THE DEPARTURE


Now came a period of utter stagnation

It was a deadlock.

We held the bay, the plain of Anafarta, the Salt Lake, the Kislar Dagh 
and Kapanja Sirt in a horse-shoe.

The Turks held the heights of Sari Bair, Anafarta village, and the 
hills beyond "Jefferson's Post" in a semicircle enclosing us. Nothing 
happened. We shelled and they shelled--every day. Snipers sniped and 
men got killed; but there was no further advance. Things had remained 
at a standstill since the first week of the landing.

Rumours floated from one unit to another:

"We were going to make a great attack on the 28th"--always a fixed 
date; "the Italians were landing troops to help the Australians at 
Anzac"--every possible absurdity was noised abroad.

Hawk was on Chocolate Hill with our advanced dressing station. I was 
on "C" Beach, Lala Baba, with the remainder of the ambulance. I had 
lost all my officers by sickness and wounds, and I was now the last of 
the original N.C.O.'s of "A" Section. Except for the swimming and my 
own observations of tracks and birds and natural history generally, 
this was a desperately uninteresting period.

Orders to pack up ready for a move came suddenly. It was now late in 
September. The wet season was just beginning. The storm- clouds were 
coming up over the hills in great masses of rolling banks, black and 
forbidding. It grew colder at night, and a cold wind sprang up during 
the day.

Every one was bustling about, packing the operating tent and 
equipment, operating table, instruments, bottles, pans, stretchers, 
"monkey- boxes," bandages, splints, cooking dixies, bully- beef 
crates, biscuit tins--everything was being packed up and sorted out 
ready for moving.

But where? No one knew. We were going to move . . . soon, very soon, 
it was rumoured.

Within every mind a small voice asked-- "Blighty?" And then came 
another whiff of rumour: "The Xth Division are going-- England 
perhaps!"

But it was too good to believe. Every one wanted to believe it . . . 
each man in his inmost soul hoped it might be true . . . but it 
couldn't be England . . . and yet it might!

One night the Indian Pack-mule Corps came trailing down with their 
little two-wheeled, two- muled carts and transported all our medical 
panniers away into the gloom, and they went towards Lala Baba. It was 
a good sign.

Everything was gone now except our own packs and kit, and we had 
orders to "stand by" for the command to "Fall in."

We lay about in the sand waiting--and wondering. At last towards the 
last minutes of midnight we got the orders to "Fall in." The N.C.O.'s 
called the "Roll," "numbered off" their sections and reported "All 
present and correct, sir!"

In a long straggling column we marched from our last encampment 
towards Lala Baba. The night was very dark and the sand gave under our 
feet. It was hard going, but every man had a gleam of hope, and 
trudged along heavy-laden with rolled overcoat, haversack and water-
bottle and stretcher, but with a light heart.

The advanced party from Chocolate Hill met us at Lala Baba. Here 
everything was bustle and hurry.

Every unit of the Xth Division was packed up and ready for 
embarkation. Lighters and tugs puffed and grated by the shore. Horses 
stamped and snorted; sergeants swore continually; officers nagged and 
shouted.

Men got mixed up and lost their units, sections lost their way in the 
great crowd of companies assembled.

Once Hawk loomed out of the darkness and a strong whiff of rum came 
with him . . . he disappeared again: "See you later, Sar'nt-- lookin' 
after things--important--practically everythink----"

He was full of drink, and in his hurry to look after "things" (mostly 
bottles) he lost some of his own kit and my field-glasses. He worked 
hard at getting the equipment into the lighters, notwithstanding the 
fact that he was "three- parts canned."

Every now and then he loomed up like some great khaki-clad gorilla, 
only to fade away again to the secret hiding-place of a bottle.

And so at last we got aboard. It was still a profound secret. No one 
knew whither we were going, or why we were leaving the desolation of 
Suvla Bay.

But every one was glad. Anything would be better than this barren 
waste of sand and flies and dead men.

That was the last we saw of the bay. A sheet of gray water, a moving 
mob on the slope of Lala Baba, the trailing smoke of the tug, and a 
pitch-black sky--and Hawk lurching round and swearing at the loss of 
his bottle and his kit.

An old sea-song was running in my mind:--

     "But two men of her crew alive-- 
     What put to sea with seventy-five!"

Only three months ago we had landed 25,000 strong; and now we numbered 
about 6000. A fearful loss--a smashed Division.

We transferred to a troop-ship standing out in the bay with all 
possible speed.

Still with the gloom hanging over everything we steamed out and every 
man was dead tired.

However, I found Hawk, and we decided not to sleep down below with the 
others, all crowded together and stinking in the dirty interior of the 
ship.

We took our hammocks up on deck and slung them forward from the 
handrail near one of the great anchors.

I had a purpose in doing this. I had no intention of going to sleep. 
By taking note of a certain star which had appeared just to the right 
of a cross-spar, and by noticing its change of position, I was enabled 
to guess with some exactitude the course we were laying.

For the first two or three hours the star and the mast kept a 
perfectly unchangeable position.

I woke up after dozing for some minutes, and taking up my old stand 
near the companion-way again took my star observation. But this time 
the star had swept right round and was the other side of the mast. We 
had changed our course from south-west to north. Just then Hawk came 
up the companion-way, no doubt from a bottle- hunt down below.

"It's--Salonika!" said he.

"We've turned almost due north in the last quarter of an hour."

"I know it,--been down to the stokers' bunks--it's Salonika--another 
new landing."

"They keep the Xth for making new landings."

And so to the Graeco-Serbian frontier and a fresh series of 
adventures, including sickness, life in an Egyptian hospital--and then 
England.




CHAPTER XXVIII


LOOKING BACK


The queer thing is, that when I look back upon that "Great Failure" it 
is not the danger or the importance of the undertaking which is 
strongly impressed so much as a jumble of smells and sounds and small 
things.

It is just these small things which no author can make up in his study 
at home.

The glitter of some one carrying an army biscuit-tin along the mule 
track; the imprinted tracks of sand-birds by the blue Aegean shore; 
the stink of the dead; a dead man's hand sticking up through the sand; 
the blankets soaked each morning by the heavy dew; the incessant 
rattle of a machine-gun behind Pear-tree Gully; the distant ridges of 
the Sari Bahir range shimmering in the heat of noon-day; the angry 
"buzz" of the green and black flies disturbed from a jam-pot lid; the 
grit of sand in the mouth with every bite of food; the sullen dullness 
of the overworked, death-wearied troops; the hoarse dried-up and 
everlasting question: "Any water?"; the silence of the Hindus of the 
Pack-mule Corps; the "S-s-s-e-e-e-e-o-o-o-op!--Crash!"--of the high 
explosives bursting in a bunch of densely solid smoke on the Kislar 
Dargh, and the slow unfolding of these masses of smoke and sand in 
black and khaki rolls; the snort and stampede of a couple of mules 
bolting along the beach with their trappings swinging and rattling 
under their panting bellies; the steady burning of the star-lit night 
skies; the regular morning shelling from the Turkish batteries on the 
break of dawn over the gloom-shrouded hills; the far-away call of some 
wounded man for "Stretchers! Stretchers!"; the naked white men 
splashing and swimming in the bay; the swoop of a couple of skinny 
vultures over the burning white sand of the Salt Lake bed to the 
stinking and decomposing body of a shrapnel-slaughtered mule hidden in 
the willow-thickets at the bottom of Chocolate Hill; a torn and 
bullet-pierced French warplane stranded on the other side of Lala 
Baba--lying over at an angle like a wounded white seabird; the rush 
for the little figure bringing in "the mails" in a sack over his 
shoulder; the smell of iodine and iodoform round the hospital-tents; 
the long wobbling moan of the Turkish long- distance shells, and the 
harmless "Z-z-z-eee-e- e-o-ooop!" of their "dud" shells which buried 
themselves so often in the sand without exploding; the tattered, 
begrimed and sunken-eyed appearance of men who had been in the 
trenches for three weeks at a stretch; the bristling unshaven chins, 
and the craving desire for "woodbines"; the ingrained stale blood on 
my hands and arms from those fearful gaping wounds, and the red-brown 
blood-stain patches on my khaki drill clothes; the pestering curse of 
those damnable Suvla Bay flies and the lice with which every officer 
and man swarmed.

The awful--cut-off, Robinson Crusoe feeling--no letters from home, no 
newspapers, no books . . . sand, biscuits and flies; flies, bully and 
sand . . .

Stay-at-home critics and prophets of war cannot strike just that tiny 
spark of reality which makes the whole thing "live."

However many diagrams and wonderful ideas these remarkable amateur 
experts publish they won't "go down" with the man who has humped his 
pack and has "been out."

Mention the word "Blighty " or "Tickler's plum-and-apple," "Kangaroo 
Beach" or "Jhill-o! Johnnie!" or "Up yer go--an' the best o' luck!" to 
any man of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force and in each case you 
will have touched upon a vividly imprinted impresssion of the 
Dardanelles.

There was adventure wild and queer enough in the Dardanelles campaign 
to fill a volume of Turkish Nights' Entertainments, but the people at 
home know nothing of it.

This is the very type of adventure and incident which would have 
aroused a war-sickened people; which would have rekindled war-weary 
enthusiasm and patriotism in the land. Maybe most of these accounts of 
marvellous escapes and 'cute encounters, secret scoutings and 
extraordinary expeditions will lie now for ever with the silent dead 
and the thousands of rounds of ammunition in the silver sand of Suvla 
Bay.

The stars still burn above the Salt Lake bed; the white breakers roll 
in each morning along the blue sea-shore, sometimes washing up the 
bodies of the slain--just as they did when we camped near Lala Baba.

But the guns are gone and there the heavy silence of the waste places 
reigns supreme.

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