Part 12

The movements of the transports, store ships, and auxiliaries of all kinds were controlled from the _Achates_, and to cope with this work additional officers had been attached to her. An Admiral hoisted his flag in her, and brought his Staff, including two Assistant Clerks; three Captains joined as Naval Transport Officers--"N.T.O.'s"--and round her gangways hovered, night and day, a restless crowd of steamboats, picket-boats, and pinnaces--lent for various purposes from other ships. Each of these steamboats had its midshipman--some of them two, working watch and watch, twenty-four hours "on", and twenty-four hours "off" duty--with the result that the Honourable Mess was completely overrun with strangers.

With the Pink Rat, the Lamp-post, and Bubbles away _all_ the time, the Orphan, the Hun, and Rawlins--who relieved these, two in turn--away _most_ of the time, and the Pimple spending most of his days and a good many of his nights visiting transports with the Navigator, when that officer went away to anchor them in their proper places, there was practically no one left except Uncle Podger, the China Doll, and the Sub. Now the Sub was in charge of all steamboats; it was his duty to hoist them out of the water when they required repairs, to get the repairs carried out as quickly as possible, and then hoist them into the water again. He also was in charge of all the coaling and watering of these boats. These duties kept him so constantly employed that he very seldom spent much time in the gun-room. In fact, Barnes generally left something in his cabin for him to eat, whenever the opportunity permitted.

Of all the Honourable Mess, practically only Uncle Podger and the China Doll remained and came to meals as before. The result was that, twenty-four hours after the _Achates_ had anchored off "W" beach, the mess groaned under the weight of the Barbarians, and the Midianites, in the guise of tired, hungry snotties from other ships, and the Admiral's two Assistant Clerks had descended, pretty completely, on the fruitful land of her gun-room. They crowded down into it in their Condy's-fluid-stained "ducks"; they lay on the cushions and slept; lay in the one easy-chair and slept; came in at all hours of the day and night, demanding food, and drove the patient Barnes and the little messman nearly off their heads.

The miserable little rat of a messman, thoughtless of the morrow, and eager to turn an honest penny just as quickly as he could, produced all the stores he had laid in at Portsmouth and again at Malta--stores which had been intended to delight the stomachs of the Honourable Mess for many "moons": tins of dainty biscuits, cakes, boxes of chocolate and preserved fruit, bottles of anchovies, jars of bloater and anchovy paste, jars of Oxford marmalade, and tins of Oxford sausages and of tongue--and many other rare delicacies, impossible now to replace; and this insatiable crowd of sojourners realized, like one man, that though their work was hard and the hours long, their feet were indeed cast in fruitful and pleasing places. Now the Pimple and the China Doll worshipped their stomachs with an unswerving devotion, unalloyed by the pangs of indigestion, so watched these intruders working havoc among the gun-room stores with feelings of keen agony. They realized, only too well, the barrenness which would soon fall to their lot, and they implored the Sub to stop these devastating demands on luxuries and "extras" before it was too late. Worst blow of all: that one last barrel of beer wouldn't drip another drop, however hard you blew down the vent.

But the Sub was so seldom in the gun-room that he did not, for the first few days, realize the impending danger. It was on the third day, just as he had received an imploring, urgent order from the Commander, "to hoist in the General's picket-boat and hack away a coil of rope which had wrapped itself round the screw and shaft, and get her into the water again as quickly as ever he could", that he was waylaid by these two young gentlemen, who rushed to him with anxious faces. "Can't something be done? It's simply awful! One of the _Lord Nelson's_ snotties has just had his second box--his second box to-day--of those "chocs" with walnuts on the top!"

They ran back much faster than they came; but that very day the Sub had the whole tragedy brought vividly before him, when, later on, going down to his cabin for a cup of tea, and feeling he wanted something "tasty", he ordered a pot of anchovy paste.

Barnes came back with a long face. "That 'ere rat of a messman, 'e's been and gone and let all of 'em strange young gen'l'men 'ave all the han-chovy, sir. 'E ain't got none left, sir, but 'e 'as just one pot of chicken-and-'am what's gone an' got a bit mouldy. There won't be 'ardly nothink left of nothink, what with them strange young gen'l'men, and the young gen'l'men what's gone with the beach parties a-sending off chits for this and chits for that, as if this 'ere ship was a Lipton's store-shop."

"It's just as bad along in the canteen, for'ard, sir," he added dolefully; "beach parties and all of these stranger boats' crews, they've just been and gone and raided it, that they 'ave; nothink there now, scarcely, but penny bottles of Worcester sauce and tins of blackin'. It ain't 'ardly fair; no, nor it isn't."

Even Uncle Podger thought things were going too far when one day a midshipman from one of these ships ordered four tins of Oxford sausages to be sent down to his boat's crew.

"It may be very pretty to watch," he said, finding the Sub in his cabin, "but it's rotten bad luck on us."

The Sub was worried. "You see, it's like this," he answered; "they're rather like guests, and we can't be rude to them. But I'll write out a notice which won't hurt their feelings, and may be some good; we'll stick it on the notice board."

He wrote out several; he didn't like any of them, and tore them up, saying: "We can't be rude, can we?" And then, getting impatient, tore up the last, and burst out with: "Well, let the blessed things go, and don't let's worry, Uncle, old chap! You and I aren't particular."

So things took their course unchecked, till the messman, at the end of ten days or so, announced to the rapacious throng, and the miserable Pimple and China Doll, that he had nothing left in his private store except one bottle of pickles and a bottle of Eno's fruit salt. Even that pot of mouldy "chicken-and-ham" had been "taken up".

It is certain that if the Pimple or the China Doll were asked, now, what went on during the days following the landing of "The Great Adventure", and what struck them most forcibly, both of them would tell of the snotty who had eaten two boxes of "walnut chocolates" in one day--the two last boxes in the messman's store.

The China Doll would also recount days of unaccustomed toil, when he was attached to one of the Naval Transport Officers as Clerk, and had to copy out sailing orders and check lists of arrivals and sailings of ships; work which frequently interfered with his great delight of climbing to the main-top, and looking through the range-finder there (against all orders, it may be said) at the shells bursting on the slopes of Achi Baba and among the windmills and houses of the village of Krithia. For the first few days he had felt very proud of his new job, carried a big correspondence book about with him, and felt himself as important as those very important young officers, the Admiral's Assistant Clerks; but as the days wore on, it became monotonous and irksome. The Captain whom he thus "assisted" was none too gentle with his mistakes--which were many--and he wished that the old days would return, when he had nothing to do but sit on the office stool in front of a ship's ledger, and kick his feet against the bulkhead until Uncle Podger told him to clear out of it. If only he kicked that bulkhead hard enough and often enough, Uncle Podger would never keep him long. It had been such a pleasant kind of a life, and in those days he had only to run into the gun-room and make some cheeky remark, to be rolled on the deck and be ragged; but even that was finished; the gun-room was no longer like home nowadays, for the snotties were mostly strangers, who took no notice of him if they were awake; and even if the Orphan, Rawlins, or the Hun happened to be there, they were much too tired to skylark. With the Pimple, who was more often available, he did not like skylarking, for the Pimple generally hurt him--intentionally.

So, what with one thing and another, the China Doll was not entirely happy whilst he copied out these "silly" orders, and guns thudded from the ships all round him--guns whose shells he could not always run up on deck to see burst.

There was so much to see, and it was so irritating to come out all this way to the Dardanelles, and then to find that he had to stick in a stupid office just when some of the most exciting things were going on. However, he could always make sure of watching a duel between the howitzers on the Asiatic shore--somewhere behind Kum Kali fort--and the ship told off to keep them quiet--the _Prince George_ or the _Albion_, sometimes the _Agamemnon_. At almost any hour of the day he went on deck, he could make certain of soon seeing a splash leap up, close to whichever ship was on duty, and then see her fire her 12-inch guns, and watch till the brownish-red or black clouds flew up behind Kum Kali ridge as the shells burst, hoping intensely that bits of "Asiatic Annie" were flying up in it, and wondering what the spotting aeroplane, circling high above in the blue sky like a hawk, had seen and signalled.

Then there were the shrapnel bursting behind "W" beach, and the little shells which sometimes burst there, but, more often than not, only buried themselves with a little spurt of dust. He would wonder whether Bubbles or the Lamp-post had been hit, and hoped they had not, because they had promised to send him off a shell, or anything interesting, as a curio. And, later on, there were the high-explosive shells, which sometimes burst in the air over that beach, and at other times burst on the ground with a horrid noise which frightened him, even where he was, in the ship, and made him rather alter his mind about going ashore to see the fun.

The Turkish aeroplanes, or German most probably--the "Taubes" he had heard so much of--they came often; and at the first news of "hostile aeroplane approaching from the north-east" he would dash on deck, and try to spot them as they appeared over the top of Achi Baba--little moving spots which he lost sight of, if he was not very careful, until they came nearer and nearer, and the sun made their wings glisten like silver. He knew that each carried bombs, and often he could actually see these little things at the moment they were released from the body of the aeroplane, to burst somewhere near "W" beach, raising a cloud of dust and smoke, or drop in the sea among the ships, sending up a rather silly splash--such a waste of energy. And it was so "ripping" to hear guns firing at the aeroplane and see the shrapnel bursting. He did so long to see one crumple up and come tumbling down, but he was always being disappointed; and when that particular aeroplane had seen what it wanted, dropped all its bombs--seldom where it wanted--and turned back up the Straits, the China Doll felt rather miserable.

Sometimes British and French aeroplanes went up after the Taube, and chased him to his home up above the Narrows, whilst the Turkish shrapnel burst round them just as they had done at Smyrna, only making better shooting as the days went on and their practice improved.

At first the British and French aeroplanes had their home at Tenedos; and if they rested, slid down on the open ground close to Helles lighthouse, flighting back to their island before dark to spend the night. That, too, was always "pretty to watch", as Uncle Podger would have said.

Then the bombardments of Achi Baba and Krithia, on the days that the troops attacked, gave him intense enjoyment; and sometimes, though not often, the China Doll, from his post up aloft in the main-top, could see, through the forbidden range-finder, little groups of khaki figures darting about among the scrub and the ravines which intersected that plain, though he could never be sure whether they were British or Turks. But what excited him most, and kept him in some quiet corner for hours, holding on to the rigging or a stanchion, stretching his head out in the dark, and hardly daring to breathe, were the night attacks by the Turks. The noise of them would wake him, and up on to the after shelter deck he would slip, in his ragged pyjamas, and watch the glare of the field-guns, the bursts of shrapnel-flame, the bright star-shells as they sunk in graceful curves of dazzling white light, and would listen to the rattle of the musketry and the Maxims, and the fierce barking of the guns--especially of the French "75's".

On one of these nights Mr. Meredith found his funny little figure squeezed up against the rails, close to the life-buoy.

"Hullo, youngster!" he said cheerfully. "Would you like to be right in among it all--there on shore?"

"No, sir! I mean yes, sir! No, sir!"

"Which do you mean?" he asked.

"I don't know, sir. It sounds so awful."

"Well, you'd better turn in. They're packing up for the night now."

And so the China Doll would patter down the ladder in his bare feet, listen for a moment at the top of the hatchway to make sure that they had stopped fighting, and then go back to the dark half-deck and his hammock, and lie listening until he could not keep awake any longer.

In the picket-boat and steam pinnace the Orphan, the Hun, and Rawlins (who first relieved one and then the other) had never, all that first week or ten days, six hours' consecutive sleep.

Steamboats! Why! fifty more would have found plenty to do; and of those which were actually available, so many were constantly in the Sub's hands being repaired, or back on board their own ships being repaired, that those remaining were running practically day and night continuously. The Hun's pinnace smashed in her stem and stove in her bows against a trawler on the Thursday, and that laid her up for two whole days whilst she was being patched. On one of these two days he took charge of a boat whose midshipman had been killed by a stray bullet at another beach--"X" beach--round the corner, and on the second he and the Orphan kept "watch and watch" in the picket-boat. For all practical purposes their only chance of a rest was when their boats ran short of coal and water and had to go back to the _Achates_. The job of filling up with water and coal often took half an hour--time enough to get some food, sometimes even a bath; more often, all they wanted was sleep. Occasionally they had a stroke of luck after getting back to the ship, and might be told that they would not be wanted for an hour, perhaps longer. Then the Orphan, Rawlins, or the Hun--whoever it was who had such luck--would coil up on a cushion in the gun-room and sleep, or lie down on the Sub's bunk--if he was not there--which was more peaceful. More often than not, something would happen: an urgent signal would come from somewhere or other, to take a Staff officer "off" from "W" beach to the _Arcadia_--the General Head-quarters Staff ship---or to tow inshore a lighter full of stores, urgently needed--bombs, barbed wire, empty sandbags, whatever it might be; his boat might be the only one available, and away he would have to go.

This used to happen day and night, for during those first ten days there was no relaxation of effort whatever, all the twenty-four hours round the clock.

Very often the Orphan had to take his boat alongside hospital ships, and several times it happened that men climbed down their tall, white sides and asked for a passage ashore. One of these, on one occasion, was a stretcher-bearer of the Worcesters, an old soldier evidently. The air, just about this time, was full of rumours of Turkish atrocities, and these caused much anger until they were contradicted--as they generally were--although the contradictions never went the rounds as did the original rumours. The Orphan had just heard one particular story, vouched for, of four English--evidently prisoners--having been found burnt to death in Sedd-el-Bahr castle. So, thinking this man might know something about it, he asked him.

"Know about them? I should think I did; all nonsense, that story. They were burnt right enough--I saw them myself--but so was the wooden storehouse the Turks had put them in. Everything was burnt, and there was the base of a 6-inch lyddite shell lying close by them; one of our ships' shells which had set the place on fire during the bombardment."

He told him of his own experiences. "Why, sir," he said, "twice the Worcesters have had to fall back a bit at night, and leave wounded behind; and at daybreak we got back the ground again and found them all right, though we never expected they would be alive. 'We thought to find you scuppered,' we told them--at first, that was; not afterwards. I remember one--the Sergeant-Major of my company. We found him in the morning, and we asked him how he'd managed to keep clear of the Turks. 'Keep clear of 'em,' he says; 'keep clear of 'em! why, they crept up after you'd fallen back, found me in the dark, and gave me water; pulled me along behind some cover--your firing being so hot--and covered me with a blanket.'"

"Then haven't you seen anything wrong?" the Orphan asked.

"Well, I wouldn't exactly say that; there's a young chap in there"--and he pointed to the hospital ship--"what has some thirty-five bayonet wounds--just pricks--in him. They caught him in a trench and did handle him pretty rough, till he pretended to be dead; then they left him. He'll be up and about in ten days' time. Then I saw two of those Senegalese chaps see 'blue murder' one day; but what can you expect?"

"Are our fellows playing the game?" the Orphan asked.

"You don't know Bert Smith, he's in my section. Well, he and I was carrying a wounded Turk in our stretcher, he taking the head, and me going along in front with his feet, and I notices that he starts a-jerking his end up and down pretty violent, so I says to him: 'Here, Bert, what are you a-doing of? you'll hurt the poor blighter!' and he up and says: 'Poor blighter be darned; he's only a blooming Turk!'"

"What did you do?" asked the Orphan, smiling at the man's so very transparent earnestness.

"I just told him that, Turk or no Turk, he was a-fighting for his home and country, and it wasn't for us to say he was doing wrong--us who was trying to drive him out of it--and to go a-hurting of him."

"He carried him proper like after that, but of course, sir, you don't know Bert Smith; he's a fair 'card'."

The Orphan, noticing that he had a blood-stained bandage round his neck, asked him what he had been doing aboard the hospital ship.

"They sent me off," the man said indignantly. "Just had a bit of a clip--went in in front--came out at the back--under the skin--nothing. I stayed aboard there a little, and then, when the doctors were too busy to notice, I skipped into the first boat that would take me ashore, and am off back again. I can do all the doctoring I wants, and they're getting pretty short of chaps like me up there," and he jerked his thumb Krithia way.

During these days the Orphan allowed a good many men to scramble down from the hospital ships into his picket-boat--men slightly wounded, and who wanted to go back to their regiments. Many of these were Australians and New Zealanders, a brigade of whom had been brought round from Anzac, and had suffered extremely heavy losses in a most gallant but unsuccessful endeavour to capture Krithia.

He often had to take his picket-boat into "W" beach when shells were dropping on it or into the water close by; and these were times when he had to pull himself together, so that Jarvis and the crew should not know that he hated it; especially did he dislike the buzzing noise which just gave him sufficient warning to make him wonder where _that_ shell was going to hit. He also had an extremely narrow escape one day when he was taking a General and his Staff officers to "V" beach. As he approached the _River Clyde_ he saw that some big shells were dropping close to her, and just before he reached her, swish--sh--sh came along the noise of one and it flopped into the sea just ahead, fortunately without bursting. It heaved the bows of his boat right clear of the water, and the splash that fell over them fell on the deck, the General, and on his Staff officers. The Orphan's breath came very fast then; but he could not help laughing as he saw Plunky Bill, who'd been standing in the bows with his boat-hook all ready for going alongside the _River Clyde_, turn a complete somersault and disappear, head first, down the little hatch there. It was such a relief to have something to laugh at.

One day he was sent to the French flagship--she was probably the _Suffren_--with a note to the French Admiral, and had to wait on her quarter-deck for an answer. The Admiral brought it up himself; a dapper little man he was--all springs--and when he saw the Orphan standing stiffly to attention, he darted across, laid both his thin, aristocratic hands on his shoulders, gave him a friendly, encouraging shake, and talked French to him, the only words the Orphan was able to understand and remember being: "Ah, mon petit brave! mon pauvre petit garcon!"

On the way back with the answer he told Jarvis about this. "He called me lots of things, and he called me 'his poor little boy'--rather cheek, wasn't it?" In fact, the Orphan rather thought that his dignity had been hurt.

"A funny old bird, that 'ere Gay Pratty, sir," Jarvis said. "D'you know Porter--'Frenchy' Porter, they calls him now--that 'ere leading signalman what comed from the _Swiftsure_? 'E was lent to that 'ere French ship for the 18th March--when the _Bouvet_ and _Ocean_ and _Irresistible_ were 'outed'. 'E tells me that that 'ere little ladylike gen'l'man was on the bridge all the time, a 'opping about like a bloomin' sparrow, and wouldn't go down in the conning-tower nohow. They had shells all over 'em and all round 'em, and Frenchy Porter couldn't 'elp ducking 'is 'ead. Just as a big one come sloshing along--right over the bridge, it seemed--an' Frenchy 'ad ducked--that 'ere little box-of-tricks comes up to 'im, a-smiling and as jaunty as you please, and says to 'im, a-jerkin' 'is arms and 'is 'ands: 'When the noise come, you duck your 'ead--but then she 'as gone--you are too late'--it ain't no bloomin' use, or words to that heffect. A great, little gen'l'man, that be, sir."

After hearing this story, the Orphan was jolly glad the Admiral _had_ spoken to him.