I
THERE has come upon us, suddenly, one of those inexplicable lulls which
make the experienced seafarer in the Mediterranean recall bygone voyages
out East. It is as if the ship had run abruptly into some sultry and
airless chamber of the ocean, a chamber whose cobalt roof has shut down
tight, and through which not a breath is moving. The smoke from the
funnel, of a sulphurous bronze color, even while our trail yet lies
somnolent in a long smear on the horizon, now goes straight to the
zenith. The iron bulwarks are as hot as hand can bear, as the westering
sun glows full upon the beam. Under the awnings the troops lie gasping
on their rubber sheets, enduring silently and uncomprehendingly, like
dumb animals.
Far ahead, the escort crosses and recrosses our course. Still farther
ahead, a keen eye can detect a slight fraying of the taut blue line of
the horizon. Signals break from the escort and are answered from our
bridge. I turn to a sergeant who is shambling to and fro by the
machine-room door, and inform him that Port Said is in sight, and that
he will be in harbor in an hour or so.
And then, just as suddenly as we entered, the door of that heated
chamber of the sea opens and we pass out into a warm humid wind. The
wind and the news wake everybody. The soldiers, who have encamped on our
after-deck during the voyage, suddenly display a feverish activity.
Rations are packed, rifles are cleaned, and I am in the full tide of
popular favor because I permit oil-reservoirs to be replenished in the
machine-room and furnish those priceless fragments of old emery cloth
which give such a delectable and silvery gloss to the bolts. Later, I am
so popular that I could almost stand for Parliament, for I tell the
sergeant that each man can fill his waterbottle with iced water. Which
they proceed to do at once, so that said water gets red-hot before the
moment of disembarkation!
But take a look at these men on our after-deck while we are coming up to
Port Said. You have never seen them before and you will not see them
again, for they are bound for Bagdad and beyond. They are very
representative, for they are of all ages, races, and regiments. They are
going to join units which have been transferred. Three were hours in the
water when their ship was torpedoed. Several have come overland across
France and Italy, and got most pleasantly hung up at entrancing cities
on the way. Others have come out of hospitals and trenches in Macedonia
and France and Flanders. They are Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English.
The sergeant, now thumbing a worn pocket-book, has seen service in
India, China, Egypt, and France.
Behind him, on the hatch, is a boy of eighteen who wears the uniform of
the most famous regiment in the British Army. He is small for his age,
and he has a most engaging smile. When I asked him how on earth he got
into the Army he explained that he had ‘misriprisinted his age.’ He has
a chum, a gaunt Highlander, who scarcely opened his lips all the voyage,
and who sat on the hatch sewing buttons on their clothes, darning their
stockings, and reading a religious pamphlet entitled _Doing it Now_.
There is another sergeant, too, a young gentleman going home to get a
commission. He is almost to be described as one apart, for he holds no
converse with the others. He walks in a mincing way, he has a gold watch
with a curb-chain on one wrist, a silver identification plate and a
silver slave-bangle from Saloniki on the other, and an amethyst ring on
one of his fingers. As the Chief Engineer said to me one day, he needed
only a spear and a ring through his nose to be a complete fighting man.
However, in this war it is unwise to make snap judgments. I understand
that this young gentleman has an aptitude for certain esoteric
brain-work of vast use in artillery. He never goes near the firing-line
at all. Our young friend Angus MacFadden has that job. When the young
gentleman with the slave-bangle and gold-mounted fountain-pen and
expensive Kodak has figured out certain calculations in his dug-out
office, Angus, who resembles an extremely warlike bellhop, with his
gaunt Highland chum beside him, will scramble up out of his trench, make
a most determined rush toward a given point, and, in short, complete the
job, whatever it may be.
Now it is all very well to talk about the triumphs of mind over matter,
but my interest is not with the young gentleman at all. He may carry
Omar Khayyam in his kit. He may call the ‘Shropshire Lad’ ‘topping
poetry.’ He may (as he does) borrow Swinburne from my bookshelf. My
interest is with Angus and his chums. I look out of my machine-room
window and watch them getting ready to disembark. They are very amusing,
with their collapsible aluminium pannikins, their canvas washbasins and
buckets, their fold-up shaving tackle and telescopic tooth-brushes.
There is one tough old private of the Old Army among them. He has the
Egyptian and two South African medals. He never seems to have any kit to
bother him. I see him in the galley, peeling potatoes for their dinner,
deep in conversation with the pantryman and smoking an Irish clay. He
knows all the twenty-one moves, as we say. Then there is a very young
man who reads love stories all the time, a rosy-cheeked lad with the
Distinguished Service Order ribbon on his tunic.
Another, almost as young, is tremendously interested in refrigeration.
He comes into my engine-room and stares in rapt incredulity at the snow
on the machine. ‘I don’t see why it doesn’t melt!’ he complains, as if
he had a grievance. ‘How _do_ you freeze? if it isn’t a rude question.’
I explain briefly how we utilize the latent heat of re-evaporation
peculiar to certain gaseous media, in order to reduce the temperature.
He turns on me with a rush of frankness and bursts out, ‘But, you know,
that’s all Greek to me!’ Well, I suggest, his soldiering’s all Greek to
me, come to that. He laughs shortly, with his eyes on the ever-moving
engines, and says he supposes so. By and by he begins to talk of his
experiences in Macedonia. He thinks the sea is beautiful, after the bare
hot gulches and ravines. He is so fair that the sun has burned his face
and knees pink instead of brown. I asked him what he was doing before
the war, and he said his father had a seed-farm in Essex and he himself
was learning the business.
Meanwhile we have arrived at Port Said. The engines stop and go astern
violently, and the pilot comes alongside in a boat and climbs the
rope-ladder. Just ahead is the breakwater, with a couple of motor
patrols keeping guard over the fairway. Our escort puts on speed and
goes in, for her job with us is done. She has gone in to coal, and she
will be ready in a few hours to take another transport out. She and her
sisters are like us—they are never through. The big ships may lie for
days, or even weeks, in harbor. We small fry have to hurry. Back and
forth we ply without ceasing. Sometimes we run ashore in our haste, and
so make less speed. Sometimes we smash into each other in the dark, and
have to stagger back to port and refit with all possible expedition.
Sometimes, too, we go out and never come back, and nobody save the
authorities and our relatives hears anything about it. To what end?
Well—and herein lies my interest in those soldiers of the King on the
after-deck—the one ultimate object we have in view is to get Master
Angus MacFadden and his chums into that front-line trench, to keep them
there, warm and fed, and fully supplied with every possible assistance
when they climb over the parapet to make the aforesaid rush. Everything
else, when you come to think of it, is subordinate to that.
The ship goes at half-speed now past the breakwater, a long gray finger
pointing northwards from the beach. Half-way along we pass the De
Lesseps statue on its high pedestal, the right hand flung out in a
grandiose gesture toward the supreme achievement of his life. The warm
wind from the westward is sending up the sea to break in dazzling white
foam on the yellow sand below the pink and blue and brown bathing-huts.
The breakwater is crowded with citizens taking the air, for the walks of
Port Said are restricted and flavored with the odors of Arabian
domesticity. We pass on, and the hotels and custom-house buildings come
into view. All around are the transients of the ocean, anchored and for
a moment at rest. Past the Canal building we steam, a pretentious stucco
affair with three green-tiled domes and deep Byzantine galleries. Past
also Navy House, a comely white building in the Venetian style,
recalling the Doge’s Palace—an illusion heightened by the fleet of
patrols anchored in front, busily getting ready to go out to work.
And then we stop, and manœuvre, and go astern; tugs whistle imperiously,
motor-boats buzz around us, ropes are hurriedly ferried across to buoys
and quays, and we are made fast and pulled into our berth alongside of
an immense vessel which has come from the other side of the world with
frozen meat to feed Master Angus and his chums. But by this time it is
dark. The ochreous sheen on the sky behind Port Said is darkening to
purple and violet, the stars are shining peacefully over us, and the
sergeant comes to ask for a lantern by which to finish packing his kit.
It has been warm during the day, but now it is stifling. We are, as I
said, close alongside a great ship. She extends beyond us and towers
above us, and even the warm humid breeze of Port Said in August is shut
out from us. Up from below comes a suffocating stench of hot bilge. The
ship is invaded by a swarm of Arab cargo-men, who begin immediately to
load us from our neighbor. Cargo lights, of a ghastly blue color, appear
at the hatchways. Angus and his chums take up their kits and fall in on
the bridge-deck. Officers hurry to and fro. Hatches are taken off, and
the cold air of the holds comes up in thin wisps of fog into the tropic
night. Winches rattle. Harsh words of French and Arabic commingle with
the more intelligible shouts of the ship’s officers. All night this goes
on. All night proceeds this preposterous traffic in frozen corpses amid
the dim blue radiance of the cargo-clusters. Hundreds upon hundreds of
frozen corpses!
I go off watch at eight and, seated in a room like a Turkish bath, I try
to concentrate on the letters which have come over the sea. I am seized
with a profound depression, arising, I suppose, from the bizarre
discrepancy between the moods communicated by the letters and my own
weariness. Most letters are so optimistic in tone. They clap one on the
back and give one breezy news of the flowers in New Jersey gardens, of
the heat in New Orleans, of bombs in London and reunions in English
houses. All very nice; but I have to get up at two, and the thermometer
over my bunk is now registering a hundred Fahrenheit. An electric fan
buzzes and snaps in the corner and seems only to make the air hotter. An
Arab passes in the alleyway outside and calls to some one named Achmet
in an unmelodious howl. (All male Arabs are named Achmet apparently.)
I sit in my pajamas, with the letters in my hand, and wonder how long it
is going to last. Another week or so and we shall have had two years of
it. Most of us have gone home on leave. Counting the commander, there
are—let me see—four of us left of the original crowd. It is over a year
since I applied for leave. Nothing will come of it. I look into the
future and see myself, a gray elderly failure, still keeping a six-hour
shift on a Mediterranean transport, my life spent, my friends and
relatives all dead, Angus and his chums gone west, and a new generation
coming out, with vigorous appetites for fresh provisions.
And then the door opens and lets in a slight uniformed figure with a
grip in his hand and a familiar smile on his face. Lets in also liberty,
freedom, pay-day, England, Home and Beauty.
It is my relief, arrived at last!