along my old water-course where I had crawled away
from the sniper some days before.

I made a big detour to avoid showing myself on the sky-line. I knew the
general direction of our Brigade Headquarters, and after half-an-hour’s
steady trudging with various creepings and crawlings I arrived and
delivered my message. I returned quickly towards Pear-tree Gully. I
stopped once to listen for the “Pop-pop-pop!” of our machine-gun but I
could not hear it. I hurried on. It was downhill most of the way going
back. I crept up through the bushes and looked about for signs of our
men and the officer.

I saw a man of the machine-gun section carrying the tripod-stand,
followed by another with the ammunition-belt-box.

“Seen any Medical Corps here?”

“They’ve gone down--‘ooked it... you’d better get out o’ this quick
yourself--we’re retreating--can’t ‘old this place no’ow--too ‘ot!”

“Did the officer leave any message?”

“No--they’ve bin gone some time--come on, Sammy.”

Well, I thought to myself, this IS nice. So I went down with the
machine-gunners and in the dead grass just below the gully I found a
wounded man: he was shot through the thigh and it had gone clean through
both legs.

He was bleeding to death quickly, for it had ripped both arteries.
Looking round I saw another man coming down, hopping along but very
cheerful.

“In the ankle,” he said; “can you do anything?”

“I’ll have a look in a minute.”

I examined the man who was hit in the thigh and discovered two
tourniquets had been applied made out of a handkerchief and bits of
stick to twist them up. But the blood was now pumping steadily from both
wounds and soaking its way into the sandy soil. I tightened them up, but
it was useless. There was no stopping the loss of blood.

All the time little groups of British went straggling past--hurrying
back towards the bay--retreating.

It was impossible to leave my wounded. I helped the cheerful man to hop
near a willow thicket, and there I took off his boot and found a clean
bullet wound right through the ankle-bone of the left foot. It was
bleeding slowly and the man was very pale.

“Been bleeding long?” I asked.

“About half an hour I reckon. Is it all right, mate?”

“Yes. It’s a clean wound.”

I plugged each hole, padded it and bound it up tightly. I had a look
at the other man, who was still bleeding and had lost consciousness
altogether.

It was a race for life. Which to attend to? Both men were still
bleeding, and both would bleed to death within half an hour or so. I
reckoned it was almost hopeless with the tourniquet-man and I left him
passing painlessly from life to death. But the ankle-man’s wound was
still bleeding when I turned again to him. It trickled through my
plugging. It’s a difficult thing to stop the bleeding from such a place.
Seeing the plug was useless I tried another way. I rolled up one of
his puttees, put it under his knee, braced his knee up and tied it in
position with the other puttee. This brought pressure on the artery
itself and stopped the loss of blood from his ankle. I could hear the
Turkish machine-gun much closer now. It sputtered out a leaden rain with
a hard metallic clatter.

“Thanks, mate,” said the man; “‘ow’s the other bloke?”

“He’s all right,” I answered, and I could see him lying a little way up
the hill, calm and still and stiffening.

I found two regimental stretcher-bearers coming down with the rest in
this little retreat, and I got them to take my ankle-man on to their
dressing station about two miles further back.

It’s no fun attending to wounded when the troops are retiring.

Next day they regained the lost position, and I trudged past the poor
dead body of the man who had bled to death. The tourniquets were still
gripping his lifeless limbs and the blood on the handkerchiefs had dried
a rich red-brown.



CHAPTER XX. “JHILL-O! JOHNNIE!”


                “A” BEACH

                SUVLA BAY

     There’s a lot of senseless “doing”
        And a fearful lot of work;
     There are gangs of men with “gangers,”
        To see they do not shirk.
     There’s the usual waste of power
       In the usual Western way,
     There’s a tangle in the transport,
       And a blockage every day.
     The sergeants do the swearing,
       The corporals “carry on”;
     The private cusses openly,
       And hopes he’ll soon be gone.


One evening the colonel sent me from our dug-out near the Salt Lake to
“A” Beach to make a report on the water supply which was pumped ashore
from the tank-boats. I trudged along the sandy shore. At one spot I
remember the carcase of a mule washed up by the tide, the flesh rotted
and sodden, and here and there a yellow rib bursting through the skin.
Its head floated in the water and nodded to and fro with a most uncanny
motion with every ripple of the bay.

The wet season was coming on, and the chill winds went through my
khaki drill uniform. The sky was overcast, and the bay, generally a
kaleidoscope of Eastern blues and greens, was dull and grey.

At “A” Beach I examined the pipes and tanks of the water-supply system
and had a chat with the Australians who were in charge. I drew a small
plan, showing how the water was pumped from the tanks afloat to the
standing tank ashore, and suggested the probable cause of the sand and
dirt of which the C.O. complained.

This done I found our own ambulance water-cart just ready to return to
our camp with its nightly supply. Evening was giving place to darkness,
and soon the misty hills and the bay were enveloped in starless gloom.

The traffic about “A” Beach was always congested. It reminded you of the
Bank and the Mansion House crush far away in London town.

Here were clanking water-carts, dozens of them waiting in their turn,
stamping mules and snorting horses; here were motor-transport wagons
with “W.D.” in white on their grey sides; ambulance wagons jolting
slowly back to their respective units, sometimes full of wounded,
sometimes empty. Here all was bustle and noise. Sergeants shouting and
corporals cursing; transport-officers giving directions; a party of New
Zealand sharp-shooters in scout hats and leggings laughing and yarning;
a patrol of the R.E.’s Telegraph Section coming in after repairing the
wires along the beach; or a new batch of men, just arrived, falling in
with new-looking kit-bags.

It was through this throng of seething khaki and transport traffic that
our water-cart jostled and pushed.

Often we had to pull up to let the Indian Pack-mule Corps pass, and it
was at one of these halts that I happened to come close to one of these
dusky soldiers waiting calmly by the side of his mules.

I wished I had some knowledge of Hindustani, and began to think over any
words he might recognise.

“You ever hear of Rabindranarth Tagore, Johnnie?” I asked him. The name
of the great writer came to mind.

He shook his head. “No, sergeant,” he answered.

“Buddha, Johnnie?” His face gleamed and he showed his great white teeth.

“No, Buddie.”

“Mahomet, Johnnie?”

“Yes--me, Mahommedie,” he said proudly.

“Gunga, Johnnie?” I asked, remembering the name of the sacred river
Ganges from Kipling’s “Kim.”

“No Gunga, sa’b--Mahommedie, me.”

“You go Benares, Johnnie?”

“No Benares.”

“Mecca?”

“Mokka, yes; afterwards me go Mokka.”

“After the war you going to Mokka, Johnnie?”

“Yes; Indee, France--here--Indee back again--then Mokka.”

“You been to France, Johnnie?”

“Yes, sa’b.”

“You know Kashmir, Johnnie?”

“Kashmir my house,” he replied.

“You live in Kashmir?”

“Yes; you go Indee, sergeant?”

“No, I’ve never been.”

“No go Indee?”

“Not yet.”

“Indee very good--English very good--Turk, finish!”

With a sudden jerk and a rattle of chains our water-cart mules pulled
out on the trail again and the ghostly figure with its well-folded
turban and gleaming white teeth was left behind.

A beautifully calm race, the Hindus. They did wonderful work at Suvla
Bay. Up and down, up and down, hour after hour they worked steadily on;
taking up biscuits, bully-beef and ammunition to the firing-line, and
returning for more and still more. Day and night these splendidly built
Easterns kept up the supply.

I remember one man who had had his left leg blown off by shrapnel
sitting on a rock smoking a cigarette and great tears rolling down his
cheeks. But he said no word. Not a groan or a cry of pain.

They ate little, and said little. But they were always extraordinarily
polite and courteous to each other. They never neglected their prayers,
even under heavy shell fire.

Once, when we were moving from the Salt Lake to “C” Beach, Lala Baba,
the Indians moved all our equipment in their little two-wheeled carts.

They were much amused and interested in our sergeant clerk, who stood 6
feet 8 inches. They were joking and pointing to him in a little bunch.

Going up to them, I pointed up to the sky, and then to the Sergeant,
saying: “Himalayas, Johnnie!”

They roared with laughter, and ever afterwards called him “Himalayas.”

                  THE INDIAN TRANSPORT TRAIN

     (Across the bed of the Salt Lake every night from the
     Supply Depot at Kangaroo Beach to the firing-line beyond
     Chocolate Hill, September 1915.)

     (footnote: “Jhill-o!”--Hindustani for “Gee-up”; used by the
     drivers of the Indian Pack-mule Corps.)


     The Indian whallahs go up to the hills--
       “Jhill-o! Johnnie, Jhill-o!”
      They pass by the spot where the gun-cotton kills;
     They shiver and huddle--they feel the night chills--
       “Jhill-o! Johnnie, Jhill-o!”

     With creaking and jingle of harness and pack--
       “Jhill-o! Johnnie, Jhill-o!”
      Where the moonlight is white and the shadows are black,
     They are climbing the winding and rocky mule-track--
       “Jhill-o! Johnnie, Jhill-o!”

     By the blessing of Allah he’s more than one wife;
       “Jhill-o! Johnnie, Jhill-o!”
      He’s forbidden the wine which encourages strife,
     But you don’t like the look of his dangerous knife;
       “Jhill-o! Johnnie, Jhill-o!”

     The picturesque whallah is dusky and spare;
       “Jhill-o! Johnnie, Jhill-o!”
      A turban he wears with magnificent air,
     But he chucks down his pack when it’s time for his prayer;
       “Jhill-o! Johnnie, Jhill-o!”

     When his moment arrives he’ll be dropped in a hole;
       “Jhill-o! Johnnie, Jhill-o!”
      ‘Tis Kismet, he says, and beyond his control;
     But the dear little houris will comfort his soul;
       “Jhill-o! Johnnie, Jhill-o!”

     The Indian whallahs go up to the hills;
       “Jhill-o! Johnnie, Jhill-o!”
      They pass by the spot where the gun-cotton kills;
     But those who come down carry something that chills;
       “Jhill-o! Johnnie, Jhill-o!”



CHAPTER XXI. SILVER BAY


On the edge of the Salt Lake, by the blue Aegean shore, Hawk and I dug a
little underground home into the sandy hillock upon which our ambulance
was now encamped.

“I’m going deep into this,” said Hawk--he was a very skilful miner, and
he knew his work.

“None of your dead heroes for me,” he said; “I don’t hold with
‘em--we’ll make it PRACtically shell-proof.” We did. Each day we
burrowed into the soft sandy layers, he swinging the pick, and I filling
up sand-bags. At last we made a sort of cave, a snug little Peter Pan
home, sand-bagged all round and safe from shells when you crawled in.

I often thought what a fine thing Stevenson would have written from the
local colour of the bay.

Its changing colours were intense and wonderful. In the early morning
the waves were a rich royal blue, with splashing lines of white breakers
rolling in and in upon the pale grey sand, and the sea-birds skimming
and wheeling overhead.

At mid-day it was colourless, glaring, steel-flashing, with the sunlight
blazing and everything shimmering in the heat haze.

In the early afternoon, when Hawk and I used to go down to the shore and
strip naked like savages, and plunge into the warm water, the bay had
changed to pale blue with green ripples, and the outline of Imbros
Island, on the horizon, was a long jagged strip of mauve.

Later, when the sunset sky turned lemon-yellow, orange, and deep
crimson, the bay went into peacock blues and purples, with here and
there a current of bottle-glass green, and Imbros Island stood clear cut
against the sunset-colour a violet-black silhouette.

Queer creatures crept across the sands and into the old Turkish snipers’
trenches; long black centipedes, sand-birds--very much resembling
our martin, but with something of the canary in their colour. Horned
beetles, baby tortoises, mice, and green-grey lizards all left their
tiny footprints on the shore.

“If this silver sand was only in England a man could make his fortune,”
 said Hawk. (“We wept like anything to see--!”)

I never saw such white sand before. One had to misquote: “Come unto
these SILVER sands.” It glittered white in a great horse-shoe round the
bay, and the bed of the Salt Lake (which is really an overflow from the
sea) was a barren patch of this silver-sand, with here and there a dead
mule or a sniper’s body lying out, a little black blot, the haunt of
vultures.

I made some careful drawings of the sand-tracks of the bay; noting down
tracks being a habit with the scout.

In these things Hawk was always interested, and often a great help; for,
in spite of his fifty years and his buccaneerish-habits, he was at heart
a boy--a boy-scout, in fact, and a fine tracker.

One of the most picturesque sights I ever saw was an Indian officer
mounted on a white Arab horse with a long flowing mane, and a tail which
swept in a splendid curve and trailed in the sands. The Hindu wore a
khaki turban, with a long end floating behind. He sat his horse bolt
upright, and rode in the proper military style.

The Arab steed pranced, and arched its great neck. With the blue of
the bay as a background it made a magnificent picture, worthy of the
Thousand-and-One Nights.

Day by day we improved our dug-out, going deeper into the solid rock,
and putting up an awning in front made of two army blankets, with a
wooden cross-beam roped to an old rusty bayonet driven into the sand.

We lived a truly Robinson Crusoe life, with the addition of Turkish
high-explosives, and bully-beef-and-biscuit stew.

Our dug-out was back to the firing-line, and at night we looked out
upon the bay. We lay in our blankets watching the white moonlight on the
waves, and the black shadows of our ambulance wagons on the silver sand.

It was in this dug-out that Hawk used to cook the most wonderful dishes
on a Primus stove.

The language was thick and terrible when that stove refused to work,
and Hawk would squat there cursing and cleaning it, and sticking bits of
wire down the gas-tube.

He cooked chocolate-pudding, and rice-and-milk, and
arrowroot-blancmange, stewed prunes, fried bread in bacon fat, and many
other tasty morsels.

“The proof of a good cook,” said Hawk, “is whether he can make a meal
worth eating out of PRACtically nothink”--and he could.

There were very few wounds now to attend to in the hospital dug-out.
Mostly we got men with sandfly-fever and dysentery; men with scabies and
lice; men utterly and unspeakably exhausted, with hollow, black-rimmed
eyes, cracked lips and foot-sores; men who limped across the sandy
bed, dragging their rifles and equipment in their hands; men who were
desperately hungry, whose eyes held the glint of sniper-madness; men
whose bodies were wasting away, the skin taut and dry like a drum, with
every rib showing like the beams of a wreck, or the rafters of an old
roof.

Always we were in the midst of pain and misery, hunger and death. We do
not get much of the rush and glory of battle in the “Linseed Lancers.”
 We deal with the wreckage thrown up by the tide of battle, and wreckage
is always a sad sight--human wreckage most of all.

But the bay was always full of interest for me, with its ever-changing
colour, and the imprint of the ripples in the gleaming silver-sand.

And the silver moonlight silvers the silver-sand, while the skeletons
of the Xth sink deeper and deeper, to be rediscovered perhaps at some
future geological period, and recognised as a type of primitive man.



CHAPTER XXII. DUG-OUT YARNS


     Oft in the stilly night,
     By yellow candle-light,
     With finger in the sand
     We mapped and planned.

     “This is the Turkish well,
     That’s where the Captain fell,
     There’s the great Salt Lake bed,
     Here’s where the Munsters led.”

     Primitive man arose,
     With prehistoric pose,
     Like Dug-out Men of old,
     By signs our thoughts were told.

I have slept and lived in every kind of camp and bivouac. I have dug and
helped to dig dug-outs. I have lain full length in the dry, dead grass
“under the wide and starry sky.” I have crept behind a ledge of rock,
and gone to sleep with the ants crawling over me. I have slept with a
pair of boots for a pillow. I have lived and snoozed in the dried-up bed
of a mountain torrent for weeks. A ground-sheet tied to a bough has been
my bedroom. I have slumbered curled in a coil of rope on the deck of a
cattle-boat, in an ambulance wagon, on a stretcher, in farmhouse barns
and under hedges and haystacks. I have slept in the sand by the blue
Mediterranean Sea, with the crickets and grasshoppers “zipping” and
“zinging” all night long.

But our dug-out nights on the edge of the bay at Buccaneer Bivouac were
the most enjoyable.

It was here of a night-time that Hawk and I--sometimes alone, sometimes
with Brockley, or “Cherry Blossom,” or “Corporal Mush,” or Sergeant Joe
Smith, the sailormen as onlookers and listeners--it was here we drew
diagrams in the sand with our fingers, and talked on politics and
women’s rights, marriage and immorality, drink and religion, customs and
habits; of life and death, peace and war.

Sometimes Hawk burst into a rare phrase of splendid
composition--well-balanced rhetoric, not unworthy of a Prime Minister.

At other times he is the buccaneer, the flinger of foul oaths, and
terrible damning curses. But as a rule they are not vindictive, they
have no sting--for Hawk is a forgiving and humble man in reality, in
spite of his mask of arrogance.

A remarkable character in every way, he fell unknowingly into the old
north-country Quaker talk of “thee and thou.”

Another minute he gives an order in those hard, calm, commanding words
which, had he had the chance, would have made him, in spite of his lack
of schooling, one of the finest Generals the world could ever know.

On these occasional gleams of pure leadership he finds the finest King’s
English ready to his lips, while at other times he is ungrammatical,
ordinary, but never uninteresting or slow of intuition.

He was a master of slang, and like all strong and vivid characters had
his own peculiar sayings.

He never thought of looking over my shoulder when I was sketching. He
was a gentleman of Nature. But when he saw I had finished, his clear,
deep-set eyes (handed down to him from those old Norseman ancestors)
would glint with interest--

“Dekko the drawing,” he would say, using the old Romany word for “let’s
see.”

“PRACtically” was a favourite word.

“PRACtically the ‘ole Peninsula--”

“PRACtically every one of ‘em--”

“It weren’t that,” he would say; or, “I weren’t bothering--”

“I’m not bothered--”

“Thee needn’t bother, but it’s a misfortunate thing--”

“Hates me like the divil ‘ates Holy Water.”

“Like enough!”

“A pound to a penny!”

“As like as not!”

“Ah; very like.”

These were all typical Hawkish expressions.

His yarns of India out-Rudyard Kipling. They were superb, full of
barrack-room touches, and the smells and sounds of the jungle. He told
of the time when a soldier could get “jungling leave”; when he could
go off with a Winchester and a pal and a native guide for two or three
months; when the Government paid so many rupees for a tiger skin, so
many for a cobra--a scale of rewards for bringing back the trophies of
the jungle wilds.

He pictured the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush, describing the everlasting
snows where you look up and up at the sheer rocks and glaciers; “you
feel like a baby tortoise away down there, so small, as like as not you
get giddy and drunk-like.”

One night Hawk told me of a Hindu fakir who sat by the roadside
performing the mango-trick for one anna. I illustrated it in the sand as
he told it.

_caption: Dug-out, September 9, 1915._

1. The fakir puts a pinch of dust from the ground in a little pile on a
glass plate on a tripod.

2. He covers it up with a handkerchief or a cloth.

3. He plays the bagpipes, or a wooden flute, while you can see the heap
of dust under the cloth a-growing and a-growing up and up, bigger and
bigger.

4. At last he lifts up the cloth and shows you the green mango-tree
growing on the piece of glass.

“He covers it again--plays. Lifts the cloth, shows you the mango tree in
leaf. Covers it again--plays again. Takes away the cloth, and shows you
the mango-tree in fruit, real fruit; but they never let you have the
fruit for love or money. Rather than let any one have it, they pluck it
and squash it between their fingers.”



CHAPTER XXIII. THE WISDOM OF FATHER S----


One day, while I was making some sketch-book drawings of bursting shells
down in the old water-course, the Roman Catholic padre came along.

“Sketching, Hargrave?”

“Yes, sir.”

And then: “I suppose you’re Church of England, aren’t you?”

“No, sir; I’m down as Quaker.”

“Quaker, eh?--that’s interesting; I know quite a lot of Quakers in
Dublin and Belfast.”

Who would expect to find “Father Brown” of G. K. Chesterton fame in a
khaki drill uniform and a pith helmet?

A small, energetic man, with a round face and a habit of putting his
hands deep into the patch pockets of his tunic. Here was a priest who
knew his people, who was a real “father” to his khaki followers. I
quickly discovered him to be a man of learning, and one who noticed
small signs and commonplace details.

His eyes twinkled and glittered when he was amused, and his little round
face wrinkled into wreaths of smiles.

When we moved to the Salt Lake dug-outs he came with us, and here he had
a dug-out of his own.

When the day’s work was finished, and the moonlight glittered white
across the Salt Lake, I used to stroll away for a time by myself before
turning in.

It was a good time to think. Everything was so silent. Even my own
footsteps were soundless in the soft sand. It was on one of these
night-prowls that I spotted the tiny figure of Father S--- jerking
across the sands, with that well-known energetic walk, stick in hand.

“Stars, Hargrave?” said the little priest.

“Very clear to-night, sir.”

“Queer, you know, Hargrave, to think that those same old stars have
looked down all these ages; same old stars which looked down on Darius
and his Persians.”

He prodded the sand with his walking stick, stuck his cap on one side (I
don’t think he cared for his helmet), and peered up to the star-spangled
sky.

“Wonderful country, all this,” said the padre; “it may be across this
very Salt Lake that the armies of the ancients fought with sling and
stone and spear; St. Paul may have put in here, he was well acquainted
with these parts--Lemnos and all round about--preaching and teaching on
his travels, you know.”

“Talking about Lemnos Island,” he went on, “did you notice the series of
peaks which run across it in a line?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it was on those promontories that Agamemnon, King of Mycenx, lit
a chain of fire-beacons to announce the taking of Troy to his Queen,
Clytaemnestra, at Argos--”

Here the little priest, as pleased as a school-boy, scratched a rough
sketch map in the sand--

“All the islands round here are full of historical interest, you know;
`far-famed Samothrace,’ for instance.” Father S--- talked much of
classical history, connecting these islands with Greek and Roman heroes.

All this was desperately interesting to me. It was picturesque to stand
in the sand-bed of the Salt Lake, lit by the broad flood of silver
moonlight, with the little priest eagerly scratching like an ibis in the
sand with his walking-stick.

I learnt more about the Near East in those few minutes than I had ever
done at school.

But besides the interest in this novel history lesson, I was more than
delighted to find the padre so correct in his sketch of the island and
the coast, and I took down what he told me in a note-book afterwards,
and copied his sand-maps also.

After this I came to know him better than I had. I visited his dug-out,
and he let me look at his books and Punch and a month-old Illustrated
London News, or so. I came to admire him for his simplicity and for his
devotion to his men. Every Sunday he held Mass in the trenches of the
firing-line, and he never had the least fear of going up.

A splendid little man, always cheerful, always looking after his
“flock.” Praying with those who were about to give up the ghost;
administering the last rites of the Church to those who, in awful agony,
were fluttering like singed moths at the edge of the great flame, the
Great Life-Mystery of Death.

He wrote beautifully sad letters of comfort to the mothers of
boy-officers who were killed. Father S--- knew every man: every man knew
Father S--- and admired him.

His dug-out was made in a slope overlooking the bay, and was really
a deep square pit in the sand-bank, roofed with corrugated iron and
sandbagged all round. Here we talked. I found he knew G. K. C. and
Hilaire Belloc. Always he wanted to look at any new drawings in my
sketch-books.

It is a relief to speak with some intelligent person sometimes.

Such was Father S---, a very ‘cute little man, knowing most of the
troubles of the men about him, noticing their ways and keeping in touch
with them all.



CHAPTER XXIV. THE SHARP-SHOOTERS


Just after the episode of the lost squads we were working our
stretcher-bearers as far as Brigade Headquarters which were situated on
a steep backbone-like spur of the Kapanja Sirt.

One of my “lance-jacks” (lance-corporals) had been missing for a good
long time, and we began to fear he was either shot or taken prisoner
with the others who had gone too far up the Sirt.

One afternoon we were resting among the rocks, waiting for wounded to be
sent back to us; for since the loss of the others we were not allowed
to pass the Brigade Headquarters. There was a lull in the fighting, with
only a few bursting shrapnel now and then.

This particular lance-jack was quite a young lad of the middle-class,
with a fairly good education.

But he was a weedy specimen physically, and I doubted whether he could
pull through if escape should mean a fight with Nature for food and
water and life itself.

Fairly late in the day as we all lay sprawling on the rocks or under the
thorn-bushes, I saw a little party staggering along the defile which led
up to the Sirt at this point.

There were two men with cow-boy hats, and between them they helped
another very thin and very exhausted-looking fellow, who tottered along
holding one arm which had been wounded.

As they came closer I recognised my lost lance-jack, very pale and
shaky, a little thinner than usual, and with a hint of that gleam of
sniper-madness which I have noticed before in the jumpy, unsteady eyes
of hunted men.

The other two, one each side, were sturdy enough. Well-built men, one
short and the other tall, with great rough hands, sunburnt faces,
and bare arms. They wore brown leggings and riding-breeches and khaki
shirts. They carried their rifles at the trail and strode up to us with
the graceful gait of those accustomed to the outdoor life.

“Awstralians!” said some one.

“An’ the corporal!”

Immediately our men roused up and gathered round.

“Where’s yer boss?” asked the tall Colonial.

“The adjutant is over here,” I answered.

“We’d like a word with him,” continued the man. I took them up to the
officer, and they both saluted in an easy-going sort of way.

“We found ‘im up there,” the Australian jerked his head, “being sniped
and couldn’t git away--says ‘e belongs t’ th’ 32nd Ambulance--so here he
is.”

The two Australians were just about to slouch off again when the
adjutant called them back.

“Where did you find him?” he asked.

“Up beyond Jefferson’s Post; there was five snipers pottin’ at ‘im, an’
it looked mighty like as if ‘is number was up. We killed four o’ the
snipers, and got him out.”

“That was very good of you. Did you see any more Medical Corps up there?
We’ve lost some others, and an officer and sergeant.”

“No, I didn’t spot any--did you, Bill?” The tall man turned to his pal
leaning on his rifle.

“No,” answered the short sharp-shooter; “he’s the only one. It was a
good afternoon’s sport--very good. We saw ‘e’d got no rifle, and was in
a tight clove-’itch, so we took the job on right there an’ finished four
of ‘em; but it took some creepin’ and crawlin’.”

“Well, we’ll be quittin’ this now,” said the tall one. “There’s only
one thing we’d ask of you, sir: don’t let our people know anything about
this.”

“But why?” asked the adjutant, astonished. “You’ve saved his life, and
it ought to be known.”

“Ya-as, that may be, sir; but we’re not supposed to be up here
sharp-shootin’--we jist done it fer a bit of sport. Rightly we don’t
carry a rifle; we belong to the bridge-buildin’ section. We’ve only
borrowed these rifles from the Cycle Corps, an’ we shall be charged with
bein’ out o’ bounds without leave, an’ all that sort o’ thing if it gits
known down at our headquarters.”

“Very well, I’ll tell no one; all the same it was good work, and we
thank you for getting him back to us,” the adjutant smiled.

The two Australians gave him a friendly nod, and said, “So long, you
chaps!” to us and lurched off down the defile.

“We’ll chuck it fer to-day--done enough,” said the tall man.

“Ya-as, we’d better git back. It was good sport--very good,” said the
short one.

Certainly the Australians we met were a cheerful, happy-go-lucky,
devil-may-care crew. They were the most picturesque set of men on the
peninsula.

Rough travelling, little or no food, no water, sleepless nights
and thrilling escapes made them look queerly primitive and Robinson
Crusoeish.

I wrote in my pocket-book: “September 8, 1915.--The Australians have the
keen eye, quick ear and silent tongue which evolves in the bushman and
those who have faced starvation and the constant risk of sudden death,
who have lived a hard life on the hard ground, like the animals of the
wild, and come through.

“Fine fellows these, with good chests and arms, well-knit and gracefully
poised by habitually having to creep and crouch, and run and fight.
Sunburnt to a deep bronze, one and all.

“Their khaki shorts flap and ripple in the sea-wind like a troop of Boy
Scouts. Some wear green shirts, and they all wear stone-gray wide-awake
hats with pinched crown and broad flat brims.”

When at last the mails brought us month-old papers from England, we read
that “The gallant Australians” at Suvla “took” Lala Baba and Chocolate
Hill; indeed, as Hawk read out in our dug-out one mail-day--

“The Australians have took everythink, or practically everythink worth
takin’. They stormed Lala Baba and captured Chocolate ‘ill--in fac’
they made the landin’; and the Xth and XIth Divisions are simply a myth
accordin’ to the papers!”



CHAPTER XXV. A SCOUT AT SUVLA BAY


Many times have I seen the value of the Scout training, but never was
it demonstrated so clearly as at Suvla Bay. Here, owing to the rugged
nature of the country--devoid of all signs of civilisation--a barren,
sandy waste--it was necessary to practise all the cunning and craft of
the savage scout. Therefore those who had from boyhood been trained in
scouting and scoutcraft came out top-dog.

And why?--because here we were working against men who were born scouts.

It became necessary to be able to find your way at night by the stars.
You were not allowed to strike a light to look at a map, and anyhow the
maps we had were on too small a scale to be of any real use locally.

Now, a great many officers were unable to find even the North Star!
Perhaps in civil life they had been men who laughed at the boy scout in
his shirt and shorts because they couldn’t see the good of it! But when
we came face to face with bare Nature we had to return to the methods of
primitive man.

More than once I found it very useful to be able to judge the time by
the swing of the star-sky.

Then again, many and many a young officer or army-scout on outpost duty
was shot and killed because, instead of keeping still, he jerked his
head up above the rocks and finding himself spotted jerked down again.
The consequence was, that when he raised himself the next time the Turks
had the spot “taped” and “his number was up.”

This means unnecessary loss of men, owing entirely to lack of training
in scoutcraft and stalking.

Finding your way was another point. How many companies got “cut
up” simply because the officer or sergeant in charge had no bump of
location. As most men came from our big cities and towns, they knew
nothing of spotting the trail or of guessing the right direction.
Indeed, I see Sir Ian Hamilton states that owing to one battalion
“losing its way” a most important position was lost--and this happened
again and again--simply because the leaders were not scouts.

Then there were many young officers who when it came to the test could
not read a map quickly as they went. (Boy scouts, please note.)
This became a very serious thing when taking up fresh men into the
firing-line.

Those men who went out with a lot of “la-di-da swank” soon found that
they were nowhere in the game with the man who cut his drill trousers
into shorts--went about with his shirt sleeves rolled up and didn’t mind
getting himself dirty.

There were very few “knuts” and they soon got cracked!

Shouting and talking was another point in scouting at Suvla Bay. Brought
up in towns and streets, many men found it extremely difficult to keep
quiet. Slowly they learnt that silence was the only protection against
the hidden sniper.

I remember a lot of fresh men landing in high spirits and keen to get up
to the fighting zone. They marched along in fours and whistled and sang;
but the Turks in the hills soon spotted them and landed a shell in the
middle of them. Silence is the scout’s shield in war-time.

It fell to my lot to make crosses to mark the graves of the dead. These
crosses were made out of bully-beef packing-cases, and on most of them I
was asked to inscribe the name, number and regiment of the slain. I
did this in purple copying pencil, as I had nothing more lasting: and
generally it read:--

                   “In Memory of 19673,
                        Pte.------
                     Royal Irish Fus.
                         R.I.P.”

I had to be tombstone maker and engraver--and sometimes even sexton--a
scout turns his hand to anything.

We had our advanced dressing station on the left of Chocolate Hill--the
proper name of which is Bakka Baba.

Our ambulance wagons had to cross the Salt Lake, and often the wheels
sank and we had to take another team of mules to pull them out.

The Turks had a tower--a gleaming white minaret--just beyond Chocolate
Hill, near the Moslem cemetery in the village of Anafarta. It was
supposed to be a sacred tower, but as they used it as an observation
post, our battle-ships in the bay blew it down.

Flies swarmed everywhere, and were a great cause of disease, as, after
visiting the dead and the latrines they used to come and have a meal on
our jam and biscuits!

During the whole of August and September we were under heavy shell-fire;
but we got quite used to it and hardly turned to look at a bursting
shell.

I must say khaki drill uniform is not a good hiding colour. In the
sunlight it showed up too light. I believe a parti-coloured uniform, say
of green, khaki and gray would be much better. Therefore the Scout
who wears a khaki hat, green shirt, khaki shorts and gray stockings is
really wearing the best uniform for colour-protection in stalking.

The more scouting we can introduce the better.

Carry on, Boy Scouts! Bad scoutcraft was one of the chief drawbacks in
what has been dubbed “The Glorious Failure.”



CHAPTER XXVI. THE BUSH-FIRES


There are some things you never forget...

That little Welshman, for instance, lying on a ledge of rock above our
Brigade Headquarters with a great gaping shrapnel wound in his abdomen
imploring the Medical Officer in the Gaelic tongue to “put him out,” and
how he died, with a morphia tablet in his mouth, singing at the top of
his high-pitched voice--

     “When the midnight chu-chu leaves for Alabam!
     I’ll be right there!
     I’ve got my fare...
     All aboard!
     All aboard!
     All aboard for Alla-Bam!
   ... Midnight... chu-chu... chu-chu...”

And so, slowly his soul steamed out of the wrecked station of his body
and left for “Alabam!”

One evening, the 25th of August, bush-fires broke out on the right of
Chocolate Hill.

The shells from the Turks set light to the dried sage, and thistle and
thorn, and soon the whole place was blazing. It was a fearful sight.
Many wounded tried to crawl away, dragging their broken arms and legs
out of the burning bushes and were cremated alive.

It was impossible to rescue them. Boxes of ammunition caught fire and
exploded with terrific noise in thick bunches of murky smoke. A bombing
section tried to throw off their equipment before the explosives burst,
but many were blown to pieces by their own bombs. Puffs of white smoke
rose up in little clouds and floated slowly across the Salt Lake.

The flames ran along the ridges in long lapping lines with a canopy of
blue and gray smoke. We could hear the crackle of the burning thickets,
and the sharp “bang!” of bullets. The sand round Suvla Bay hid thousands
of bullets and ammunition pouches, some flung away by wounded men, some
belonging to the dead. As the bush-fires licked from the lower slopes of
the Sari Bair towards Chocolate Hill this lost ammunition exploded, and
it sounded like erratic rifle-fire. The fires glowed and spluttered all
night, and went on smoking in the morning. I had to go up to Chocolate
Hill about some sand-bags for our hospital dug-outs next day, and on the
way up I noticed a human pelvis and a chunk of charred human vertebrae
under a scorched and charcoaled thorn-bush.

Hawk and I kept a very good look-out every day. We noted the arrival of
reinforcements, and the putting up of new telegraph lines; we spotted
incoming transports, and the departure of our battle-ships in the bay.

In fact, between us, we worked a very complete “Intelligence
Department” of our own. We made a rough chart showing the main lines of
communications, and the position of snipers and wells, telegraph wires
to the artillery, and the main observation posts and listening saps.

“It’s just as well,” said I, “to know as much as we can how things are
going, and to keep account of details--it’s safer, and might be very
useful.”

“Very true,” said Hawk; “‘ave you noticed ‘ow that little cruiser
comes in every morning at the same time, and goes out again in the late
afternoon? Also, two brigades of Territorials came in last night and
went round by the beach early this morning towards Lala Baba; I see the
footprints when I went down for a wash.”

The colonel had camped us on the edge of the Salt Lake on this side of
an incline which led up to a flat plateau. Into this incline we had made
our dug-outs, and he was now planning the digging out of a square-shaped
place which would hold all our stretchers on which the sick and wounded
lay, and would be protected from the Turkish shell-fire by being dug
into the solid sandstone.

I was looking about for sand-tracks and shells, and I noticed that the
grass had grown much more luxuriously at one level than it did lower
down. This grass was last year’s and was now yellow and dead and
rustling like paper flowers.

“This,” said I to Hawk, “was last year’s water-mark in the rainy
season.”

“That’s gospel,” said Hawk; “and what would you make out o’ that
observation?”

He smiled his queer whimsical smile.

“Why, I guess we shall be swamped out of this camp in a month’s time.”

“Yes; practically the ‘ole of this, up to this level, will be under
water.”

“Then what’s the good of starting to dig a big permanent hospital here
when----?”

“Yours not to reason why,” said Hawk; “it’s a way they have in the army;
but I’m not bothering.”

Each section dug in shifts day after day until the men were worn out
with digging.

Then the long, flat rain-clouds appeared one morning over the distant
range of mountains.

“You see them,” said Hawk, lighting a “woodbine,” and pointing across
the Salt Lake; “that’s the first sign of the wet season coming up.”

Sure enough in a few days the colonel had orders to shift his ambulance
to “C” Beach, near Lala Baba, as our present position was unfavourable
for the construction of a permanent field hospital, owing to the rise of
water in the wet season.

Soon after this, Hawk was moved to the advanced dressing station on
Chocolate Hill, and I had to remain with my section near the Salt Lake.
Thus we were separated.

“It’s to break up our click, too thick together, we bin noticing too
much, we know the workin’ o’ things too well, must break up the combine,
dangerous to ‘ave people about ‘oo spot things and keep their jaws
tight. Git rid o’ Hawk--see th’ ideeah? Very clever, ain’t it?
Practically we’re the only two ‘oo do feel which way the wind blows, an’
that’s inconvenient sometimes.”

I asked Hawk while he was on Chocolate Hill to note down in his head
the various snipers’ posts, and the general positions of the British and
Turkish trenches.

There came a time when I wanted to send him a note. But it was a
dangerous thing to send notes about. They might fall into the hands of
some sniper and give away information.

Therefore I got a bar of yellow soap from our stores, cut it in two,
bored out a small hole in one half, wrapped up my note, put it inside
the soap, clapped the two halves together, stuck them together by
wetting it, and completely concealed the cut by rubbing it with water.

I then asked one of the A.S.C. drivers who was going up with the
ambulance wagon in the morning to give the piece of soap to Hawk.

“He _hasn’t_ got any soap,” I explained, “and he asked me to send him
a bit. Tell him it’s from me, and that I hope he’ll find it all
right--it’s the best we have!”

Hawk got the soap, guessed there was a reason for sending it, broke it
open and found the note. So a simple boy-scout trick came in useful on
active service.



CHAPTER XXVII. THE DEPARTURE


Now came a period of utter stagnation

It was a deadlock.

We held the bay, the plain of Anafarta, the Salt Lake, the Kislar Dagh
and Kapanja Sirt in a horse-shoe.

The Turks held the heights of Sari Bair, Anafarta village, and the
hills beyond “Jefferson’s Post” in a semicircle enclosing us. Nothing
happened. We shelled and they shelled--every day. Snipers sniped and men
got killed; but there was no further advance. Things had remained at a
standstill since the first week of the landing.

Rumours floated from one unit to another:

“We were going to make a great attack on the 28th”--always a fixed
date; “the Italians were landing troops to help the Australians at
Anzac”--every possible absurdity was noised abroad.

Hawk was on Chocolate Hill with our advanced dressing station. I was on
“C” Beach, Lala Baba, with the remainder of the ambulance. I had lost
all my officers by sickness and wounds, and I was now the last of the
original N.C.O.’s of “A” Section. Except for the swimming and my own
observations of tracks and birds and natural history generally, this was
a desperately uninteresting period.

Orders to pack up ready for a move came suddenly. It was now late in
September. The wet season was just beginning. The storm-clouds were
coming up over the hills in great masses of rolling banks, black and
forbidding. It grew colder at night, and a cold wind sprang up during
the day.

Every one was bustling about, packing the operating tent and equipment,
operating table, instruments, bottles, pans, stretchers, “monkey-boxes,”
 bandages, splints, cooking dixies, bully-beef crates, biscuit
tins--everything was being packed up and sorted out ready for moving.

But where? No one knew. We were going to move... soon, very soon, it was
rumoured.

Within every mind a small voice asked--“Blighty?” And then came another
whiff of rumour: “The Xth Division are going--England perhaps!”

But it was too good to believe. Every one wanted to believe it... each
man in his inmost soul hoped it might be true... but it couldn’t be
England... and yet it might!

One night the Indian Pack-mule Corps came trailing down with their
little two-wheeled, two-muled carts and transported all our medical
panniers away into the gloom, and they went towards Lala Baba. It was a
good sign.

Everything was gone now except our own packs and kit, and we had orders
to “stand by” for the command to “Fall in.”

We lay about in the sand waiting--and wondering. At last towards the
last minutes of midnight we got the orders to “Fall in.” The N.C.O.’s
called the “Roll,” “numbered off” their sections and reported “All
present and correct, sir!”

In a long straggling column we marched from our last encampment towards
Lala Baba. The night was very dark and the sand gave under our feet.
It was hard going, but every man had a gleam of hope, and trudged
along heavy-laden with rolled overcoat, haversack and water-bottle and
stretcher, but with a light heart.

The advanced party from Chocolate Hill met us at Lala Baba. Here
everything was bustle and hurry.

Every unit of the Xth Division was packed up and ready for embarkation.
Lighters and tugs puffed and grated by the shore. Horses stamped and
snorted; sergeants swore continually; officers nagged and shouted.

Men got mixed up and lost their units, sections lost their way in the
great crowd of companies assembled.

Once Hawk loomed out of the darkness and a strong whiff of rum came
with him... he disappeared again: “See you later, Sar’nt--lookin’ after
things--important--practically everythink----”

He was full of drink, and in his hurry to look after “things” (mostly
bottles) he lost some of his own kit and my field-glasses. He worked
hard at getting the equipment into the lighters, notwithstanding the
fact that he was “three-parts canned.”

Every now and then he loomed up like some great khaki-clad gorilla, only
to fade away again to the secret hiding-place of a bottle.

And so at last we got aboard. It was still a profound secret. No one
knew whither we were going, or why we were leaving the desolation of
Suvla Bay.

But every one was glad. Anything would be better than this barren waste
of sand and flies and dead men.

That was the last we saw of the bay. A sheet of gray water, a moving
mob on the slope of Lala Baba, the trailing smoke of the tug, and a
pitch-black sky--and Hawk lurching round and swearing at the loss of his
bottle and his kit.

An old sea-song was running in my mind:--

     “But two men of her crew alive--
     What put to sea with seventy-five!”

Only three months ago we had landed 25,000 strong; and now we numbered
about 6000. A fearful loss--a smashed Division.

We transferred to a troop-ship standing out in the bay with all possible
speed.

Still with the gloom hanging over everything we steamed out and every
man was dead tired.

However, I found Hawk, and we decided not to sleep down below with the
others, all crowded together and stinking in the dirty interior of the
ship.

We took our hammocks up on deck and slung them forward from the handrail
near one of the great anchors.

I had a purpose in doing this. I had no intention of going to sleep. By
taking note of a certain star which had appeared just to the right of
a cross-spar, and by noticing its change of position, I was enabled to
guess with some exactitude the course we were laying.

For the first two or three hours the star and the mast kept a perfectly
unchangeable position.

I woke up after dozing for some minutes, and taking up my old stand near
the companion-way again took my star observation. But this time the star
had swept right round and was the other side of the mast. We had
changed our course from south-west to north. Just then Hawk came up the
companion-way, no doubt from a bottle-hunt down below.

“It’s--Salonika!” said he.

“We’ve turned almost due north in the last quarter of an hour.”

“I know it,--been down to the stokers’ bunks--it’s Salonika--another new
landing.”

“They keep the Xth for making new landings.”

And so to the Graeco-Serbian frontier and a fresh series of adventures,
including sickness, life in an Egyptian hospital--and then England.



CHAPTER XXVIII. LOOKING BACK


The queer thing is, that when I look back upon that “Great Failure” it
is not the danger or the importance of the undertaking which is strongly
impressed so much as a jumble of smells and sounds and small things.

It is just these small things which no author can make up in his study
at home.

The glitter of some one carrying an army biscuit-tin along the mule
track; the imprinted tracks of sand-birds by the blue Aegean shore; the
stink of the dead; a dead man’s hand sticking up through the sand; the
blankets soaked each morning by the heavy dew; the incessant rattle of a
machine-gun behind Pear-tree Gully; the distant ridges of the Sari Bahir
range shimmering in the heat of noon-day; the angry “buzz” of the green
and black flies disturbed from a jam-pot lid; the grit of sand in the
mouth with every bite of food; the sullen dullness of the overworked,
death-wearied troops; the hoarse dried-up and everlasting question:
“Any water?”; the silence of the Hindus of the Pack-mule Corps; the
“S-s-s-e-e-e-e-o-o-o-op!--Crash!”--of the high explosives bursting in a
bunch of densely solid smoke on the Kislar Dargh, and the slow unfolding
of these masses of smoke and sand in black and khaki rolls; the snort
and stampede of a couple of mules bolting along the beach with their
trappings swinging and rattling under their panting bellies; the steady
burning of the star-lit night skies; the regular morning shelling from
the Turkish batteries on the break of dawn over the gloom-shrouded
hills; the far-away call of some wounded man for “Stretchers!
Stretchers!”; the naked white men splashing and swimming in the bay; the
swoop of a couple of skinny vultures over the burning white sand of
the Salt Lake bed to the stinking and decomposing body of a
shrapnel-slaughtered mule hidden in the willow-thickets at the bottom
of Chocolate Hill; a torn and bullet-pierced French warplane stranded on
the other side of Lala Baba--lying over at an angle like a wounded white
seabird; the rush for the little figure bringing in “the mails” in
a sack over his shoulder; the smell of iodine and iodoform round the
hospital-tents; the long wobbling moan of the Turkish long-distance
shells, and the harmless “Z-z-z-eee-e-e-o-ooop!” of their “dud” shells
which buried themselves so often in the sand without exploding; the
tattered, begrimed and sunken-eyed appearance of men who had been in the
trenches for three weeks at a stretch; the bristling unshaven chins,
and the craving desire for “woodbines”; the ingrained stale blood on
my hands and arms from those fearful gaping wounds, and the red-brown
blood-stain patches on my khaki drill clothes; the pestering curse of
those damnable Suvla Bay flies and the lice with which every officer and
man swarmed.

The awful--cut-off, Robinson Crusoe feeling--no letters from home,
no newspapers, no books... sand, biscuits and flies; flies, bully and
sand...

Stay-at-home critics and prophets of war cannot strike just that tiny
spark of reality which makes the whole thing “live.”

However many diagrams and wonderful ideas these remarkable amateur
experts publish they won’t “go down” with the man who has humped his
pack and has “been out.”

Mention the word “Blighty” or “Tickler’s plum-and-apple,” “Kangaroo
Beach” or “Jhill-o! Johnnie!” or “Up yer go--an’ the best o’ luck!” to
any man of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force and in each case
you will have touched upon a vividly imprinted impresssion of the
Dardanelles.

There was adventure wild and queer enough in the Dardanelles campaign to
fill a volume of Turkish Nights’ Entertainments, but the people at home
know nothing of it.

This is the very type of adventure and incident which would have aroused
a war-sickened people; which would have rekindled war-weary enthusiasm
and patriotism in the land. Maybe most of these accounts of marvellous
escapes and ‘cute encounters, secret scoutings and extraordinary
expeditions will lie now for ever with the silent dead and the thousands
of rounds of ammunition in the silver sand of Suvla Bay.

The stars still burn above the Salt Lake bed; the white breakers roll in
each morning along the blue sea-shore, sometimes washing up the bodies
of the slain--just as they did when we camped near Lala Baba.

But the guns are gone and there the heavy silence of the waste places
reigns supreme.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "At Suvla Bay
 - Being the notes and sketches of scenes, characters and adventures of the Dardanelles campaign, made by John Hargrave ("White Fox") while serving with the 32nd field ambulance, X division, Mediterranean expeditionary force, during the great war." ***

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