Pierce Hammersly went on board the Sorontia just as the sun was setting. The ship was a thirty-thousand tonner, and her black hull and white superstructure towered like a cliff above the dock sheds and derricks. Pierce had a struggle to get his baggage on board. He was suffering from a sense of turmoil and excitement when he went in search of his cabin.
“I say, steward, is this B deck?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And where’s Cabin 37?”
“Second on the left, sir. I shall be looking after you, sir. Three-berth cabin with porthole. You had better take the single berth, sir.”
“Excellent. I suppose we sail at any moment?”
The steward, a plump, shiny-faced soul, gave him a humorous look.
“Any moment, sir. Perhaps this time next week.”
Pierce was first man in Cabin 37, and so won the single bunk under the porthole. The cabin was beautifully fitted with mahogany furniture, a pile carpet, mirrors, and a couple of easy chairs.
“Dinner is still on, sir.”
“That’s a good idea, steward. Which way to the saloon?”
“Right aft along B deck, sir. I’ll see to your baggage and get it unpacked.”
“Is it necessary?”
“Well, sir, you may be on board a month.”
“A month?”
“I’ve known stranger things happen.”
Pierce found his way to the saloon, and to an excellent six-course dinner. He sat next an old Quartermaster Captain, a ranker in days of yore, whose rosy face glistened happily.
“Nothing wrong with this sort of active service—what?”
“They seem to be doing us well.”
“Well! It’s like being a little millionaire—for the price of a drink. Steward, another whisky. Have you any ice on board?”
“There will be ice every day, sir.”
The old soldier chuckled.
“We’ll make the most of it. This sort of thing can’t last.”
The Sorontia lay anchored in the estuary for three whole days. No one was allowed on board, and no one was allowed to leave her—a wise provision, though it made the home-hungry men fret and swear.
“My wife’s only about a mile away,” said one of Pierce’s cabin comrades, “and I can’t see her. It seems bally rot.”
“Rot! Not at all!” quoth a hard-bitten second lieutenant of three-and-forty; “this isn’t a woman’s job. We have left them behind.”
They could write letters, for a mail was to go ashore before the Sorontia sailed, and Pierce covered ten sheets in writing to Janet, and half that number in a letter to his father. He had recovered a superficial optimism, and the crowd about him was cheery. There was plenty to eat and drink and smoke, and unlimited bridge in the evening, so no one had any right to grumble.
The Sorontia sailed on the fourth day. She glided slowly down the estuary, bellowing like a great black leviathan, and her trumpetings made Hammersly picture her as a great beast setting out upon some fabulous adventure. He remained on the saloon deck with a crowd of brother officers, watching England turning from green to grey. A few khaki figures working on a fort stood up and waved caps and cheered the Sorontia as she slid by. Then came the open sea where two destroyers picked them up, and galloped like greyhounds on either beam.
Pierce slept well that first night, although the married subaltern in his cabin talked for half an hour about the submarine peril, and the inflatable waistcoat he meant to wear all through the voyage. Next day they were in the Bay, and five men out of ten ceased to be interested in anything but the proximity of a basin. Pierce lay in his bunk for a day and a half, abject and miserable, till the steward played the stern nurse and almost ordered him to get up.
Pierce got up, shaved—in anguish—and felt better. By tea-time he was growing hungry, and he ate a most creditable dinner. They passed the Rock that night, and Pierce saw it as a huge, shadowy outline, while some African town, whose name he did not know, glittered with southern lights.
The days were pleasant enough, but the nights were abominable. Every porthole had to be screwed up, and some three thousand men lived on their own air. The heat and the fog in the crowded smoking-room passed description; men sat in their shirt-sleeves, and drank and sweated over their cards. Pierce Hammersly lay naked in his bunk and listened to the married subaltern talking of tragedies and terrors in his sleep.
By day he sat in a deck-chair and watched the solemn and mysterious African coast glide by. It was like a great blue-grey cloud bank dotted here and there with the white glitter of a town. The sea was a sheet of sapphire, turning a blackish green when smoke palls from the Sorontia’s funnels drifted over it. There were mock alarms, when the troops rushed to their stations and put on life-belts. Everybody made a joke of it, which is the English way.
They called at Malta, and Pierce went ashore for a few hours. Gossip grew when they put to sea again. A little Jew doctor man, who sat opposite Pierce at mess, had been to one of the hospitals and was full of news.
“We’re for Gallipoli all right.”
Eager faces were turned to him, nor was Pierce the only man who flinched.
“How do you know, Doc?”
“Casualties—sickness. We’re wanted. No Salonica stunt this voyage. I shall end up at Mudros—in a hospital there.”
He went on gobbling, and Pierce hated him. The man was a gourmand and a gross feeder, and it was astonishing how much he could eat. He tore bread to pieces with unclean, be-ringed fingers, and hung his head over his plate like a dog. And Pierce hated him; so did the rest. This fellow was likely to have a soft time on a Greek island, and they almost felt him gloating over it and sucking his teeth.
“Fancy being handled by that!” said someone to Pierce on the stairs; “why, blood’s cleaner.”
Now men are very simple creatures when they are stripped of their affections, and herded together in a crowd to face danger and death. Cleverness counts no longer; the elemental strengths and tendernesses of the individual man shine out, and the man who has a little of the woman in him will be wiser than the most acute philosopher. Pierce Hammersly used to lie stretched in a deck-chair and watch these men in khaki drifting to and fro along the deck. The spirit of adventure was strong in most of them; their faces were cheerful and well fed—the faces of men who lived for the day and did very little thinking. Their uniforms were new and clean, and life could still be healthy and gay; blood and dirt, flies and sickness had not become realities. Here and there Pierce discovered grave, foreseeing eyes and sad foreheads. There were men who looked back at England as well as looked to the land ahead. He noticed that the saloon decks and dining-rooms of the Sorontia grew more silent as her voyage drew to its close; a few groups continued to be noisy, and to drink heavily and excitedly at night.
Then came the submarine attack. It happened about five in the afternoon. The Sorontia trumpeted with her siren; ten seconds later she fired her bow gun.
Pierce, rushing along the deck, saw a youngster in front of him jump in the air, startled by the bang of the gun. Men were pouring to their stations, men who chattered excitedly, men with set faces, men with fear in their eyes. The Sorontia vomited brown streams of humanity on to her decks; there was no shouting; the discipline was good; the brown ranks formed up and stood steady, each man with his life-belt on.
Pierce Hammersly found himself scrambling down a ladder, and snatching at a life-belt that hung from a handrail. The unattached officers paraded together on the starboard side of C deck. The married subaltern was trying to tie the tapes of his belt, but his hands shook so badly that he could not manage to make a knot. Pierce did it for him, though his own fingers fumbled not a little.
“Anybody seen anything?”
“What’s that over there?”
“Our own wash. She’s turned almost in her own length.”
Bang went the stern gun. A maxim started hammering.
“The beast must be pretty close.”
“Well, we sha
ll know all about it, one way or another, in five minutes.”
They stood at attention, waiting, seeing nothing but the stretch of sea in front of them. Hardly a man spoke. The silence was queer, expectant, solemn. Pierce Hammersly noticed that the married subaltern was nearly as white as his life-belt, and that his nose looked pinched and cold.
The stern gun boomed again. Everybody was wondering, waiting for the fatal crash.
“Wonder if they have fired at us?”
“Confound it, I’ve left my pipe in the smoking-room!”
“Isn’t that a periscope over there?”
“Blessed if I can see anything.”
Minutes passed. The Sorontia was spuming through the water at a good twenty knots an hour. Nothing happened; the minutes passed.
The rigid men relaxed a little. The feeling of tension slackened. Someone made a joke, and a laugh went round. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes slipped by, and there was nothing but the blue sea and the blue sky above it.
“She must have missed us,” said somebody, “and we have got the pace of her.”
And that was just what had happened.
That was Pierce Hammersly’s first taste of real danger, and he had experienced an intense and thrilling curiosity that could not be described as fear. He was rather pleased with himself on the whole, but he discovered that a sudden limit had been set to the imaginations of innocence. He had stood up and faced a chance of death, and the experience was quite different from what he had expected it to be, yet the adventure left a new seriousness behind it, and a sudden vivid sense of grim reality. Scores of green soldiers upon the Sorontia saw truth clearly and saw it whole. Much of the hypocritical and smug nonsense talked at home became instantly as potent as an emetic. “Business as usual.” “Doing your bit making munitions.” “Volunteering—to stay at home!” Never has a war taught more bitter truths, never has a country sacrificed all that was most honourable and generous in itself, and spread a cowardly shield over the shirker and the cynic. Who prated in Parliament for the rights of our volunteers? They had no rights but the rights of the soldier, but orators waxed hot over the rights of the little laggards, those free citizens who were so free and noble, such proud electors, such patriots whose refrain was “Tell us it is necessary for us to do our duty and we will do it—under compulsion, not before.”
That submarine adventure produced one fine effect. It had so frightened the little Jew doctor that he could not eat his dinner.
He spluttered with indignation.
“It’s a scandal! Why don’t they give us an escort?”
And then to a fellow medico:
“We ought to be in a hospital ship. We ought not to be made to run these risks—highly trained experts.”
The other doctor snubbed him.
“Thank God we do run some risks. When I look at these infantry chaps I feel ashamed. It’s they who get hell.”
On the second morning they steamed through a glassy sea, and past a strange Greek island that was all bare rock and barren mystery. Hammersly studied it through his field-glasses, and his classic illusions were badly shocked. It looked a fitting place for the starving of the dogs that the Turks shipped from Constantinople.
About ten o’clock they sighted Lemnos, and a destroyer came fussing out to meet them. The submarine peril was at an end; they would have a few days’ peace before they had to face that other peril.
Pierce Hammersly leant on the rail, and watched the rocky island and its magnificent harbour rise out of the sea. The Sorontia worked her way in, and the whole panorama lay outspread before these English eyes. The island was a study in yellows and golds, with the blue sky above, and the blue harbour in its midst. The place teemed with shipping, battleships and cruisers, destroyers, transports, colliers, liners, pinnaces, motor-boats. Mudros town gleamed white; the quaint windmills, with their spindle wheels and conical roofs, showed up against the gold and blue. Hardly a tree was to be seen, but the glare of the sun beat upon the little figures of men drilling, upon acres of white tentage, mule-teams, gangs of labourers, dust, piles of timber and stores.
A sententious major, who was standing next to Pierce, grew eloquent and boastful.
“Most impressive, absolutely magnificent! A picture of Empire—what! Amphibious warfare! We are showing them a miracle. And some day before long those grey ships will be holding up Stamboul.”
The day passed in watching the wonderful life of that great harbour, while senior officers rushed off in panting motor-boats to report. Pierce felt a great desire to go ashore and stretch himself, look for Turkish prisoners and explore that Greek town over yonder. He wanted to see the French; anything that was French fascinated him.
There was a magnificent sunset that evening, the wild mountainous hills in the west standing out sharp and black against a sheet of red and gold. The sunburnt fields were the colour of umber, the water of the harbour a purplish blue. Pierce Hammersly leant over the rail of the saloon deck, and thought of Janet, and the woods at Scarshott, and old Porteous and the life at home. A deepening melancholy possessed him. That superb sunset depressed him, filled him with prophetic sadness.
The colours changed to hard yellows and steely greys. Memories gave place to a sense of cold contact with that grim and immediate future. Scores of men on board the Sorontia were turning their eyes towards that strip of country forty miles away across the sea.
What was it really like over there? What did the “real thing” mean? How did a man feel when the first shell burst near him?
Pierce Hammersly wondered.
Life seemed very strange.
CHAPTER XI
The Clyde boat, with all lights out, glided over the dark sea towards Cape Helles. Pierce Hammersly and a dozen other officers were bunched together on the forepart of the upper deck, watching the eastern sky and talking in undertones. The lower deck was packed with troops, drafts for various regiments, but the silence on board was astonishing and suggestive. It was like a ship of the dead gliding through the darkness over a black sea towards a land of shadows.
An indescribable melancholy reigned supreme. Hammersly felt it in the very marrow of his bones, and in the whispering voices of the men on either side of him. The great mystery lay over yonder in the darkness, that land of unknown chances where a man might leave his bones to rot or gain strange, transient glory.
A great sword of light swept suddenly across the sky.
“Hallo—a searchlight!”
“One of ours, I suppose.”
“It looked right up in the sky.”
Queer flashes stabbed the distant darkness, strange momentary glares, like summer lightning.
“Guns?”
“But I don’t hear anything.”
Raw, inexperienced, innocent, they watched these solemn phenomena with inquisitive awe. It seemed to be a sort of devil’s world towards which they were driving, the victims of fate, chillily resigned.
Presently a glitter of light showed all along above the water, outlining a vague, dark, looming mass. Then the glitter separated into hundreds of little points of light, and beyond them lay darkness, nothing but darkness.
“What the devil are all those lights?”
“Couldn’t say.”
Someone supplied a suggestion.
“Lights in dug-outs along the cliff.”
“Yes, that’s it.”
Half an hour later the Clyde boat lay moored inside an improvised pier made out of sunken steamers. The troops were told that they were to spend the night on board, and that they would land at dawn. Everything was strangely quiet. It never occurred to these innocents that they might be shelled.
Hammersly slept on a table in the saloon, with his haversack under his head. He woke up stiff, aching, in a most unwholesome temper, and some twenty other gentlemen were in much the same condition. The Clyde boat provided them with a touch of active service, in acute contrast to the Sorontia with her clean sheets and luxurious meals. There was no foo
d to be had on the Clyde boat, no hot tea or coffee, no hot water.
“I say, what about breakfast?”
A grinning steward trod on the illusion.
“You won’t get any breakfast here, sir.”
“But a pot of tea——”
“We don’t feed troops, sir; we only carry ’em.”
Bits of broken biscuit and oddments of chocolate were routed out of pockets. Pierce went in search of his baggage, found that his valise had been opened, and that his burberry had been stolen. He started the day hungry and exasperated.
They went ashore about six o’clock on the morning of a perfect day. The sea was blue, but everything else looked brown—the cliffs, the slopes of shovelled dirt, the beach, the men, the mules. A crowd of Greeks, swarthy ruffians, came down to unload the boats. Indians with their mule-carts bumped down the improvised roads. Swarms of soldiers in sun helmets, shirts and faded khaki trousers moved over the baked and dusty ground. There was dust everywhere—and flies.
Still not a shell, not the sound of a gun being fired. The Turks were lazy, or husbanding ammunition, and the amazing and laborious peacefulness of the scene struck Hammersly as extraordinary. He was waiting with several officers who were to be attached to units of the same division, while their baggage was being brought ashore.
“Damn it, I should enjoy some breakfast!”
“This is the real thing, my boy; don’t grouse.”
“I’m not grousing. I say, what swine those Greeks look! Classic beauty—what!”
They smoked cigarettes, and took in the strangeness of it all.
“I say, what happens to us?”
“We report at Army Corps Headquarters.”
“But do we?”
“We’ll try it, anyway.”
“And where may that be?”
“Round the cliff there. That landing officer chap told me.”
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