On the edge of the Salt Lake, by the blue Aegean shore, Hawk and I dug a
little underground home into the sandy hillock upon which our ambulance
was now encamped.
“I'm going deep into this,” said Hawk--he was a very skilful miner, and
he knew his work.
“None of your dead heroes for me,” he said; “I don't hold with
'em--we'll make it PRACtically shell-proof.” We did. Each day we
burrowed into the soft sandy layers, he swinging the pick, and I filling
up sand-bags. At last we made a sort of cave, a snug little Peter Pan
home, sand-bagged all round and safe from shells when you crawled in.
I often thought what a fine thing Stevenson would have written from the
local colour of the bay.
Its changing colours were intense and wonderful. In the early morning
the waves were a rich royal blue, with splashing lines of white breakers
rolling in and in upon the pale grey sand, and the sea-birds skimming
and wheeling overhead.
At mid-day it was colourless, glaring, steel-flashing, with the sunlight
blazing and everything shimmering in the heat haze.
In the early afternoon, when Hawk and I used to go down to the shore and
strip naked like savages, and plunge into the warm water, the bay had
changed to pale blue with green ripples, and the outline of Imbros
Island, on the horizon, was a long jagged strip of mauve.
Later, when the sunset sky turned lemon-yellow, orange, and deep
crimson, the bay went into peacock blues and purples, with here and
there a current of bottle-glass green, and Imbros Island stood clear cut
against the sunset-colour a violet-black silhouette.
Queer creatures crept across the sands and into the old Turkish snipers'
trenches; long black centipedes, sand-birds--very much resembling
our martin, but with something of the canary in their colour. Horned
beetles, baby tortoises, mice, and green-grey lizards all left their
tiny footprints on the shore.
“If this silver sand was only in England a man could make his fortune,”
said Hawk. (“We wept like anything to see--!”)
I never saw such white sand before. One had to misquote: “Come unto
these SILVER sands.” It glittered white in a great horse-shoe round the
bay, and the bed of the Salt Lake (which is really an overflow from the
sea) was a barren patch of this silver-sand, with here and there a dead
mule or a sniper's body lying out, a little black blot, the haunt of
vultures.
I made some careful drawings of the sand-tracks of the bay; noting down
tracks being a habit with the scout.
In these things Hawk was always interested, and often a great help; for,
in spite of his fifty years and his buccaneerish-habits, he was at heart
a boy--a boy-scout, in fact, and a fine tracker.
One of the most picturesque sights I ever saw was an Indian officer
mounted on a white Arab horse with a long flowing mane, and a tail which
swept in a splendid curve and trailed in the sands. The Hindu wore a
khaki turban, with a long end floating behind. He sat his horse bolt
upright, and rode in the proper military style.
The Arab steed pranced, and arched its great neck. With the blue of
the bay as a background it made a magnificent picture, worthy of the
Thousand-and-One Nights.
Day by day we improved our dug-out, going deeper into the solid rock,
and putting up an awning in front made of two army blankets, with a
wooden cross-beam roped to an old rusty bayonet driven into the sand.
We lived a truly Robinson Crusoe life, with the addition of Turkish
high-explosives, and bully-beef-and-biscuit stew.
Our dug-out was back to the firing-line, and at night we looked out
upon the bay. We lay in our blankets watching the white moonlight on the
waves, and the black shadows of our ambulance wagons on the silver sand.
It was in this dug-out that Hawk used to cook the most wonderful dishes
on a Primus stove.
The language was thick and terrible when that stove refused to work,
and Hawk would squat there cursing and cleaning it, and sticking bits of
wire down the gas-tube.
He cooked chocolate-pudding, and rice-and-milk, and
arrowroot-blancmange, stewed prunes, fried bread in bacon fat, and many
other tasty morsels.
“The proof of a good cook,” said Hawk, “is whether he can make a meal
worth eating out of PRACtically nothink”--and he could.
There were very few wounds now to attend to in the hospital dug-out.
Mostly we got men with sandfly-fever and dysentery; men with scabies and
lice; men utterly and unspeakably exhausted, with hollow, black-rimmed
eyes, cracked lips and foot-sores; men who limped across the sandy
bed, dragging their rifles and equipment in their hands; men who were
desperately hungry, whose eyes held the glint of sniper-madness; men
whose bodies were wasting away, the skin taut and dry like a drum, with
every rib showing like the beams of a wreck, or the rafters of an old
roof.
Always we were in the midst of pain and misery, hunger and death. We do
not get much of the rush and glory of battle in the “Linseed Lancers.”
We deal with the wreckage thrown up by the tide of battle, and wreckage
is always a sad sight--human wreckage most of all.
But the bay was always full of interest for me, with its ever-changing
colour, and the imprint of the ripples in the gleaming silver-sand.
And the silver moonlight silvers the silver-sand, while the skeletons
of the Xth sink deeper and deeper, to be rediscovered perhaps at some
future geological period, and recognised as a type of primitive man.