No Hero-This Page 6

  Dinner is over, and we sit in the lounge. I find myself looking at the clock. This waiting is unbearable. Mary is very white and still, and I realize that I am making her suffer.

  “I think I had better be going. Don’t come to the station.”

  She gives me a poignant look. She is grateful to me for understanding that she cannot bear much more and retain her self-control. She comes with me to the lounge entrance. We kiss, and turn quickly away. I cannot bear to look at her again.

  I find Clayton in the vestibule. He too is alone. He tells me that he has ordered a taxi, and offers me a lift.

  “Thanks, old man, I will.”

  I am glad of Clayton, and he is glad of me. As the taxi moves off he says, “I hope I shall never see that damned hotel again.”

  At Chester station the platform is crowded with R.A.M.C. officers and their kit, and quite a number of them are drunk. Clayton and I withdraw to a quiet part of the platform. His eyes are infinitely sad, yet scornful.

  “What swine, Brent, what swine!”

  * * *

  Liverpool. Clayton and I are tramping along a quay, with a couple of amateur porters carrying our kit. It is very dark and dim. I see nothing but granite setts and railway lines, and a few obscure gas-lamps. Other men are making their way along the quay, most of them like silent ghosts. I hear the clatter of boots on the granite setts. Someone behind us is noisy and intoxicated and begins to sing.

  “She wore a wreath of roses

   And no knickers on her legs!”

  He is told to shut up, and becomes argumentative and quarrelsome.

  I see Clayton’s face in the light of a lamp. It is bleached and strained.

  Something vast and black and cliff-like looms up. We are approaching a large open building that appears to be all pillars and roof. The vast blackness is the side of a ship. I see gangways, and piles of baggage, and a few Tommies sitting on their kits. A voice shouts instructions in this great hollow building. “Report at the office, gentlemen, for cabins.”

  There is a stampede towards the office at the far end of the great shed. Our draft of R.A.M.C. officers becomes a mob. It is like a crowd trying to rush the gates of a football ground. An elderly major who appears to be in charge of the embarkation shed tries to restore order and decency. He shouts indignantly, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, remember you are officers.” But his protests have no effect, and Clayton and I stand and watch the scrimmage outside the office. It is like a hospital rag indulged in by men who have reverted to irresponsible loutishness. We wait until the scramble is over, for neither of us has any desire to share in it. With a few others of the more tame or more sensitive members of the flock we approach the office.

  The elderly officer who has tried to instil decency and discipline into this crowd of doctors is standing in the doorway. He smiles at us, but I divine in him an anger and contempt that are not appeased.

  He speaks to the N.C.O. who is handing out cabin numbers.

  “Now that the others have stampeded, we will attend to the gentlemen.”

  It is a case of virtue rewarded. The worst cabins have been assigned to the pushers and the greedy. Clayton and I find ourselves in a three berth and outside cabin. We have asked to be together, and we have the cabin to ourselves.

  Clayton sits down on his bed, and takes off his haversack. He looks infinitely weary.

  He says, “What a business, Brent. It seems strange that men should want to be drunk and rowdy on a night like this.”

  I unhitch my haversack and hang it on a hook.

  “It seems to have been one of those rare cases when pushing doesn’t pay.”

  Clayton bends over and looks at his boots.

  “Why did I buy these damned things? Do you know, Brent, I thought that it was all going to be so different.”

  V

  For two days I am dreadfully sick. This huge, beast of a boat seems to roll with a horrible and rhythmic persistence. I lie in my bunk and do not care what happens to me or the war or humanity. I am quite shamelessly bed-ridden. Clayton is not sick at all, but he tells me for my comfort that the Gigantic’s troop-decks, there are seven of them, are a shambles of disconsolate khaki and vomit. Were we to be attacked and torpedoed not half the men would ever get to their boat-stations. Would it matter? If they are feeling like I am they might almost bless the Hun and his submarine.

  My steward, a brisk, perky little man, brings me in things on trays and takes them away again. Everything seems to creak, and jingle, and roll. Clayton’s greatcoat, hanging on a hook, swings to and fro as though mocking me. I hate that coat, but I am nearer tears than curses. What bloody use shall I be in a war?

  * * *

  It is the third morning. Clayton has gone to breakfast. The steward comes in briskly, and with an air of authority.

  “You can get up, sir, now.”

  He has tea and toast, and I protest, but he is firm, and I feel he despises me.

  “You will feel much better if you get up, sir. We are out of the rough stuff.”

  I drink the tea, eat the toast, sit on the edge of my bunk, and feel nauseated and giddy. But I must make an effort. I make that effort and feel better and better. I manage to shave, and my morale improves. The steward was right. In an hour I am on deck and feeling the sea wind on my face.

  * * *

  We pass Gibraltar at night, and see nothing but a vague swelling against the sky. We are in the Mediterranean. Sunny, serene weather. We have no duties to perform. We sit about and read, and walk the decks. We are sumptuously fed, and waited upon by white-coated stewards. The wine, if you order it, is iced. It seems incredible that one should be going to a war in this luxury liner.

  * * *

  A G.O.C.’s parade. There are nearly a hundred R.A.M.C. officer reinforcements on the Gigantic, and we parade at our boat stations. We are a strange crowd, not only raw in our discipline but in our manners. One large man near me is smoking a calabash pipe and carrying a walking-stick. The G.O.C. and his staff appear, and the regular officer in charge of us calls us to attention. There is a sort of casual, shuffling response. The large man is still puffing cheerfully at his pipe. I can see the G.O.C.’s face. It is a pleasant, ruddy face. Fortunately the great man has a sense of humour. He is amused by this hotch-potch crowd of medicos.

  He says, “Gentlemen, I do not smoke on parade, and I do not expect you to.”

  The pipe and odd cigarettes are put away. We are inspected with paternal tolerance. I wonder what this great gentleman must think of our sense of the fitness of things, or our lack of it. Even Clayton’s ridiculous boots are passed over without comment. We are just doctors, and very raw at that.

  Clayton says to me afterwards, “What a crowd! Did you see that fellow with the pipe? If a man can be as stupid and as insensitive as all that, what can he give to his patients?”

  I admit that one has not much cause to be proud of some of the members of the profession.

  * * *

  We get glimpses of the mysterious African coast; sometimes it is grey blue or grey purple. If one could only land and linger there? Now, there is nothing but sea, a crumpled, sun-polished vastness. I feel cut off from everything even in this crowded troop-ship. We have some five thousand men on board, five thousand strangers. My little self refuses to merge itself in this mass of humanity. I am horribly homesick, and conscious of a sense of tension. Even the assumption of cheerfulness conceals what I know to be anxiety and secret fear. Every hour this huge ship is carrying us nearer and nearer to our crisis.

  Gossip has it that we are to share in the last and final push towards Constantinople.

  In the dining-saloon I sit between Clayton and a bumptious little man from Yorkshire named Cosser, who seems to regard the whole affair as a cynical joke. He persists in asserting that we are bound for Alexandria, and that whatever may be the fate of the combatants on board we doctors are intended for hospital work in Egypt. I gather that Cosser, who is young and unmarried, does not care a damn w
hat may happen to the combatants. But do I? Yes, for when I watch some of these lads parading the decks I am filled with profound pity.

  * * *

  We pick up the crew of a French collier that has been torpedoed earlier in the day. We crowd the rails and watch the ship’s boat come alongside. There are about a dozen men in it, a rough-looking lot in strange clothes. The captain is a fat, sallow little man with a pointed black beard. The Gigantic seems stuck in water that oozes round her like dark oil. Cosser is beside me, and he remarks, “Damned silly stopping like this for a boat-load of pirates. If that submarine is anywhere about, we are giving her a sitting target.” A part of me may agree with Cosser, but I am glad that we have rescued those French sailors.

  They are aboard, and the ship is gathering speed. The Frenchmen’s white boat has been left adrift on the blue water. I watch it for a long while, looking rather like a white bird afloat on the sea.

  * * *

  We are attacked. I am sitting in a deck-chair reading when the syren sends out its poignant, urgent blasts. I realize that, contrary to orders, I have left my life-belt in the cabin. I rush downstairs. The whole ship seems to be crawling with khaki, like some insect nest that has been disturbed, but all this multitudinous movement is soundless. I snatch my jacket and run back along the corridor. I have a glimpse of a broad staircase below packed with a solid mass of men all struggling upwards like brown grease oozing out of a tube. I notice their white, tense faces all straining up towards the light. I get a feeling of compressed and struggling anguish, of life trapped below and fighting its way up into the air. I reach our parading place and find Clayton. He fastens on my jacket for me. Nearly all of us are here. A machine-gun crew is getting its gun into position just in front of us by the rails. I am aware of the great ship throbbing, and straining as though some fierce pressure were being put upon her. We are turning. The man squatting behind the machine-gun pushes his cap back, laughs, and cocks out his elbows.

  A gun fires. I feel something jump inside me. It is as though a tense cord had been let go with a vibrant twang. Clayton is next me, and I feel him wince. Someone says, “That’s one of our guns.” I stand in a strange stillness, watching the machine-gun crew. They are a fair-haired lot, young yeomen, and they appear to be enjoying the show.

  How extraordinarily silent everything is, almost like the hush before dawn.

  The silence continues. We stand there in the sunlight waiting for the shock of an explosion. Sea and sky are completely peaceful. The Gigantic appears to have turned almost in her own length, and we can see the track of her wash like the trail of an immense sea-serpent. We are steaming at full speed in the direction from which we have come. We wait, and nothing happens. I meet Clayton’s eyes and we smile at each other.

  The ship’s syren warns us that the emergency is over, and that we can break ranks. The machine-gun crew clear away their gun. One fair-haired lad laughs and says, “No luck!” I am very glad there was no luck. At dinner that evening the news goes round that we stumbled upon an Austrian submarine and that the surprise was mutual. We fired at her, and she submerged, and launched a torpedo that missed us by five yards.

  I go to sleep that night with my life-belt lying ready to hand on the floor beside my bunk.

  * * *

  Mudros. It is early in the morning, a calm, opalescent day, with a suggestion of faint mist, and the sea like glass. We steam slowly into the great harbour which resembles an immense lake surrounded by rocky hills. The place is packed with ships, cruisers, battleships, freighters, transports. I am not a master of fine writing, and I cannot describe adequately the significance and splendour of this scene. The water is very blue, the shore the colour of a lion’s skin. Some of the nearer hills are a goldish green, the most distant grey and black. I notice a row of quaint windmills on a ridge. We pass a French transport packed with French colonial troops, and we cheer and wave to each other.

  Clayton is at my elbow, and his face has a gentle melancholy.

  “Rather marvellous!”

  “Amphibious might,” and as I utter the words I feel that I have descended to journalistic claptrap, for, to me this Greek island and its assembled ships are embalmed in a great sadness. Somehow I divine failure. Or is this feeling of futility in the midst of the pageant of power a personal mood? My glance rests on a white hospital ship with her red cross like a bloody symbol splashed upon her side.

  Clayton speaks softly.

  “Well, now we know, Brent. No corn in Egypt for us,” and then he adds, “Perhaps we shall get letters here.”

  Letters from home, a letter from my wife! God, how far away England seems! The greenness of England in September! And suddenly I loathe this Greek island with a profound and bitter loathing. I have no spirit of adventure in me; I do not want to land and explore. A kind of dreadful apathy descends upon me, a feeling of fatalism. I am not free to choose, and I shall sit and wait for the fate others will impose upon me.

  * * *

  We are at anchor. Nothing seems to be happening, and there are no orders for us. We hear that the regular R.A.M.C. captain who is in charge of us is mysteriously sick in his cabin, and that a temporary captain has gone off to report.

  I lean on the rail and watch a small motor-launch draw up to the side. It is in charge of an Australian soldier in khaki drill and a slouch hat. His bare knees, arms, neck and face are burnt to a wonderful colour. He looks so clean, and capable and tough that I feel a gutless, flabby, tame creature. This man is a veteran. There is nothing in me that can compare with him. I shall never make a soldier.

  At dinner the stewards apologize for the absence of ice. All the ice has gone to the hospital ships. Do they expect us to feel aggrieved?

  Word is passed along the tables that we are to assemble in the library after dinner. The cynical Cosser, as usual, appears to possess private information.

  “They didn’t expect us, hadn’t been notified! A consignment of a hundred or so doctor men nicely packed in a crate! Don’t know what to do with us! Funny, isn’t it?”

  After dinner we gather in the library. The temporary captain who is now in charge of us, stands behind a table and explains the situation. I notice that he has a number of slips of paper on the table, and I am reminded of the incident at Chester.

  “Gentlemen, you are to be allowed to detail yourselves for duty either at Helles, Anzac or Suvla on the peninsula, or at Mudros. Will each officer please write on a slip of paper where he wishes to go, and return the slip to me.”

  We look at each other. This seems a very peculiar and unfair way of saddling us with the responsibility. Clayton and I collect our slips of paper and withdraw to a table. We decide to put ourselves down for Helles, and hope to remain together. I am aware of other men with worried faces sitting hesitant before signing their own fate.

  Someone says, “Well, I call this the limit! We have volunteered, and the people who should give us orders funk it, and tempt us to funk it.”

  We hand in our slips of paper and make our way to the smoking-room. I run up against Cosser. I ask him how any man with any sense of honour could put himself down to stay behind at Mudros. Cosser looks sheepish, and says nothing. It leaks out later that forty per cent, or so have volunteered to remain behind at Mudros, and that Cosser is one of these heroes.

  * * *

  We are warned at breakfast to be ready to embark with our kits for Helles at eleven o’clock. Clayton has paid a hurried visit to the Ordnance Depot ship, and contrived to supply himself with a pair of boots and officer’s puttees to replace his monstrous field-boots. We who are for Helles parade at 10.40. There are about thirty of us, and I notice that Sanders, a very large and fat fellow, has an equally large revolver in his holster. We chip him about it, but he insists on wearing the revolver. What the devil does he expect to do with it? A small steamer attaches herself to the bulk of the Gigantic. We have to manhandle our own kits on board her, for we appear to be nobody’s children. We share this boat with a crowd of i
nfantry reinforcements. Our little steamer casts off, and we suppose that the great adventure has begun, but not a bit of it. She transfers herself to the flank of another ship, the famous Aragon where the staff reside, and we remain attached peacefully to the Aragon for three hours.

  Clayton and I go below in search of lunch. In the small saloon we find other officers interviewing a laconic person in shirt sleeves who is busy in what was once the pleasure-boat’s bar. The laconic person assures us that there is no food to be had on board. The crew alone is catered for officially.

  “Haven’t you gents got your rations?”

  In our innocence we have not thought of such casual things, and no one has troubled to think of them for us. Sanders, the fellow with the revolver, produces money, and shows it.

  “Here, you can manage bacon and eggs.”

  The laconic person turns his back on us.

  “Nothing doing.”

  The contrasts of active service strike me as humorous. Iced wine and a table d’hôte dinner one evening, and empty stomachs the next. Clayton and I go on deck and compare resources. He has a packet of chocolate; I have nothing. He gives me half his chocolate. The infantry have their rations, but we unwise virgins must suffer empty bellies.

  We leave Mudros harbour late in the afternoon, and we sit and watch its mountains sink below the horizon. The sea is very calm, but we raw civilians begin to suffer from inward qualms. It is ridiculous how hungry one can feel when there is nothing to eat. Clayton goes exploring. He comes back to tell me that he has seen a couple of slices of bread on a shelf in the cuddy. We look at each other guiltily. Can we disgrace ourselves by an attempt to pinch that bread?