"Easier to tell you, sir, what we _didn't_ fight about," laughed
Birkby. "At first it was mostly food. We didn't have any 'pothecary's
scales to divide it exactly with, and when one lad got a few grains of
rice more than another, it wasn't in human nature not to make some bit
of a mention of it."
"That was wot you an' me 'ad our first tiff over, matey," cut in
Fenton. "It was the day after Captain Tanner gave out the text 'love
thy neighbour like thyself' for us to ponder ower. You dipped into
the pot ahead of me, an' I said, 'How's a bloke goin' to love his
neighbour when that neighbour pinches half his rice?' You filled your
mouth with one hand an' clipped me one in the jaw wi' t'other; an' as
I went reelin' back I put my foot into Bill's pile of toasted snails,
squashing 'em flat. So over he rolls an' starts to beat me afore I
cud get up. W'en at last I gets up the rice was all gone an' Bill had
copped all my snails to pay for the ones I squashed. All I had to put
down me gullet that night was some of the squashed snails I salvaged
from the sand, an' the grit I ate with 'em started my dysentery going
again fer a week."
Birkby smiled, and nodded confirmatively. "Yes," he resumed, "most of
our fights were about food, but my first one was about my trousers.
You see, I was off watch and turned in asleep when the torpedo struck
the _Tara_, and only just managed to get away in my pajamas. The lower
part of these I kicked out of in the water, and one of the sailors of
the submarine gave me a spare pair of his German naval breeches. It
was glad indeed I was to have them. At first no one remarked them,
but finally, at the end of a hard day's march, one of the Welsh lads
passed some observation in his own language about me accepting the
bounty of the Hun. I didn't understand exactly what he said, but to be
on the safe side I clouted him one then and there. But all the same,"
he concluded after a pause, "I traded the Hun trousers to one of the
guards for a long Arab shirt, and got on without any breeches for the
rest of the time."
"An' not a bit worse off than most of the rest of us," added Fenton.
"His 'burnoose' was a good foot longer than mine."
"But it was X---, the 'Snail King,'" continued Birkby, "who was
oftenest in trouble. We were all jealous of his appetite for the
wriggling things, jealous of the quick way he had of spying and picking
them up, and, most of all, jealous of the way he was getting fat on
them while all the rest of us were wasting away to skeletons. First and
last, though, I think we were about quits with him. You see, the way
we cooked the snails was to throw them on the coals till the blow-off
of steam made a sort of whistle to announce that they were done to a
proper turn. Well, little old Barton here, by dint of long practising
alone in the desert, developed a bit of a whistle of his own which even
the 'Snail King' himself couldn't tell from the real thing. By tooting
up at the proper moments, old Barty had the 'King' setting his teeth
in half-cooked snails for nearly a week before he twigged the thing.
Then, of course, he jumped on our little friend here with both feet,
and it took two of us half-fed ones to drag him off."
"Aye, matey," Barton chipped in, "an' it took three o' ye to hold him
the week after when we planted the loaded shells on him. I pinched a
cartridge from one o' a dozen snail-shells wi' powder. On top o' this
I rammed in the upper half--the 'orned half--of a snail, an' scattered
the shells where 'His Highness' cu'd find 'em, but for not 'avin'
put 'em all on the coals at onct. After the first ones began to blow
up a post-mortem on the remainin' ones revealed some of my infernal
machines, and then I laughed and gave the whole game away."
And so they ran on. Fenton confessed to having had to "clout" one of
the quartermasters, because the latter had been so "swanky" as to
maintain that the torpedo that sank the _Tara_ was scarlet "when the
bally thing was only red"; and Birkby admitted to having closed his
argument for the negative on one of Lieutenant Tanner's Sunday texts
with, "And if you still think that 'Love is the greatest thing in the
world'--take _that_!" And as we slid up the Liffey in the drizzle of
the Irish dawn, Barton just finished telling me how someone accused the
first man to sight the rescuing motors with eating the "Arabs' hemp
and 'seeing' things,'" adding that the two were circling each other on
tottering legs, looking for an opening, when the bout was interrupted
by the arrival of the Red Cross ambulances. "Half a minute later," he
concluded, "the two of 'em was both guzzlin' over the same jam-tin."
There had, it appears, been some kind of a dispute over everything,
from the sand beneath their feet to the sky above their heads, and,
except for the higher officers, just about every man of them had had
some kind of a set-to with every other one. And yet not even the fine
optimism of Captain Gwatkin-Williams and Lieutenant Tanner convinced
me so thoroughly as these off-hand recitals of the ancient British
spirit of give-and-take in which they settled their petty troubles
that, had the worst come to the worst--had, for instance, the Duke of
Westminister's rescue party gone astray, as it nearly did--it would
have been the man, not the beast, in the _Tara_ sailors that would have
triumphed in the end.