LEMNOS HARBOUR
Within the outer anchorage
The ancient Argonauts lay to;
Little they dreamt--that dauntless crew--
That here to-day in the sheltered bay
Where the seas are still and blue,
Great battle-ships should froth and
hum, And mighty transport-vessels come
Serenely floating through.
With magic sail the Argonauts
Stood by to go about;
Little they thought--that hero band--
As they made once more for an unknown land
In a world of terror and doubt,
That here in the wake of the magical bough
Should come the all-terrible ironclad now
Serenely floating out.
Written on Mudros Beach: Oct. 7, 1915.
July the twenty-seventh.
The deadly silence...
The tenderfoot on an expedition of this sort naturally expects to find
himself plunged into a whirl of noise and tumult.
The crags were colourless and shimmering in the heat. The harbour was
calm and greeny-blue. One by one, with our haversacks and water-bottles,
belts and rolled overcoats, we went down the companion-way into the
waiting surf-boats. Again and again these boats, roped together and
tugged by a little launch, went back and forth from the S.S. Canada to
the “Turk's Head Pier”--a tiny wooden jetty built by the Engineers.
I asked one of the straw-hatted men of the Naval Division, who was
casting off the painter, what the place was like--
“Sand an' flies, and flies an' sand--nothinkelse!” he replied.
No sooner ashore than the green and black flies came pestering and
tormenting like a host of wicked jinn. The glare of sunlight on
the yellow sand hurt the eyes. The deadly silence of the place was
oppressive--especially when you had strung yourself up to concert pitch
to face the crash and turmoil of a fearful battle.
The quiet isolation and khaki desolation of jagged peaks and sandy
slopes was nerve-breaking.
You could see the thin lines of the wireless station and little groups
of white bell-tents dotted here and there.
Robinson Crusoe wasn't in it. Sand and flies and sun; sun and flies and
sand.
“Wot 'ave we struck 'ere, Bill?”
“Some d---d desert island, I reckon!”
“A blasted heath...”
“Gordlummy, look at the d---d flies!”
“Curse the ---- sun; sweat's trickling down me back.”
“And curse all the d---d issue...”
“What the holy son of Moses did we join for?”
We growled and groaned and cursed our luck. The sweat ran down under our
pith helmets and soaked in a stream from under our armpits. We trudged
to our camping-place along the shore. One or two Greek natives followed
us about with melons to sell. Parched and choked with sand, we were only
too glad to buy these water-melons for two or three leptas.
The rind was green like a vegetable marrow, but the inside was yellow
with pink and crimson pips--the colour of a Mediterranean sunset.
One day ashore on this accursed island and the diarrhoea set in. I never
saw men suffer such awful stomach-pains before. The continual eating of
melons to allay the blistering thirst helped the disease. Many men slept
close to the latrines, too weak to crawl to and fro all night long. The
sun blazed, and the flies in thousands of millions swarmed and irritated
from early morning till sundown.
At night it was cold. The stars burned white-hot--a calm, fierce
glitter.
Hawk and I “kipped down” (slept) together on a sandy stretch overlooking
the bay. We could see the green-and-red electric lights of the hospital
ships waiting in the harbour--for us, perhaps...
The “graft” (work) was fearful. All day long we were at it: hauling up
our equipment from the beach where it had been dumped ashore. Medical
panniers, operating marquee, tents and tent-poles, cook-house dixies,
picks and shovels, bully and biscuit boxes and a hundred-and-one
articles necessary to the work of the Medical Corps in the field: all
this had to be man-handled through the sand up to our camp about a mile
away. And the sun blazed, and the flies pestered and stung and buzzed
and fought with each other for the drops of sweat streaming down your
face. How long should we be here? When were we going into action?... The
suspense was brain-racking. The diarrhoea increased: everyone went down
with it. Some got the ague shivers and some a touch of dysentery.
We became gloomy and bodily sick. We wanted to get into it--into
action...
Anything would be better than this God-forsaken island. Why the dickens
did they leave us moping here: working in the blazing heat, and crawling
to the latrines in the chilly nights? For goodness' sake, let's get out
of it! Let's get to work!... So the days dragged on.
The natives wore baggy trousers and coloured head-bands. They sat all
day near our camp selling melons, tomatoes, very cheap and tasteless
chocolates, raisins, figs and dates.
We used to go down to swim in the little bay-like semicircle of the
harbour. The water was always warm and very salt. Here were tiny
shoals of tiny fish. The water was clear and glassy. There were pinky
sea-urchins with spikey spines which jabbed your feet. The sandy bed of
the bay was all ribbed with ripples.
The island was humming and ticking like a watch with insect-noises:
otherwise the deadly silence held. There were red-winged grasshoppers
and great green-gray locust-looking crickets which whistled and
“cricked” all night.
We had to fetch our water from the water-tank boats, about a mile and a
half distant, and haul it up in a water-cart.
Gangs of natives were working under the military authorities. There
were Greeks and Greek-Armenians, Turks and Ethiopians, Egyptians and
half-breeds of all kinds from Malta and Gib. They were employed in
making roads and clearing the ground for huts and camps.
And all the time we had no letters from home. We were actually marooned
on Lemnos Island: as literally marooned on a barren desert isle as any
buccaneer of the old Spanish galleon days. We went suddenly back to a
savage life. We went down to bathe stark naked, with the sunset glowing
orange on our sunburnt limbs. Here it was that Hawk proved himself a
wonderfully good swimmer. He was lithe and supple and well-made--an
extraordinary specimen of virile manhood--and he spent his fiftieth
birthday on Lemnos!
One day came the order to pack up and man-handle all our stuff down
to the beach ready for re-embarkation. At last we were on the move. We
worked with a will now. The great day would soon dawn. Some of us would
get “put out of mess,” no doubt, but this waiting about to get killed
was much worse than plunging into the thick of it.
August the 6th saw us steaming out at night towards the great unknown
climax--the New Landing.