THE END OF MAC'S CAMPAIGNING DAYS
About midday a hospital-ship anchored off the shore, and some one led
him along the pier to a barge, from which he was transferred to a
mine-sweeper, and at last was swung upwards by a crane on to the deck
of the ship. He was almost the first on board. Kind hands and
affectionate voices welcomed him, and tender hands led him along the
deck to a surgery. The fresh cooling sea air had revived him, and here
at last, with skilled hands and cool lotions easing his aching head, he
felt supremely happy.
The blood and grime removed from his face, and a neat white bandage
round his head, a sister took him in charge and guided him far down to
a ward low in the ship. She gave him a comfortable bunk, and swiftly
set about spring-cleaning him. She speedily unclothed him by running a
pair of scissors along the sleeves and legs of his blood-clotted
garments, giving him his precious bandages and identification disc
wrapped up in a handkerchief; then sponged him all over in deliciously
cool water, decked him in a shirt, and spread a sheet over him. Next
came a large bowl of hot soup, which Mac lost no time in putting within
his hungry frame, and finally a glass of port. The fine sister chatted
away the while with pleasant little laughs and entertaining
remembrances, as if she had not been working in those steamy holds for
days and nights with scarce a rest.
Many others were brought into the ward, and it was soon full of
seriously wounded men, Imperial, Australian and New Zealand. M.O.'s
and sisters worked incessantly at the heavy dressings.
The hours drifted slowly by, for though he had had no sleep for four
days and nights, and little for several nights before that, he did not
sleep, and the passage of time was marked only by the arrival of meals
and the pleasant relief of fresh dressings. He was always hungry from
long under-feeding, and relished everything which came his way. For
him there was no difference between night and day, and he often lost
count of time. There was only one sister in the ward, a splendid
Queensland girl, who toiled for almost all of the twenty-four hours in
the hot, steaming atmosphere, going steadily the round of the heavy
dressings, starting again at the beginning as soon as she came to the
last.
The ordinary routine work had to be left to the orderlies, and these
men angered Mac so at times that he wished they might be lined up in a
row and shot. Recruited, it seemed, from the lowest order of some
community, they made use of this opportunity, when all senior ranks
were too fully occupied with more immediate work of their own, to loaf,
to rob the wounded sometimes, and to ignore many simple duties which
for many men made all the difference between pain and comfort. Most of
the wounded suffered from dysentery in a more or less acute form, and
frequently seriously wounded men had to struggle out of bed to attend
to the wants of those incapable of moving. Some exceptions there were,
but the casual neglect in Mac's ward made him fume with anger.
But the sister and the padre were splendid people. The padre came to
the ward to assist the sister with her dressings, and came to Mac to
break gently the news that he would never see again. Mac had no
illusions on this point, and laughed at the padre and his serious,
funereal attitude till he resumed his normal cheery manner, when he and
Mac soon discovered that they had many great friends in common in New
Zealand, for the padre hailed from those parts too. The padre and
sister became great friends of Mac, and in odd moments they sat on his
bunk and yarned away with him, the padre about the Sounds' country
which he and Mac knew so well, about what work Mac might do in future,
and about all sorts of things, and with the sister he arranged some day
to stay on the far back Queensland station.
The evening of the day he came on board they left Anzac and for some
hours the engines rumbled away, when again there was silence. Mac was
told they were at Mudros alongside the _Aquitania_ putting all light
and medium cases on board that vessel. Then for an indefinite space of
time he again felt the vibration of the engines, and he thought they
must be bound for Alexandria. When the vessel stopped, without having
the vaguest notion how long she had been steaming, he took it for
granted they were at Alexandria, and was rejoicing inwardly. He was
deeply disappointed to hear they were again off Anzac.
During the day the Turks shelled the vessel, and turned machine-guns on
her. The shells, which Mac could hear bursting as he lay in his bunk,
did no damage, but the machine-gun fire caught one wounded man lying on
deck, made several chips in the deck and holes through the operating
theatre, narrowly missing a medical officer at work on a case and
rattled against the steel sides. The ship moved out to a safer
anchorage. Mac heard in later days that a destroyer had been
carelessly firing from under the lee of the hospital ship. They took
on board that day another thousand cases, again transferred the less
seriously wounded to the _Aquitania_, and returned once more to Anzac.
They left Anzac finally on Friday, called again at Mudros to discharge
the light cases, and set a course for Alexandria, much to Mac's relief.
One day he was taken on a stretcher to the operating theatre, where he
drifted strangely away from earthly things, and woke again in his bunk.
Once he had a glorious sleep, after an injection of morphia, but
usually he lay awake, tired and restless. There was no one to talk to,
except on those rare but pleasant moments when the good padre and the
ever-cheering sister found a few spare minutes. All those near him
were badly wounded and far too ill to speak. Some died, and, wrapped
in a blanket, disappeared from the ward to join the line of corpses on
an upper deck, waiting the dawning hour and the parting words of the
padre to plunge with firebars at their feet into the blue
Mediterranean. Of what had finally happened on those Gallipoli heights
no one could say definitely, and there were disappointing and
unsatisfactory rumours. About noon one day the vessel passed much
wreckage of shattered boats, oars, sun helmets, lifebelts and so on,
and cruised about for some time looking for survivors, but found none.
It was the scene of the foundering a few hours earlier of the _Royal
Edward_ with many hundred fine fellows. The padre brought what news he
could to Mac, and was seldom unaccompanied by something tempting in the
way of sweets or fruit.
On Monday about the middle of the morning the vessel tied up at
Alexandria. The heat was almost unbearable, for no breeze stirred in
the hot confines of the dock to send a cooling breath into the stuffy
depths of the ship. Mac had a wild longing to get off the ship, and he
must have become light-headed. He had been told he would be sent
ashore before evening, but it seemed to him hour after hour had passed
and he knew it must be ten o'clock at night. He gave up hope, and said
to the sister when she came near him that he supposed no one would be
sent ashore now until morning.
"But it's only midday. You'll all go ashore this afternoon."
"Midday on Monday or Tuesday?" Mac inquired.
"Monday, of course, you silly old boy."
Days seemed to pass before the stretcher-bearers commenced removing the
wounded from his ward, but it was only four in the afternoon when he
was put on a stretcher, taken up in a lift and carried down the gangway
across the pier to an ambulance. For those fifty yards through the
fierce sun, an English woman walked beside him holding a parasol over
his head, and he was deeply touched by so thoughtful a kindness. From
what he had seen of the English ladies of Egypt during the terrible
shortage of trained hospital workers, he knew that no words could
describe the magnificence of their actions. The ambulance rattled
away, and he heard again the many noises of an Egyptian street. It was
a dreary journey of nearly an hour, for the springs of the car had long
abandoned their functions, and the jolting over the cobbled roads was
agony to his wounded head.
He was taken to the 17th General Hospital at Ramleh, and was placed on
a low basket arrangement in a big marquee, with its sides rolled up so
that the least hot of any stray breeze might find its way in. The
floor was the desert sand. It was in these days that the shamefully
inadequate preparations for the wounded were most felt, yet the
sufferers themselves did not complain, and the hospital staffs and the
civilian population of Egypt went to work in that scorching heat to
make the best use of their strength and of the short supply of material
available. So the wounded, knowing that all there were doing their
best uncomplainingly accepted going without dressings when they would
have brought great relief; accepted bad food sometimes, the discomfort
of the wicket beds in the stifling heat of the marquees; and, armed
each with a fly whisk, they made the best of a bad job. The sisters
were magnificent, and, indeed, everybody was. The lightly wounded,
too, did all in their power for those who could not walk.
Several hours after Mac arrived, he was handed a bowl of rice mixed
with condensed milk, and though it had been made some time, and had
fermented, he was hungry and ate it eagerly. Then a sister dressed his
wound, and soon the marquee was left to itself for the night. For the
first time in several days, in spite of the fact that his head felt
very bad, he went to sleep, and his waking was full of strange,
unutterable horror. He found himself crawling with his hands and knees
on the sand. He was awake, but why was it he could not see? He
crawled round and round, but could find nothing but sand, sand
everywhere, nothing but sand. He felt terribly alone, and he could not
recall the reason of it all, or why he could not see. He called out in
his terror--again--and again--what, he did not know. Then an old
sister seized him. "You poor old boy. What have you crawled out of
the tent for?" And he remembered again where he was. She took him
back to his bed, soothed him as a mother would calm a terrified child.
Mac was trembling like a leaf.
Tuesday dragged wearily by. He was in low condition, and very, very
tired and his head ached violently. Between the flies, the heat and
the uncomfortable bed, it was not a happy home; but the kindness of the
sisters and the other wounded men who came to him occasionally, went
far towards making it all bearable. There were men worse than he in
that marquee, men in agony and near to death, with torn, septic wounds,
but sticking it out without a word.
Wednesday brought changes. The padre of the hospital ship had cabled
to his father in London that he was all right, and what hospital he was
going to; and now several people came to see him. Mac told them he
would like to go home as soon as he could be sent, as there could be no
more campaigning for him and the sooner he was home the better. The
M.O. said that a hospital-ship was leaving on the following day and
that he would be sent by it. Mac was put in a ward that afternoon. He
was brought some clothes for the morning, but, being fed up with bed,
unknown to the sister, he donned them straight away and went and sat by
the window. He felt very groggy, but getting up and about bucked him
up tremendously.
Next morning he took farewell of the sister, and, clad in a Tommy
uniform built for some one many sizes smaller, a pair of heavy boots of
huge calibre, and a Tommy cap perched on top of his bandages, he walked
downstairs with an orderly. But out in the open the sun was too much
for him and laid him low, when he was converted into a stretcher-case,
and swung away on an ambulance much more comfortable than the one which
brought him. Again he was carried across the sun-baked pier, sheltered
from the sun and protected from the flies by one of those splendid
Alexandrian women, and taken down into a comfortable bunk in the
hospital-ship _Dongola_. Mac found in the adjutant of the ship a
friend of bygone days, who placed him in a spare deck cabin, which he
found not at all an unpleasant home for the next ten days.
He speedily gained strength at sea, and began to enjoy life a bit more.
A fine Australian, who was but slightly wounded, took Mac under his
wing, and with ceaseless care and affection walked with him on deck,
and in a wonderfully unselfish way did many little things to make time
pass quickly for him. A cheery Scottish sister poked her head in
occasionally, and came in the evening to do his dressing. The orderly
who brought Mac's meals, was an earnest, hardworking man, who had
worked once with a missionary among the Eskimos, and who did the work
of several lazy orderlies as well as his own. Late in the evening, as
a special treat, he brought a gramophone up from below deck, stood it
on a chair in the middle of the small cabin, directed the trumpet
straight at Mac's head, and set in motion mournful hymn tunes. It was
tough going for his aching head; but the earnest orderly was so wrapped
up in giving to him what he thought was great pleasure that he had not
the heart to stop him. Mac would silence it for a time by encouraging
dissertations on Eskimo life, or the future of the Gospel in India. An
hour of the gramophone, and it would retire below to end its rasping
for the day.
Twelve hot hours were passed in the Grand Harbour of Malta, while
thousands of cackling fowls were lowered from the boat deck and sent
ashore for men in hospital. The two following days Mac was almost
entirely deserted, as a heavy sea sent most of the sisters, orderlies
and patients to their bunks. The first night no one came to dress his
head; but the second night a quaint rough stoker put in an appearance,
and, chatting cheerfully the while, made his head more or less
comfortable. No water came for washing, and on two rare occasions a
fleeting orderly left a plate of some sort of food or other. He spent
those two days in bed, and was thankful when they were over. From then
onward the voyage went well, snoozing on deck in a chair, or walking up
and down arm and arm with the Australian.
At length, in the keen air of an English autumn morning, Mac stood by
the ship's rail as she moved quietly up Southampton Water, to berth in
due course alongside a pier and a hospital train. Mac had dreamed that
it might be so, though he scarcely dared to hope that it would come
true; but the gangway was scarcely down before his father and his
sister were on the deck and had him in their arms. In the middle of
the afternoon the hospital train stopped at a Surrey station; and
before very long he was being undressed, bathed and put to bed.
Presently, the sister, the medical officer, his father and his sister
withdrew quietly from the bright little room, saying that he must go to
sleep after the excitements of the day. And to sleep Mac went, feeling
more comfortable and happy than he had been for many a long day.