CHAPTER IV
THE VIGIL
§1
Night or day, the ship ploughed remorselessly on. It was steered a bewildering zigzag course to outwit the submarines. The second day of the voyage saw us in the Bay of Biscay, a hundred miles off Cape Finisterre. The sun got steadily hotter, and the sea bluer.
And the subalterns blessed the sun, because it gave them an excuse for putting on the white tennis-flannels which they had brought for deck wear. All honest boys, we know, fancy themselves in their whites. And the mention of their deck-flannels reminds me, strangely enough, of Monty's daily masses. It was evident from the attendance at these quiet little services that he had been busy persuading other young officers to see "how it worked."
Every morning the smoking room was equipped with a little altar that supported two lighted candles. And to this chapel there wandered, morning after morning, stray and rather shy young subalterns, who knelt "beneath the shadow," occupied with their own thoughts, while Calvary's ancient sacrifice was acted before God.
Monty had formed a dozen subalterns into a guild of servers. And on these sun-baked mornings he would insist that his servers should kneel at their place beside the altar in their white sporting attire. "His Mass," said he, "was meant to be mixed up with the week-day play."
It was all quiet—in fact, ever so quiet. Outside on the deck there would be noises, and in the alley-way there would be bangings of cabin-doors, and voices calling for the bath steward. But these things only intensified the quiet of the smoking room. Monty would keep his voice very low, loud enough to be heard by those who wished to follow him, and soft enough not to interrupt those who preferred to pursue their private devotions.
Whether he was right in all that he did and taught, or was only a joyous rebel, better theologians than I must determine. He was at least right in this: the attraction of that early morning service was irresistible. I began to look forward to it. I enjoyed it. When my comfortable bunk pulled strongly, and I was too lazy to get up, I would feel all day a sense of having missed something. I had never been able to pray anywhere else so easily as I prayed there. I had never before understood the satisfaction of worship.
Monty soon found that the only enemy who could beat him and prevent a swelling attendance of Youth at the Mass, was Cosy Bed. C.B., as he contemptuously called him, was most powerful at 7.0 in the morning. Padre Monty would not have been Padre Monty, had he failed to declare war on the foe at once. He drew up a "Waking List" of his family (for he had adopted everybody on the ship under 25), and each morning went his rounds, visiting a score of cabins, where the "children" slept. He burst upon them unceremoniously, and threw open the darkened port-holes to let the sunlight in. For the sunlight, like all bright things, was on the side of the Mass.
Of course it was only a minority, at best, who thus bowed their young heads to the Mass. The rest remained gentiles without the Law. And Monty's undismayed comment was characteristic of him. "I say, Rupert," he said, coolly assuming that I was his partner in the work, "We've only a few at present, our apostolic few. But don't you love these big, handsome boys, who will not come to church?"
One immortal Friday fully forty wandered in to Mass. Monty was radiant. Immediately after the service he said to me: "Come on deck, and have a game of quoits-tennis before breakfast. Mass first, then tennis—that's as it should be." We went on deck, and, having fixed the rope that acted as a net, played a hard game. And, when the first game was finished, Monty, still flushed with his victory down in the smoking room, came and looked at me over the high intervening rope, much as a horse looks over a wall, and proceeded to hold forth:
"D'you remember that picture, 'The Vigil,' Rupert, where a knight is kneeling with his sword before the altar, being consecrated for the work he has in hand? Well, this voyage is the vigil for these fellows. Before they step ashore, they shall kneel in front of the same altar, and seek a blessing on their swords. Hang it! aren't they young knights setting out on perilous work? And I'll prove we have a Church still, and an Altar, and a Vigil."
Then he asked me what I was stopping for and talking about, and why I didn't get on with the game. His spirits were irrepressible.
§2
After tea, on the fourth day, everyone hurried to the boat-deck, for land was on our port side. There to our left, looking like a long, riftless cloud bank, lay a pale-washed impression of the coast of Spain. A little town, of which every building seemed a dead white, could be distinguished on the slope of a lofty hill. There was a long undulation of mountainous country, and a promontory that we were told was Cape Trafalgar.
I should have kept my eyes fixed on this, my first view of Sunny Spain, if there had not been excited talk of another land looming on the starboard side. Looking quickly that way, I made out the grey wraith of a continent, and realised that, for the first time, Dark Africa had crept, with becomingly mysterious silence, into my range of vision.
Doe let his field-glasses drop, and stared dreamily at the beautiful picture, which was being given us, as we approached in the fall of a summer day towards the famous Straits of Gibraltar. Not long, however, could his reverie last, for Jimmy Doon poked him in the ribs and said:
"Wake up. Do you grasp the fact that you are just about to go through the gate of the Mediterranean, and you'll be damned lucky if you ever come out through it again? It's like going through the entrance of the Colosseum to the lions. It's both tedious and unseemly."
"Oh, get away, Jimmy," retorted Doe, "you spoil the view. Look, Rupert—don't look out of the bows all the time; turn round and look astern, if you want to see a glorious sunset."
I turned. We were steering due east, so the disc of the sun, this still evening, was going down behind our stern. The sea maintained a hue of sparkling indigo, while the sun encircled itself with widening haloes of gold and orange. The vision was so gorgeous that I turned again to see its happy effect upon the coast of Spain, and found that the long strip of land had become apple pink. Meanwhile I was aware that my hands and all my exposed flesh had a covering of sticky moisture, the outcome of a damp wind blowing from grey and melancholy Africa.
"The sirocco," said someone, and foretold a heavy mist with the night.
It happened so. The darkness had scarcely succeeded the highly coloured sunset before the raucous booming of the fog-horn sounded from the ship's funnel, and the whole vessel was surrounded with a thick mist—African breath again—which, laden with damp, left everything superficially wet. The mist continued, and the darkness deepened, as we went through the Straits. The siren boomed intermittently, and Gibraltar, invisible, flashed Morse messages in long and short shafts of light on the thick, moist atmosphere. To add to the eerie effect of it all, a ship's light was hung upon the mast, and cast yellow rays over the fog-damp.
"Beastly shame," grumbled Doe, looking into the opaque darkness, "we shan't see the Rock this trip through. Never mind, we'll see it on the homeward route."
"Per-haps," corrected Jimmy Doon.
Thus we went through the gate into the Mediterranean theatre, where the big battle for those other Straits was being fought. We left the fog behind us, as we got into wider seas, and steamed into a hot Mediterranean night.
§3
Oh, it was torrid. Ere we came on deck for our talk with Monty under the stars, we had changed into our coolest things. And now, awaiting his arrival, I lolled in my deck-chair, clothed in my Cambridge blue sleeping-suit, and Doe lay with his pink stripes peeping from beneath the grey embroidered kimono.
It had become a regular practice, our nightly talk with Monty on what he called "Big Things." Certainly he did most of the talking. But his ideas were so new and illuminating, and he opened up such undreamed-of vistas of thought, that we were pleased to lie lazily and listen.
"What's it to be to-night?" he began, as he walked up to us; but he suddenly saw our pyjama outfit, and was very rude about it, calling us "popinjays," and "degenerate æsthetes." "My poor boys," he summed up, as he dropped into the chair, which we had thoughtfully placed between us for his judgment throne, "you can't help it, but you're a public nuisance and an offence against society. What's it to be to-night?"
"Tell us about confession," I said, and curled myself up to listen.
"Right," agreed Monty.
"But wait," warned Doe. "You're not going to get me to come to confession. I value your good opinion too highly."
"My dear Gazelle, don't be absurd. I'll have your promise to-night."
"You won't!"
"I will! Here goes."
And Monty opened with a preliminary bombardment in which, in his shattering style, he fired at us every argument that ever has been adduced for private confession—"the Sacrament of Penance," as he startled us by calling it. The Bible was poured out upon us. The doctrine and practice of the Church came hurtling after. Then suddenly he threw away theological weapons, and launched a specialised attack on each of us in turn, obviously suiting his words to his reading of our separate characters. He turned on me, and said:
"You see, Rupert. Confession is simply the consecration of your own natural instinct—the instinct to unburden yourself to one who waits with love and a gift of forgiveness—the instinct to have someone in the world who knows exactly all that you are. You realise that you are utterly lonely, as long as you are acting a part before all the world. But your loneliness goes when you know of at least one to whom you stand revealed."
As he said it, my whole soul seemed to answer "Yes."
"It's so," he continued. "Christianity from beginning to end is the consecration of human instincts."
So warmed up was he to his subject that he brought out his next arguments like an exultant player leading honour after honour from a hand of trumps. He slapped me triumphantly on the knee, and brought out his ace:
"The Christ-idea is the consecration of the instinct to have a visible, tangible hero for a god."
Again he slapped me on the knee, and said:
"The Mass is the consecration of the instinct to have a place and a time and an Objective Presence, where one can touch the hem of His garment and worship."
That was his king. He emphasised his final argument on my knee more triumphantly than ever.
"And confession is the consecration of the instinct to unburden your soul; to know that you are not alone in your knowledge of yourself; to know that at a given moment, by a definite sacrament, your sins are blotted away, as though they had never been."
His victorious contention, by its very impulse, carried its colours into my heart. I yielded to his conviction that Catholic Christianity held all the honours. But I fancy I had wanted to capitulate, before ever the attack began.
"By Jove," I said. "I never saw things like that before."
"Of course you didn't," he snapped.
Having broken through my front, he was re-marshalling his arguments into a new formation, ready to bear down upon Doe, when that spirited youth, who alone did any counter-attacking, assumed the initiative, and assaulted Monty with the words:
"It's no good. If I made my confession to a priest who'd been my friend, I'd never want to see him again for shame. I'd run round the corner, if he appeared in the street."
"On the contrary," said Monty, "you'd run to meet him. You'd know that you were dearer to him than you could possibly have been, if you had never gone to him in confession. You'd know that your relations after the sacred moment of confession were more intimate than ever before."
I saw Doe's defence crumbling beneath this attack. I knew he would instantly want these intimate relations to exist between Monty and himself. Monty, subtly enough, had borne down on that part of Doe's make-up which was most certain to give way—his yielding affectionateness.
And, while Doe remained silent and thoughtful, Monty attacked with a new weight of argument at a fresh point—Doe's love of the heroic.
"Don't you think," he asked, "that, if you've gone the whole way with your sins, it's up to a sportsman to go the whole way with his confession. And anybody knows that it's much more difficult to confess to God through a priest than in the privacy of one's own room. It's difficult, but it's the grand thing; and so it appeals to an heroic nature more."
"Yes, I see that," assented Doe.
Monty said nothing further for awhile, as if hoping we would declare our decision without any prompting from him. But we were shy and silent; and at last he asked:
"Well, what's the decision?"
"I'll come to you," I said, "if you'll show me how to do it all."
He replied nothing. I believe he was too happy to speak. Then he turned to Doe.
"Gazelle, what about you?"
And Doe said one of those engaging things that only he could utter:
"I imagine I ought to do it for love of Our Lord. But s'posing I know that isn't the real motive—s'posing I feel that someone has been sent into my life to put it right, and I do it rather for—for him?"
There Monty was beaten. Doe's meaning was too plain; and the rich prize it threw at Monty's feet too overwhelming. The only answer he could give was: "You must try and link it to love for the Higher One."
"All right," said Doe, simply. "I'll try."
A silence of unusual length followed. The noise of the ship going through the water, and the beat of the engines, assumed the monopoly of sound. Doe and I were thinking of the thorny and troublesome path of confession, which in a few days we must traverse. And Monty indicated what his thoughts were by the remark with which he prepared to close that night's conversation under the stars.
"The two cardinal dogmas of my faith are—"
"The Mass and confession," I volunteered, in a flash of impudence.
"Don't interrupt, you rude little cub. They are these. Just as there is more beauty in nature than ugliness, so there is more goodness in humanity than evil, and more happiness in the world than sorrow....
"Now and then one is allowed a joy that would outweigh years of disappointment. You two pups have given me one of those joys to-night. It's my task to make this voyage your Vigil; and a perfect Vigil. It's all inexpressibly dear to me. I'm going to send you down the gangway when you go ashore to this crusade—properly absolved by your Church. I'm going to send you into the fight—white."
CHAPTER V
PENANCE
§1
Upon the rail leaned Doe and I watching the waves break away from the ship. It was morning, and we were troubled—troubled over the awful difficulty of making our life confession on the morrow. Monty had given much pains to preparing us. He had sat with each under the awning on sunny days, and told him how to do it. We were to divide our lives into periods: our childhood, our schooldays, and our life in the army. We were to search each period carefully, and note down on a single sheet of writing-paper the sins that we must confess. But, wanting to do it thoroughly, I had already reached my ninth sheet. And I was still only at the beginning of my schooldays. I had acknowledged this to Monty, who smiled kindly, and said: "It is a Via Dolorosa, isn't it? But carry on. For the joy that is set before you, endure the cross."
"It was easy enough," complained Doe, "to say frankly 'everything' when he asked us what we had to confess; but, when you've got to go into details, it's the limit. I wish I were dead. Monty gave me a long list of questions for self-examination, and I had to go back and ask him for more. They didn't nearly cover all I'd done."
I couldn't help smiling.
"Yes," proceeded Doe, "Monty laughed too, and said: 'Don't get rattled. You're one of the best, and proving it every moment.' And that brings me to my other difficulty. Rupert, all my life I've done things for my own glory; and I did want to make this confession a perfect thing, free from wrong motives like that. But you've no idea how self-glorification has eaten into me. I find myself hoping Monty will say mine is the best life confession he has ever heard. Isn't it awful?" He sighed and murmured: "I wonder if I shall ever do an absolutely perfect thing."
Such a character as Doe's must ever love to unrobe itself before a friend; and he continued:
"No, I know my motives are mixed with wrong. For example, I don't believe I should do this, if some other chaplain, instead of Monty, had asked me to do it. And your saying you'd do it had much too much to do with my consenting. But I am trying to do it properly. And, after turning my life inside out, I've come to the conclusion that I'm a bundle of sentiment and self-glorification. The only good thing that I can see in myself is that where I love I give myself utterly. It's awful."
So, you see, in these words did Doe admit that the dog-like devotion, which he had once given to Radley, was transferred to Monty. In my own less intense way I felt the same thing. Radley had become remote, and ceased to be a force in our lives; Monty reigned in his stead. We were boys; and what's the use of pretending? A boy's affection is not eternal.
Of Doe's confession I can relate no more. It withdraws itself into a privacy. I can but tell you the tale of my own experience.
§2
Monty's cabin was to be his confessional. I was to go to him early the next morning, as I had been detailed for Submarine Watch for the remainder of the day.
I approached his door, stimulating myself for the ordeal by saying "In half an hour I shall have told all, and the thing will be done." A certain happiness fought in my mind against my shrinking from self-humiliation. Two moods wrestled in me; the one said: "The long-dreaded moment is on you"; the other said: "The eagerly awaited moment has come."
I found Monty ready for me, robed in a surplice and violet stole. In front of the place where I was to kneel was a crucifix.
"Kneel there," said Monty, "and, if necessary, look at that. He was so much a man like us that He kept the glory that was set before Him as a motive for enduring the cross."
I knelt down. Nervousness suddenly possessed me, and my voice trembled, as I read the printed words:
"Father, give me thy blessing, for I have sinned."
Then nervousness left me. The scene became very calm. It seemed to be taking place somewhere out of the world. The worldly relations of the two taking part in it changed as in a transfiguration. I ceased to think of Monty as a lively friend. He had become a stately priest, and I a penitent. He had become a father, and I a child.
With a quiet deliberateness that surprised me, I said the "Confiteor," and accused myself of the long catalogue of sins that I had prepared. It was almost mechanical. Such merit as there may have been in my exhaustive confession must have lain in what conquering of obstacles I achieved before I came to my knees in Monty's presence, because I was conscious of no meritorious effort then. It was as if I had battled against a running current, and had at last got into the stream; for now, as I spoke in the confessional, I was just floating without exertion down the current.
When I had finished, Monty sat without saying a word. I kept my face in my hands, and waited for the counsel that he would offer.
He gave me the very thing that my opening manhood was craving; one clear and lofty ideal. I had felt blindly for it that far-off time when, as a small boy, the recollection of my grandfather's words: "That Rupert, the best of the lot," had lifted me out of cheating and lies. I had aspired towards it, but had not seen it, that evening outside Kensingtowe's baths. I had seen it hazily that day the old Colonel spoke of our Youth and our High Calling.
And now Monty set the vision in front of me. I was to see three ideals, Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, and merge them all in one vision—Beauty. For Goodness was only beauty in morals, and Truth was only beauty in knowledge. And I was to overcome my sins, not by negatively fighting against them when they were hard upon me, but by positively pursuing in the long days free from temptation my goal of Beauty. Then the things which I had confessed would gradually drop out of my life, as things which did not fit in with my ideal. For they were not good, nor true, nor beautiful.
"Pursue Beauty," he said, "like the Holy Grail."
With my head still bowed in my hands, I felt that happiness which comes upon men when they grasp a great idea. I felt lofty resolution and serene confidence flowing into me like wine.
"And, finally," said this masterly priest, "know how certain you can be that the absolution which I am going to pronounce is full and final. God only asks a true penitence, and you can offer Him no fairer fruits of penitence than those you have brought this morning. Know, then, that there will be no whiter soul in all God's church than yours, when you leave this room. For you will be as white as when you left the baptismal font. Now listen. You shall hear what was worked for you on Calvary."
I listened, and heard him speak with studied solemnity the words of absolution. And if a feeling can be said to grow up and get older, then there came upon me at that moment the feeling of a child released to play in the sunlight; only it was that feeling grown to a man's estate.
I rose from my knees to find that I was standing again in the world. I saw a ship's cabin, and a man removing a violet stole from a white surplice. It didn't seem a time in which to talk, so I turned the handle of the cabin door, and went out quietly.
I went straight to my Submarine Watch on the deck. There was a glow pervading me, as of something pleasant which had just occurred. Forgive me if it be weak to have these fleeting moments of exaltation, but I was seeing goodness, truth, and beauty in everything. The bright sunlight was beauty; of course it was; the blue sea was beauty. And it all had something to do with beauty of character and beauty of life.
Imagine me this rare day, lost in my thoughts, as I watched the sea running by, or the new world coming to meet the bows. Sometimes I watched it with my naked eyes. Sometimes I hastened the approach of the new things by bringing my field glasses to bear upon them. And, all the time, I had a sense of satisfaction, as of something pleasant which had just occurred.
At first the broad blue floor of the sea stretched right away on every side without a sail anywhere to suggest that it was a medium of traffic. The sky, a far paler blue, met the horizon all round. It was only a slight restlessness over the surface that made the Mediterranean distinguishable from a vast and still inland lake. The ship plied steadily onward in the opposite direction to the sun, which looked down upon the scene with its hot glance unmodified by cloud or haze.
With my glasses I swept the empty waters. At last I saw, sketched over there with palest touch, a line of mountains—just such a range as a child would draw, one peak having a narrow point, another a rounded summit. This land lay at so great a distance that it was shadowless, and looked like a long bit of broken slate with its jagged ends uppermost. I cast in my mind whether Gallipoli loomed like this: and Gallipoli, somehow, seemed more peaceful since that satisfying event of the morning.
I dropped my glasses. For the first time I realised that I was setting out to do something difficult for England. Actually I! I glowed in the thought, for to-day, if ever, I was in an heroic mood. I touched for a moment the perfect patriotism. Yes, if Beauty demanded it, I could give all for England—all.
As the day went by, we seemed to be rounding that mountainous island, for it lingered on our port, always changing its aspect, but always remaining beautiful.
The whole scene was Beauty. And this Beauty, urged the voice of the priest, was to have something to say in moments when I must choose between this bad deed and that good one. Of the two, I was to do the one that was the more like the Mediterranean on a summer day.
Oh, I had a clear enough ideal now. And why had I never seen before, as Monty had seen, that, just as there was far more beauty in seas and hills than ugliness, so on the whole there was more goodness in human characters than evil, and, assuredly, more happiness in life than pain. And the old Colonel, too, had seen beauty in youth and strength; he had seen it triumphing in Penny's death and in all this sanguinary Dardanelles campaign.
Yes, I had closed on the idea. Even the lively excesses of Major Hardy's mob, even Jimmy Doon's cynical humour at the prospect of death had much in them like the Mediterranean on a summer day.
Or, say, on a summer night like this. For, as the evening wore on, we were still passing this long island; and a pale mist had risen in a narrow ribbon from the sea-line, and hidden a lower belt of its hills from my view, so that the peaks towered like Mount Ararats above a rising flood of fog-damp; and, as this bank of mist rose upward, the sun sank downward, a disc of gold fire.
I followed it with my glasses; and so rapid was its descent that, before I could count a hundred, it had dipped beneath the water-line—become a flaming semicircle—then only a glowing rim—and disappeared. It left a few minutes' afterglow, with the sky every shade from crimson at the horizon to blue at the zenith.
The world got darker, and the waves, breaking from the ship's bows, began to spill a luminous phosphorescence on the sea. I watched a little longer; and then the stars and the phosphorescent wave-crests glistened in a Mediterranean night.
CHAPTER VI
MAJOR HARDY AND PADRE MONTY FINISH THE VOYAGE
§1
But I must hurry on. Here am I dawdling over what happened indoors in the minds of two boys, while out of doors nations were battling against nations, and the whole world was in upheaval. Here am I happily describing so local a thing as the effort of a big-hearted priest to rebuild our spiritual lives on the quiet moments of the Mass and the strange glorious mystery of penance, while the great Division which captured the beaches of Cape Helles had been brought to a standstill by the impregnable hill of Achi Baba, and uncounted troopships like our own were pouring through the Mediterranean to retrieve the fight.
On with the war, then. One morning I was wakened by much talking and movement all over the boat, and by Doe's leaping out of his top bunk, kicking me in passing, and disappearing through the cabin door. Back he came in a minute, crying: "You must come out and see this lovely, white dream-city. We're outside Malta."
I rushed out to find Valetta, the grand harbour of Malta, on three sides of us. We were anchored; and the hull of the Rangoon, which looked very huge now, was surrounded by Maltese bumboats.
Shore leave was granted us. And, ashore, we hurried through the blazing heat to visit the hospitals and learn from the crowds of Gallipoli sick and wounded something about the fighting at Helles. These cheery patients shocked our optimism by telling us that it was hopeless to expect the capture of the hill of Achi Baba by frontal assault and that any further advance at Cape Helles was scratched off the programme. The hosts of troops that were passing through Malta must, they surprised us by declaring, be destined for some secret move elsewhere than at Helles, for there was no room for them on the narrow tongue of land beneath Achi Baba.
"We're wild to know what's in the wind," said a sister. "The stream of transports has never stopped for the last few days."
That we could well believe. There were two huge liners crammed with khaki figures in the harbour that morning.
"We are going to win, I imagine?" asked Monty, with a note of doubt.
"O lord, yes," replied a superbly bonny youngster, without a right arm. "But I don't envy you going to the Peninsula. It's heat, dust, flies, and dysentery. And Mudros is ten times worse."
"What's Mudros?" asked I.
"Mudros," broke in Doe, blushing, as he aired his classical learning, "is a harbour in the Isle of Lemnos famous in classical—"
"Mudros," interrupted the one-armed man, proud of his experience, "is a harbour in the Island of Lemnos, and the filthiest hole—"
"Mudros," continued Doe, refusing to be beaten, "is a harbour in the Isle of Lemnos, which is the island where Jason and the Argonauts landed, and found Hypsipele and the women who had murdered their husbands. Jupiter hurled Vulcan from Heaven, and he fell upon Lemnos. And it's sad to relate that Achilles and Agamemnon had a bit of a dust-up there."
"Well, that may be," said the one-armed hero, rather crushed by Doe's weighty lecture. "But you're going to Mudros first in your transport, and you'll probably die of dysentery there."
"Good Lord," said I.
We selected the ward where we would have our beds when we came down wounded, and the particular pretty sister who should nurse us; and went out into the dazzling sun. Having climbed to a high level that overlooked the harbour, we leaned against a stone parapet, and examined the French warships that slept, with one eye open, up a narrow blue waterway. For Malta in 1915 was a French naval base.
"Sad to see them there, sir," said a convalescent Tommy, pointing to the grey cruisers flying the tricolour. "They've been bottled up there, since the submarines appeared off Helles and sank the Majestic and t'other boats. There's only destroyers loafing around Cape Helles now, sir."
"Great Scott, is that so?" asked Monty. "But I suppose we're going to win?"
"O lord, yes," said the Tommy.
We got back to the Rangoon just before sundown. And, when the sun began to soften and to bathe the white buildings of Valetta in ruddy hues, our siren boomed out its farewell, and two English girls in a small boat waved an incessant good-bye. Crowds gathered to brandish handkerchiefs, as our transport crept away, with the boys singing: "Roaming in the gloaming on the banks of the Dardanelles," and yelling: "Are we downhearted? NO! Are we going to win? YES!"
"Well, that's the last of Malta," murmured Jimmy Doon. "Another landmark in our lives gone."
§2
Two days' run brought us outside Alexandria. And the confoundedly learned Doe, pointing out to me the pink and yellow town upon the African sands, among its palms and its shipping, said: "Behold the city of Alexander the Great, of Julius Cæsar and Cleopatra; the home of the Greek scriptures; and the see of the great saints, Clement, Athanasius, and Cyril."
So I did what he wanted. I called him a Classical Encyclopædia, at which he looked uncomfortable and pleased.
It was Alexandria right enough. We had reached at last the base of the Dardanelles fight, and entered the outskirts of that ancient imperial world, which the old Colonel had told us was the theatre of the campaign.
Travelling very slowly, we steamed into the huge harbour. And soon we were moored against one of its forty quays, and being addressed in an infernal jangle of tongues by hundreds of begging Arabs who came rushing through the guns, limbers and field kitchens arrayed on the quay.
More anxious than ever for news of the fight, we applied for shore leave, and, after lunch, went down the gangway, and trod the soil of Africa for the first time.
At once, like an overpowering personality, the East rose up to greet us, oppressing us with its merciless Egyptian sun and its pungent smell of dark humanity. Heady with the sun, and sick with the smell, we found ourselves in one of the worst streets of Alexandria, the "Rue des Sœurs," a filthy thoroughfare of brothels masquerading as shops, and of taverns, which, like the rest of the world, had gone into military dress and called themselves: "The Army and Navy Bar," "The Lord Kitchener Bar," and "The Victory Bar."
Phew! the sweat and the stench! The East was a vapour bath. What a climate for a white man to make war in! And yet everywhere in this city of Alexander and Athanasius, British and Australian soldiers sauntered on foot or drove government waggons through the streets. Sick and wounded, too, roamed abroad in their blue hospital uniforms. Only too pleased to display before three eager novices their superior acquaintance with Gallipoli, they told us the story we had heard at Malta: the Helles army, firmly stopped by the hill of Achi Baba, was melting away in the atrocious heat; but some startling new venture was expected, for the forty quays of Alexandria had been scarcely sufficient to cater for the troops and stores that had put in there; and all the hospitals in Egypt had been emptied to admit twenty thousand casualties.
We hired a buggy, and drove back through the same odorous street to the dockyard, and, having given the thief of an Arab driver a third of his demands, went straight to our cabins to rinse our mouths out.
Next day at sundown, the siren boomed good-bye. Perhaps there was a military reason for it, but we always left these ports at sunset. It was sunset, as we steamed out of Malta; and now, with the sky flushed and the air rose-tinted, we began to slip gently out of the harbour, amid cheers and handwavings from every ship that we passed. We were picking our course between the ships, when Monty plucked my sleeve, and, pointing to a home-bound liner, murmured:
"Beauty, Rupert."
I looked, and saw what he meant. For in the big liner's bows two tiny English children clad in white, a little boy and girl, waved mechanically under the instructions of their sweet-faced English mother, who, though a young one, looked with a mother's eyes at our yellow rows of helmeted lads, and waved the more energetically (I doubt not) as she strove to keep back her tears. In the sad eyes of that youthful mother I saw looking out at us the maternal love of her sex for all the sons of woman. She was the last Englishwoman that many of these boys ever saw.
As we drew near the entrance of the harbour, a cheery Englishman was swept past in a white-sailed craft, and called out, as the wind bore him away: "Good-bye, lads. Do your duty, lads. Give 'em hell ev'ry time." Almost the next minute he was a white speck among the shipping of the harbour, and we were out in the open sea.
§3
The Rangoon had taken aboard at Alexandria a number of new officers who, after being wounded on Gallipoli and treated in Egypt, were now returning as fit for duty. One showed a long, white scar across his scalp, where a bullet had just missed his brain. Another, who had still two bullets in his body, had been with our schoolfellow Moles White in the River Clyde on the great April morning. These were people to be stared at and admired. They occupied exactly the same position to us as the bloods did when we were at school. They spoke with ease and grace of Mudros Harbour, of the great April landing at Helles, of the Eski Line, the River Clyde, the Gully Ravine, and Asiatic Annie. We felt very near the trenches, when they thus tossed fabled names about in commonplace conversations. They never used the name "Gallipoli," but always "The Peninsula." We made a mental note of this.
And they affected very shrewd ideas about the surprise push that was coming off; but since they only nodded their heads wisely and refused to be drawn, we suspected that they knew no more about it than we did. They would point, with the pride of previous knowledge, to the purple-hilled islands of the Ægean that we were passing all day: Rhodes, and Patmos, and Mitylene. They laughed with damnable superiority at our extensive kit, declaring that for their part they had left everything at the base, and were carrying only a few pounds of necessaries to the Peninsula. Some of them walked the deck in private's uniform, maintaining that it was suicide to go to the Peninsula trenches in the distinctive dress of an officer. They were quite modest, simple folk, no doubt, but they certainly thought they were the only people who realised that there was a war on.
Jimmy Doon, who had heard nothing of his lost draft at Alexandria, and was much relieved thereby, became incorrigible when he smelt the whiff of the trenches brought by these heroes. He would invite our subscriptions to the daily sweepstake with the words: "Come along, fork out. Last few sweeps of your life." And he would take me aside and say: "I suppose I shall be daisy-pushing soon. Tedious, isn't it?"
Late one afternoon, when we were only an hour's run from Mudros, there came by wireless the inspiring news that solved the riddle of the chain of transports in the Mediterranean and the empty hospitals in Alexandria. The simple typed message that was pinned on the notice-board, and could scarcely be read for the crowds surrounding it, ran: "We have landed in strong force at Suvla Bay and penetrated seven miles inland. Ends."
A new landing, hurrah! April 25th over again! The miracle of Helles repeated at Suvla! Out with the maps to study the strategy of the move! The map showed us Suvla Bay far up the coast of the Peninsula, a long way behind Achi Baba. We measured seven miles, and decided that the Turks' communications with Achi Baba must have been cut. "Curse it," said an enthusiast, "we're just too late." We had visions of the Turkish Army flying from the Helles front in frantic efforts to escape the surrounding threatened by this landing in their rear. We saw them abandoning their impregnable positions at Achi Baba, abandoning the forts of the Narrows, and retreating, if they could elude destruction, upon Constantinople.
And while the strategists on deck were getting delirious in their prophecies, the ship steered a path round two outlying islets, and entered the deep indentation in Lemnos Island, which is the mighty, hill-locked harbour of Mudros. A little French destroyer, pearl-grey in the evening light, steamed past us, and the French sailors waved their arms, and danced a welcome to this troopship of their allies. The Rangoon yelled at them: "What price Suvla?" Some English sailors, towed past in coal barges, asked us whether we were downhearted, and we called back: "NO! What—price—SUVLA! Are we going to win? YES!"
Now, I ask you, have the subalterns an excuse, or have they not, for a rough-house this night? It's their last night aboard, for to-morrow morning the smaller boats will come and carry them to the deadly Peninsula: and it's the evening that has brought the news of the Suvla landing. Excuse or not, they fetch the money out of their pockets at dinner, and order the champagne before the soup is off the table. Jimmy Doon, whipping the golden cap off his magnum of "bubbly wine," says: "I've the horrible feeling I shall be dead this time to-morrow. Pass your glasses, damn you. Cheerioh! Many 'appy returns from the Great War—some day." "Cheerioh, Jimmy," we acknowledge. "'Appy days!"
And, when the hundred subalterns, who form the first sitting at dinner, vacate their places at the tables to make room for the seniors, who come in state to the second sitting, anyone who sees them rushing upstairs to the lounge, the bar, and the piano, knows that there will be noise before the clock is an hour older. It begins in the lounge: but the impulse of the spirit of riot is too strong for the rough-house to be localised there. It's the end of the voyage, and they must forthwith go and cheer the General. They must cheer the Captain. Above all they must cheer Major Hardy, the old sport! The mass of subalterns flows down the first flight of stairs to the square gallery which overlooks the dining saloon, like railings looking down into a bear-pit. And, like the bears, the seniors were feeding in the bottom of the saloon. They look up from their nuts and wine to see a hundred flushed young faces staring from the gallery at their meal.
"Three cheers for the General!" cries a voice in the gallery.
Three of the noisiest fill the ship. And, when a hundred British officers have yelled three cheers, it's in the nature of them to go on and sing: "For he's a jolly good fellow," and to finish up with a final cheer that leaves its forerunners nowhere. It's a way they have in the Army.
"Speech! Speech!" demand exalted voices.
The General rises: and that's an excuse, heaven help us, for more cheers, and "He's a jolly good fellow" all over again. The seniors are young enough to beat time on the tables by hammering with their spoons till the plates dance; and by tinkling their glasses like tubular bells. In the last cheer one major so far forgets himself—his name is Hardy—as to let go with a cat-call, after which he immediately retires into his monocle, and pretends he hasn't.
The General, who is a kindly old brigadier with twinkling eyes, says: "I can't make a speech, but I'll sing you a song." He raises his glass to the gallery, and to the hundred faces looking down, and starts in a wheezy tenor: "For they are jolly good fellows." He gets no further, but takes advantage of the tumult of cheering to resume his seat.
The Captain, a naval hero of the Helles landing, is put through it. And in his speech he says: "If the Navy is really the father and mother of the Army in this Gallipoli stunt, then I say—father and mother are proud of their children"—(cheers from the ship's officers). "The ships came as close in shore as possible—and always will, gentlemen, as long as you're on that plagued Peninsula—but, by God! it was the Army that left the shelter of the ships, and went through the blizzard of bullets on to the beaches of Cape Helles."
Can such a compliment be acknowledged otherwise than uproariously? Close your ears, if you can't stand a noise.
The Chief Officer is put through it. And by way of a speech he says: "Suppose, instead of cheering me, you cheer the fellows who have landed at Suvla?"
"Highland Honours!" yells a voice. And the seniors rise, stand upon their chairs, put one foot on the table amongst the plates, and, raising their glasses, join in the musical honours given to the new army at Suvla.
Major Hardy is called, and a speech demanded from him. Loudly applauded, he limps to the middle of the saloon, puts his monocle in his eye, and says one sentence: "I never heard such bloody nonsense in all my life." Releasing his monocle so that it falls on his chest, he limps back to his seat, and apologises to Monty.
The seniors having been thus sporting, it occurs to some bright young devil that it would be a graceful thing to sing "Home, sweet Home" to them, as they finish their meal. And "Home, sweet Home" leads naturally to "Auld Lang Syne," sung with linked arms and swaying bodies.
And then the crowd of subalterns, worked up by the licence allowed it, like a horse excited by a head-free gallop, returns in force to the lounge. The pianist strikes up "The Old Folks at Home." A Scotsman breaks in with the proclamation that It's oh! but he's longing for his ain folk; Though he's far across the sea, Yet his heart will ever be Away in dear old Scotland with his ain folk. And an Irishman, feeling that there's too much of Scotland about these songs, begins to publish the attractions of the hills of Donegal: