Oft in the stilly night,
By yellow candle-light,
With finger in the sand
We mapped and planned.
“This is the Turkish well,
That's where the Captain fell,
There's the great Salt Lake bed,
Here's where the Munsters led.”
Primitive man arose,
With prehistoric pose,
Like Dug-out Men of old,
By signs our thoughts were told.
I have slept and lived in every kind of camp and bivouac. I have dug and
helped to dig dug-outs. I have lain full length in the dry, dead grass
“under the wide and starry sky.” I have crept behind a ledge of rock,
and gone to sleep with the ants crawling over me. I have slept with a
pair of boots for a pillow. I have lived and snoozed in the dried-up bed
of a mountain torrent for weeks. A ground-sheet tied to a bough has been
my bedroom. I have slumbered curled in a coil of rope on the deck of a
cattle-boat, in an ambulance wagon, on a stretcher, in farmhouse barns
and under hedges and haystacks. I have slept in the sand by the blue
Mediterranean Sea, with the crickets and grasshoppers “zipping” and
“zinging” all night long.
But our dug-out nights on the edge of the bay at Buccaneer Bivouac were
the most enjoyable.
It was here of a night-time that Hawk and I--sometimes alone, sometimes
with Brockley, or “Cherry Blossom,” or “Corporal Mush,” or Sergeant Joe
Smith, the sailormen as onlookers and listeners--it was here we drew
diagrams in the sand with our fingers, and talked on politics and
women's rights, marriage and immorality, drink and religion, customs and
habits; of life and death, peace and war.
Sometimes Hawk burst into a rare phrase of splendid
composition--well-balanced rhetoric, not unworthy of a Prime Minister.
At other times he is the buccaneer, the flinger of foul oaths, and
terrible damning curses. But as a rule they are not vindictive, they
have no sting--for Hawk is a forgiving and humble man in reality, in
spite of his mask of arrogance.
A remarkable character in every way, he fell unknowingly into the old
north-country Quaker talk of “thee and thou.”
Another minute he gives an order in those hard, calm, commanding words
which, had he had the chance, would have made him, in spite of his lack
of schooling, one of the finest Generals the world could ever know.
On these occasional gleams of pure leadership he finds the finest King's
English ready to his lips, while at other times he is ungrammatical,
ordinary, but never uninteresting or slow of intuition.
He was a master of slang, and like all strong and vivid characters had
his own peculiar sayings.
He never thought of looking over my shoulder when I was sketching. He
was a gentleman of Nature. But when he saw I had finished, his clear,
deep-set eyes (handed down to him from those old Norseman ancestors)
would glint with interest--
“Dekko the drawing,” he would say, using the old Romany word for “let's
see.”
“PRACtically” was a favourite word.
“PRACtically the 'ole Peninsula--”
“PRACtically every one of 'em--”
“It weren't that,” he would say; or, “I weren't bothering--”
“I'm not bothered--”
“Thee needn't bother, but it's a misfortunate thing--”
“Hates me like the divil 'ates Holy Water.”
“Like enough!”
“A pound to a penny!”
“As like as not!”
“Ah; very like.”
These were all typical Hawkish expressions.
His yarns of India out-Rudyard Kipling. They were superb, full of
barrack-room touches, and the smells and sounds of the jungle. He told
of the time when a soldier could get “jungling leave”; when he could
go off with a Winchester and a pal and a native guide for two or three
months; when the Government paid so many rupees for a tiger skin, so
many for a cobra--a scale of rewards for bringing back the trophies of
the jungle wilds.
He pictured the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush, describing the everlasting
snows where you look up and up at the sheer rocks and glaciers; “you
feel like a baby tortoise away down there, so small, as like as not you
get giddy and drunk-like.”
One night Hawk told me of a Hindu fakir who sat by the roadside
performing the mango-trick for one anna. I illustrated it in the sand as
he told it.
_caption: Dug-out, September 9, 1915._
1. The fakir puts a pinch of dust from the ground in a little pile on a
glass plate on a tripod.
2. He covers it up with a handkerchief or a cloth.
3. He plays the bagpipes, or a wooden flute, while you can see the heap
of dust under the cloth a-growing and a-growing up and up, bigger and
bigger.
4. At last he lifts up the cloth and shows you the green mango-tree
growing on the piece of glass.
“He covers it again--plays. Lifts the cloth, shows you the mango tree in
leaf. Covers it again--plays again. Takes away the cloth, and shows you
the mango-tree in fruit, real fruit; but they never let you have the
fruit for love or money. Rather than let any one have it, they pluck it
and squash it between their fingers.”