At Suvla Bay Part 16

At mid-day it was colourless, glaring, steel-flas.h.i.+ng, with the sunlight blazing and everything s.h.i.+mmering in the heat haze.

In the early afternoon, when Hawk and I used to go down to the sh.o.r.e 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 peac.o.c.k blues and purples, with here and there a current of bottle-gla.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e.

"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 gra.s.s "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 gra.s.shoppers "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 d.a.m.ning 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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!"