Painfully groping he gathers his belongings and puts them, one by one, in the haversack, arranging his towel on the top. His elbow is sore with leaning on it, but the pillow is ready. Lying down again he falls quickly to sleep. Almost at once there is a wild din in his dreams.
Rapid fire again. Springing up, he rushes into the trench with the others. It is an attack. Who is attacking? The men in the trench know nothing. It started on the right, they say, and now the whole line is ablaze again with this maddening rifle-fire. Running back to the dug-out he gropes in the wreckage of coats and equipment for his belt and revolver. He must hurry to the front line to take charge of his platoon.
There are no telephones to the firing-line. What the h.e.l.l is happening?
When he is halfway up the communication trench, cannoning into the walls in his haste and weariness, the firing suddenly stops. It was a wild panic started by the Senegalese holding the line on our right. d.a.m.n them--black idiots!
He goes back swearing with the other officers, and they lie down anyhow; it is too late now to waste time on fussy arrangements. When he wakes up again there is already a hint of light in the East. It is the "Stand to Arms" before dawn. His feet are numb and painful with cold, his limbs are cramped and aching, and his right forearm has gone to sleep. The flesh of his legs is clammy, and sticks to the breeches he has lived and slept in for five days: he longs for a bath. Slowly with the others he raises himself and gropes weakly in the muddle of garments on the floor for his equipment. He cannot find his revolver. Burnett has lost his belt, and mutters angrily to himself. All their belongings are entangled together in the narrow s.p.a.ce; they disengage them without speaking to each other. Each one is in a dull coma of endurance; for the moment their spirit is at its lowest ebb; it is the most awful moment of warfare. In a little they will revive, but just now they cannot pretend to bravery or cheerfulness, only curse feebly and fumble in the darkness.
They go out into the trench and join their platoons. The N.C.O."s are still shaking and bullying the men still asleep; some of these are almost senseless, and can only be roused by prolonged physical violence.
The officer braces himself for his duties, and by and by all the men are more or less awake and equipped, though their heads droop as they sit, and their neighbours nudge them into wakefulness as the officer approaches. Mechanically he fills and lights a pipe, and takes a cautious sip at his water-bottle; the pipe turns his empty stomach, and an intolerable emptiness a.s.sails him. He knocks out the pipe and peers over the parapet. It is almost light now, but a thin mist hides the Turkish trench. His face is greasy and taut with dirt, and the corners of his eyes are full of dust; his throat is dry, and there is a loathsome stubble on his chin, which he fingers absently, pulling at the long hairs.
Steadily the light grows and grows, and the men begin to chatter, and suddenly the sun emerges over the corner of Achi Baba, and life and warmth come back to the numb souls of all these men. "Stand to" is over; but as the men tear off their hateful equipment and lean their rifles against the wall of the trench there is a sudden burst of sh.e.l.ling on the right. Figures appear running on the skyline. They are against the light, and the shapes are dark, but there seems to be a dirty blue in their uniforms. No one quite knows how the line runs up there; it is a salient. The figures must be Turks attacking the French. The men gape over the parapet. The officer gapes. It is nothing to do with them. Then he remembers what he is for, and tells his men excitedly to fire on the figures. Some of the men have begun cooking their breakfast, and are with difficulty seduced from their task. A spasmodic fire opens on the running figures. It is hard to say where they are running, or what they are doing. The officer is puzzled. It is his first glimpse of battle, and he feels that a battle should be simple and easy to understand. The officer of the next platoon comes along. He is equally ignorant of affairs, but he thinks the figures are French, attacking the Turks.
They, too, wear blue. The first officer rushes down the line telling the men to "cease fire." The men growl and go back to their cooking. It is fairly certain that none of them hit any of the distant figures, but the officer is worried. Why was n.o.body told what was to happen? What is it all about? He has been put in a false position. Presently a belated chit arrives to say that the French were to attack at sunrise, but the attack was a fiasco, and is postponed.
And now all the air is sickly with the smell of cooking, and the dry wood crackles in every corner; little wisps of smoke go straight up in the still air. All the Peninsula is beautiful in the sunlight, and wonderful to look upon against the dark blue of the sea; the dew sparkles on the scrub; over the cypress grove comes the first aeroplane, humming contentedly. Another day has begun; the officer goes down whistling to wash in a bucket.
IV
Such was life in the line at that time. But I should make the soldier"s almost automatic reservation, that it might have been worse. There might have been heavy sh.e.l.ling; but the sh.e.l.ling on the trenches was negligible--then; there might have been mud, but there was not. And eight such days might have left Harry Penrose quite unaffected in spirit, in spite of his physical handicaps, by reason of his extraordinary vitality and zest. But there were two incidents before we went down which did affect him, and it is necessary that they should be told.
On the fifth day in the line he did a very brave thing--brave, at least, in the popular sense, which means that many another man would not have done that thing. To my mind, a man is brave only in proportion to his knowledge and his susceptibility to fear; the standard of the mob, the standard of the official military mind, is absolute; there are no fine shades--no account of circ.u.mstance and temperament is allowed--and perhaps this is inevitable. Most men would say that Harry"s deed was a brave one. I have said so myself--but I am not sure.
Eighty to a hundred yards from one section of our line was a small stretch of Turkish trench, considerably in advance of their main line.
From this trench a particularly hara.s.sing fire was kept up, night and day, and the Brigade Staff considered that it should be captured. High officers in shirt sleeves and red hats looked long and wisely at it through periscopes; colonels and adjutants and subalterns and sergeants stood silent and respectful while the great men pondered. The great men then turned round with the air of those who make profound decisions, and announced that "You ought to be able to "enfilade" it from "over there,"" or "I suppose they "enfilade" you from there." The term "enfilade" invariably occurred somewhere in these dicta, and in the listeners" minds there stirred the suspicion that the Great Ones had not been looking at the right trench; if indeed they had focused the unfamiliar instrument so as to see anything at all. But the decision was made; and for the purposes of a night attack it was important to know whether the trench was held strongly at night, or occupied only by a few busy snipers. Harry was ordered to reconnoitre the trench with two scouts.
The night was pitch black, with an unusual absence of stars. The worst of the rapid fire was over, but there was a steady spit and crackle of bullets from the Turks, and especially from the little trench opposite.
Long afterwards, in France, he told me that he would never again dream of going out on patrol in the face of such a fire. But to-night it did not occur to him to delay his expedition. The profession of scouting made a special appeal to the romantic side of him; the prospect of some real, practical scouting was exciting. According to the books much scouting was done under heavy fire, but according to the books, and in the absence of any experience to the contrary, it was probable that the careful scout would not be killed. Then why waste time? (All this I gathered indirectly from his account of the affair.) Two bullets smacked into the parapet by his head as he climbed out of the dark sap and wriggled forward into the scrub; but even these did not give him pause.
Only while he lay and waited for the two men to follow did he begin to realize how many bullets were flying about. The fire was now really heavy, and when I heard that Harry had gone out, I was afraid. But he as yet was only faintly surprised. The Colonel had sent him out; the Colonel had said the Turks fired high, and if you kept low you were quite safe--and he ought to know. This was a regular thing in warfare, and must be done. So on like reptiles into the darkness, dragging with hands and pushing with knees. Progress in the orthodox scout fashion was surprisingly slow and exhausting. The scrub tickled and scratched your face, the revolver in your hands caught in the roots; the barrel must be choked with dust. Moreover, it was impossible to see anything at all, and the object of a reconnaissance being to see something, this was perplexing. Even when the frequent flares went up and one lay pressed to the earth, one"s horizon was the edge of a tuft of scrub five yards away. This always looked like the summit of some commanding height; but labouring thither one saw by the next flare only another exactly similar horizon beyond. So must the worm feel, wandering in the rugged s.p.a.ces of a well-kept lawn. It was long before Harry properly understood this phenomenon; and by then his neck was stiff and aching from lying flat and craning his head back to see in front. But after many hours of crawling the ground sloped down a little, and now they could see the sharp, stabbing flashes from the rifles of the snipers in the little trench ahead of them. Clearly they were only snipers, for the flashes came from only eight or nine particular spots, s.p.a.ced out at intervals.
_Now_ the scouts glowed with the sense of achievement as they watched.
They had found out. Never again could Harry have lain like that, naked in the face of those near rifles, coldly calculating and watching, without an effort of real heroism. On this night he did it easily--confident, unafraid. Elated with his little success, something prompted him to go farther and confirm his deductions. He whispered to his men to lie down in a fold of the ground, and crept forward to the very trench itself, aiming at a point midway between two flashes. There was no wire in front of the trench, but as he saw the parapet looming like a mountain close ahead, he began to realize what a mad fool he was, alone and helpless within a yard of the Turks, an easy mark in the light of the next flare. But he would not go back, and squirming on worked his head into a gap in the parapet, and gazed into a vast blackness. This he did with a wild incautiousness, the patience of the true scout overcome by his anxiety to do what he intended as soon as possible. The Turks"
own rifles had drowned the noise of his movements, and providentially no flare went up till his body was against the parapet. When at length the faint wavering light began and swelled into sudden brilliance, he could see right into the trench, and when the shadows chased each other back into its depths as the light fell, he lay marvelling at his own audacity: so impressed was he by the wonder of his exploit that he was incapable of making any intelligent observations, other than the bald fact that there were no men in that part of the trench. He was still waiting for another flare when there was a burst of rapid fire from our own line a little to the right. Suddenly he realized that B Company _did not know he was out_; C Company knew, but in his haste he had forgotten to see that the others were informed before he left, as he had arranged to do with the Colonel. He and his scouts would be shot by B Company.
Obsessed with this thought he turned and scrambled breathlessly back to the two waiting men. G.o.d knows why he wasn"t seen and sniped; and his retirement must have been very noisy, for as he reached the others all the snipers in the trench opened fire feverishly together. Harry and his men, who were cold with waiting, wriggled blindly back; they no longer pretended to any deliberation or cunning, but having come to no harm so far were not seriously anxious about themselves; only it seemed good to go back now. But after a few yards one of the men, Trower, gave a scream of agony and cried out, "I"m hit, I"m hit."
In that moment, Harry told me, all the elation and pride of his exploit ebbed out of him. A sick disgust with himself and everything came over him. Williams, the other scout, lay between him and Trower, who was now moaning horribly in the darkness. For a moment Harry was paralysed; he lay there, saying feebly, "Where are you hit? Where is he hit, Williams?
Where are you hit?" When at last he got to his side, the man was almost unconscious with pain, but he had managed to screech out "Both legs." In fact, he had been shot through the femoral artery, and one leg was broken. In that blackness skilled hands would have had difficulty in bandaging any wound; Harry and Williams could not even tell where his wound was, for all his legs were wet and sticky with blood. But both of them were fumbling and scratching at their field-dressings for some moments before they realized this. Then they started to take the man in, half dragging, half carrying him. At every movement the man shrieked in agony. When they stood up to carry him bodily, he screamed so piercingly that the storm of bullets was immediately doubled about them. When they lay down and dragged him he screamed less, but progress was impossibly slow. And now it seemed that there were Turks in the open scrub about them, for there were flashes and loud reports at strangely close quarters. The Turks could not see the miserable little party, but Trower"s screams were an easy guide. Then Harry bethought him of the little medical case in his breast-pocket where, with needles and aspirin and plaster and pills, was a small phial of morphine tablets. For Trower"s sake and their own, his screaming must be stilled. Tearing open his pocket he fumbled at the elastic band round the case. The little phial was smaller than the rest; he knew where it lay. But the case was upside-down; all the phials seemed the same size. Trembling, he pulled out the cork and shook out one of the tablets into his hand; a bullet cracked like a whip over his head; the tablet fell in the scrub. He got another out and pa.s.sed it over to Williams. Williams"s hand was shaking, and he dropped it. Harry groaned. The next two were safely transferred and pressed into Trower"s mouth: he did not know how strong they were, but he remembered vaguely seeing "One or two" on the label, and at that black moment the phrase came curiously into his head, "As ordered by the doctor." Trower was quieter now, and this made the other two a little calmer. Harry told me he was now so cool that he could put the phial back carefully in the case and return them to his pocket; even, from sheer force of habit, he b.u.t.toned up the pocket. But when they moved off they realized with a new horror that they were lost. They had come out originally from the head of a long sap; in the darkness and the excitement they had lost all sense of direction, and had missed the sap.
Probably they were not more than fifty yards from friends, but they might be moving parallel to the sap or parallel to the front line, and that way they might go on indefinitely. They could not drag their wretched burden with them indefinitely; so Harry sent Williams to find the trench, and lay throbbing by the wounded man. No one who has not been lost in the pitchy dark in No Man"s Land can understand how easy it is to arrive at that condition, and the intense feeling of helplessness it produces. That solitary wait of Harry"s must have been terrible; for he had time now to ponder his position. Perhaps Williams would not find the trench; perhaps he, too, would be hit; perhaps he would not be able to find the scouts again. What should they do then? Anything was possible in this awful darkness, with these bullets cracking and tearing about him. Perhaps he would be killed himself. Straining his ears he fancied he could hear the rustle of creeping men, any moment he expected a rending blow on his own tender body. But his revolver had been dropped in the dragging of Trower. He could do nothing--only try to bind up the poor legs again. Poor Harry! as he lay there bandaging his scout, he noticed that the lad had stopped moaning, and said to himself that his morphine tablets had done their work. That was something, anyhow. But the man was already dead. He could not have lived for ten minutes, the doctor told me. And when Williams at last returned, trailing a long string from the sap, it was a dead man they brought painfully into the trench and handed over gently to the stretcher-bearers.
I was in the sap when they came, and dragged Harry away from it. And when they told him he nearly cried.
II
The other incident is briefly told. On our last day in the line Harry"s platoon were working stealthily in the hot sun at a new section of trench connecting two saps, and some one incautiously threw a little new-turned earth over the parapet. The Turks, who seldom molested any of the regular, established trenches with sh.e.l.l-fire, but hotly resented the making of new ones, opened fire with a light high-velocity gun, of the whizz-bang type. This was our first experience of the weapon, and the first experience of a whizz-bang is very disturbing. The long shriek of the ordinary sh.e.l.l encourages the usually futile hope that by ducking one may avoid destruction. With the whizz-bang there is no hope, for there is no warning; the sound and the sh.e.l.l arrive almost simultaneously. Harry"s platoon did not like these things. The first three burst near but short of the trench, filling the air with fumes; the fourth hit and removed most of the parapet of one bay. Harry, hurrying along to the place, found the four men there considerably surprised, crouching in the corners and gazing stupidly at the yawning gap. It was undesirable, if not impossible, to rebuild the parapet during daylight, so he moved them into the next bay. He then went along the trench to see that all the men had ceased work. He heard two more sh.e.l.ls burst behind him as he went. On his way back two men rushing round a corner--two men with white faces smeared with black and a little blood--almost knocked him down; they were speechless. He went through the bay which had been blown in; it was silent, empty; the bay beyond was silent too, save for the buzzing of a thousand flies. In it he had left eight men; six of them were lying dead. Two had marvellously escaped. The first whizz-bang had blown away the parapet; the second, following immediately after, had pa.s.sed miraculously through the hole, straight into the trench--a piece of astounding bad luck or good gunnery. The men could not be buried till dusk, and we left them there.
Two hours later, as we sat under a waterproof sheet and talked quietly of this thing, there came an engineer officer wandering along the trench. He had come, crouching, through those two shattered and yawning bays: he was hot and very angry. "Why the h.e.l.l don"t you bury those Turks?" he said, "they must have been there for weeks!" This is the kind of charge which infuriates the soldier at any time; and we did not like the added suggestion that those six good men of the 14th Platoon were dead Turks. We told him they were Englishmen, dead two hours. "But, my G.o.d, man," he said, "they"re black!" We led him back, incredulous, to the place.
When we got there we understood. Whether from the explosion or the scorching sun in that airless place, I know not, but those six men were, as he said, literally black--black and reeking and hideous--and the flies...!
Harry and I crouched at the end of that bay, truly unable to believe our eyes. I hope I may never again see such horror as was in Harry"s face.
They were his platoon, and he knew them, as an officer should. After the explosion, there had been only four whom he could definitely identify.
Now there was not one. In two hours...
I do not wish to labour this or any similar episode. I have seen many worse things; every soldier has. In a man"s history they are important only in their effect upon him, and the effect they have is determined by many things--by his experience, and his health, and his state of mind.
But if you are to understand what I may call the battle-psychology of a man, as I want you to understand Harry"s, you must not ignore particular incidents. For in this respect the lives of soldiers are not uniform; though many may live in the same regiment and fight in the same battles, the experiences which matter come to them diversely--to some crowded and overwhelming, to some by kind and delicate degrees. And so do their spirits develop.
These two incidents following so closely upon each other had a most unhappy c.u.mulative effect on Harry. His night"s scouting, in spite of its miserable end, had not perceptibly dimmed his romantic outlook; it had been an adventure, and from a military point of view a successful adventure. The Colonel had been pleased with the reconnaissance, as such. But the sight of his six poor men, lying black and beastly in that sunlit hole, had killed the "Romance of War" for him. Henceforth it must be a necessary but disgusting business, to be endured like a dung-hill.
But this, in the end, was inevitable; with all soldiers it is only a matter of time, though for a boy of Harry"s temperament it was an ill chance that it should come so soon.
What was more serious was this. The two incidents had revived, in a most malignant form, his old distrust of his own competence. I found that he was brooding over this--accusing himself, quite wrongly, I think, of being responsible for the death of seven men. He had bungled the scouting; he had recklessly attracted attention to the party, and Trower, not he, had paid for it. He had moved four men into a bay where four others already were, and six of them had been killed. I tried hard to persuade him, not quite honestly, that he had done absolutely the right thing. In scouting, of all things, I told him, a man _must_ take chances; and the matter of the two whizz-bangs was sheer bad luck. It was no good; he was a fool--a failure. Unconsciously, the Colonel encouraged this att.i.tude. For, thinking that Harry"s nerve might well have been shaken by his first experience, he would not let him go out on patrol again on our next "tour" in the line. I think he was quite mistaken in this view, for the boy did not even seem to realize how narrow his own escapes had been, so concerned was he about his lost men.
Nor did this explanation of the Colonel"s veto even occur to him. Rather it confirmed him in his distrust of himself, for it seemed to him that the Colonel, too, must look upon him as a bungler, a waster of men"s lives....
All this was very bad, and I was much afraid of what the reaction might be. But there was one bright spot. So far he only distrusted his military capacity; there was no sign of his distrusting his own courage.
I prayed that that might not follow.
V
Mid-June came with all its plagues and fevers and irritable distresses.
Life in the rest-camp became daily more intolerable. There set in a steady wind from the north-east which blew all day down the flayed rest-areas of the Peninsula, raising great columns of blinding, maddening dust. It was a hot, parching wind, which in no way mitigated the scorch of the sun, and the dust it brought became a definite enemy to human peace. It pervaded everything. It poured into every hole and dug-out, and filtered into every man"s belongings; it formed a gritty sediment in water and tea, it pa.s.sed into a man with every morsel of food he ate, and sc.r.a.ped and tore at his inside. It covered his pipe so that he could not even smoke with pleasure; it lay in a thick coating on his face so that he looked like a wan ghost, paler than disease had made him. It made the cleaning of his rifle a too, too frequent farce; it worked under his breeches, and gathered at the back of his knees, chafing and torturing him; and if he lay down to sleep in his hole it swept in billows over his face, or men pa.s.sing clumsily above kicked great showers upon him. Sleep was not possible in the rest-camps while that wind blew. But indeed there were many things which made rest in the rest-camps impossible. Few more terrible plagues can have afflicted British troops than the flies of Gallipoli. In May, by comparison, there were none. In June they became unbearable; in July they were literally inconceivable. Most Englishmen have lain down some gentle summer day to doze on a shaded lawn and found that one or two persistent flies have destroyed the repose of the afternoon; many women have turned sick at the sight of a blowfly in their butcher"s shop. Let them imagine a semi-tropical sun in a place where there is little or no shade, where sanitary arrangements are less than primitive, where, in spite of all precautions, there are sc.r.a.ps of bacon and sugar and tea-leaves lying everywhere in the dust, and every man has his little daily store of food somewhere near him, where there are dead bodies and the carca.s.ses of mules easily accessible to the least venturesome fly--let them read for "one" fly a hundred, a thousand, a million, and even then they will not exaggerate the horror of that plague.
Under it the disadvantages of a sensitive nature and a delicate upbringing were easy to see. An officer lies down in the afternoon to sleep in his hole. The flies cl.u.s.ter on his face. Patiently, at first, he brushes them away, with a drill-like mechanical movement of his hand; by and by he does it angrily; his temper is going. He covers his face with a handkerchief; it is distressingly hot, but at least he may have some rest. The flies settle on his hand, on his neck, on the bare part of his leg. Even there the feel of them is becoming a genuine torment.
They creep under the handkerchief; there is one on his lip, another buzzing about his eye. Madly he tears off the handkerchief and lashes out, waving it furiously till the air is free. The flies gather on the walls of the dug-out, on the waterproof sheet, and watch; they are waiting motionless till he lies down again. He throws his coat over his bare knees and lies back. The torment begins again. It is unendurable.
He gets up, cursing, and goes out; better to walk in the hot sun or sit under the olive-tree in the windy dust.
But look into the crowded ditches of the men. Some of them are fighting the same fight, hands moving and faces twitching, like the flesh of horses, automatically. But most of them lie still, not asleep, but in a kind of dogged artificial insensibility. The flies crowd on their faces; they swarm about their eyes, and crawl unmolested about their open mouths. It is a horrible sight, but those men are lucky.
Then there was always a great noise in the camp, for men would be called for from Headquarters at the end of it or orders pa.s.sed down, and so great was the wind and the noise of the French guns and the Turkish sh.e.l.ls, that these messages had to be bawled from man to man. The men grew lazy from sheer weariness of these messages, so that they were mutilated as they came and had to be repeated; and there was this babel always. The men, too, like the officers, became irritable with each other, and wrangled incessantly over little things; only the officers argued quietly and bitterly, and the men shouted oaths at each other and filthy epithets. There was only a yard between the holes of the officers and the holes of the men, and their raucous quarrelling grated on nerves already sensitive from the trials of the day, and the officer came near to cursing his own men; and that is bad.
So there was no rest to be had in the camp during the day; and at night we marched out in long columns to dig in the whispering gullies, or unload ships on the beach. There were many of these parties, and we were much overworked, as all infantry units invariably are; and only at long intervals there came an evening when a man might lie down under the perfect stars and sleep all night undisturbed. Then indeed he had rest; and when he woke to a sudden burst of sh.e.l.l-fire, lay quiet in his hole, too tired and dreamy to be afraid.
Dust and flies and the food and the water and our weakness joined forces against us, and dysentery raged among us. There were many who had never heard of the disease, and thought vaguely of the distemper of dogs.
Those who had heard of it thought of it as something rather romantically Eastern, like the tsetse fly, and the first cases were invested with a certain mysterious distinction--especially as most of them were sent away. But it became universal; everybody had it, and everybody could not be sent away. One man in a thousand went through that time untouched; one in ten escaped with a slight attack. But the remainder lived permanently or intermittently in a condition which in any normal campaign would have long since sent them on stretchers to the base. The men could not be spared; they stayed and endured and tottered at their work. Thus there was every circ.u.mstance to encourage infection and little to resist it. One by one the officers of D Company were stricken.
The first stages were mildly unpleasant, encouraging that comfortable sense of martyrdom which belongs to a recognized but endurable complaint. As it grew worse, men became querulous but were still interested in themselves, and those not in the final stages discussed their symptoms, emulously, disgustingly--still a little anxious to be worse than their fellows.
In the worst stage there was no emulation, only a dull misery of recurrent pain and la.s.situde and disgust. A man could not touch the coa.r.s.e food which was all we had; or, if from sheer emptiness he did, his sufferings were immediately magnified. Yet always he had a wild craving for delicate food, and as he turned from the sickening bacon in the gritty lid of his mess-tin, conjured bright visions of lovely dainties which might satisfy his longing and give him back his strength.
So men prayed for parcels. But when they came, or when some wanderer came back from the Islands with a basket of Grecian eggs, too often it was too late for the sickest men, and their agonies were only increased.
Scientific dieting was impossible. They could only struggle on, for ever sick, yet for ever on duty: this was the awful thing. When a man reached this stage, the army was lucky indeed if it did not lose him; he was lucky himself if he did not die. But so strong is the human spirit and so patient the human body, that most won through this phase to a spasmodic existence of alternate sickness and precarious health; and when they said to themselves "I am well," and ate heartily, and said to their companions "This and that is what you should do," the disease gripped them again, each time more violently. All this sapped the strength of a man; and finally there came a terrible debility, a kind of paralysing la.s.situde when it needed a genuine flogging of the will for him to lift himself and walk across the camp, and his knees seemed permanently feeble, as if a fever had just left him. Yet many endured this condition for weeks and months till the fever definitely took them.
Some became so weak that while they still tottered up to the line and about their duties, they could not gratuitously drag themselves to the beach to bathe. Then indeed were they far gone, for the evening swims were the few paradisial moments of that time. When the sun had but an hour to live, and the wind and the dust and the flies were already dwindling, we climbed down a cliff-path where the Indians kept their sacred but odorous goats. There was a fringe of rocks under the cliffs where we could dive. There we undressed, hot and grimy, lousy, thirsty, and tired. Along the rocks solitary Indians were kneeling towards Mecca.
Some of the old battered boats of the first landing were still nosing the sh.o.r.e, and at a safe distance was a dead mule. The troops did not come here but waded noisily in the shallow water; so all was quiet, save for an occasional lazy sh.e.l.l from Asia and the chunk-chunk of a patrol-boat. The sea at this hour put on its most perfect blue, and the foot-hills across the Straits were all warm and twinkling in the late sun. So we sat and drank in the strengthening breeze, and felt the clean air on our contaminated flesh; and plunging luxuriously into the lovely water forgot for a magical moment all our weariness and disgust.
When a man could not do this, he was ill indeed.