Tell England Part 45

At first the broad blue floor of the sea stretched right away on every side without a sail anywhere to suggest that it was a medium of traffic. The sky, a far paler blue, met the horizon all round. It was only a slight restlessness over the surface that made the Mediterranean distinguishable from a vast and still inland lake.

The ship plied steadily onward in the opposite direction to the sun, which looked down upon the scene with its hot glance unmodified by cloud or haze.

With my gla.s.ses I swept the empty waters. At last I saw, sketched over there with palest touch, a line of mountains--just such a range as a child would draw, one peak having a narrow point, another a rounded summit. This land lay at so great a distance that it was shadowless, and looked like a long bit of broken slate with its jagged ends uppermost. I cast in my mind whether Gallipoli loomed like this: and Gallipoli, somehow, seemed more peaceful since that satisfying event of the morning.

I dropped my gla.s.ses. For the first time I realised that I was setting out to do something difficult for England. Actually I! I glowed in the thought, for to-day, if ever, I was in an heroic mood.

I touched for a moment the perfect patriotism. Yes, if Beauty demanded it, I could give all for England--all.

As the day went by, we seemed to be rounding that mountainous island, for it lingered on our port, always changing its aspect, but always remaining beautiful.

The whole scene was Beauty. And this Beauty, urged the voice of the priest, was to have something to say in moments when I must choose between this bad deed and that good one. Of the two, I was to do the one that was the more like the Mediterranean on a summer day.

Oh, I had a clear enough ideal now. And why had I never seen before, as Monty had seen, that, just as there was far more beauty in seas and hills than ugliness, so on the whole there was more goodness in human characters than evil, and, a.s.suredly, more happiness in life than pain. And the old Colonel, too, had seen beauty in youth and strength; he had seen it triumphing in Penny's death and in all this sanguinary Dardanelles campaign.

Yes, I had closed on the idea. Even the lively excesses of Major Hardy's mob, even Jimmy Doon's cynical humour at the prospect of death had much in them like the Mediterranean on a summer day.

Or, say, on a summer night like this. For, as the evening wore on, we were still pa.s.sing this long island; and a pale mist had risen in a narrow ribbon from the sea-line, and hidden a lower belt of its hills from my view, so that the peaks towered like Mount Ararats above a rising flood of fog-damp; and, as this bank of mist rose upward, the sun sank downward, a disc of gold fire.

I followed it with my gla.s.ses; and so rapid was its descent that, before I could count a hundred, it had dipped beneath the water-line--become a flaming semicircle--then only a glowing rim--and disappeared. It left a few minutes' afterglow, with the sky every shade from crimson at the horizon to blue at the zenith.

The world got darker, and the waves, breaking from the ship's bows, began to spill a luminous phosph.o.r.escence on the sea. I watched a little longer; and then the stars and the phosph.o.r.escent wave-crests glistened in a Mediterranean night.

CHAPTER VI

MAJOR HARDY AND PADRE MONTY FINISH THE VOYAGE

--1

But I must hurry on. Here am I dawdling over what happened indoors in the minds of two boys, while out of doors nations were battling against nations, and the whole world was in upheaval. Here am I happily describing so local a thing as the effort of a big-hearted priest to rebuild our spiritual lives on the quiet moments of the Ma.s.s and the strange glorious mystery of penance, while the great Division which captured the beaches of Cape h.e.l.les had been brought to a standstill by the impregnable hill of Achi Baba, and uncounted troopships like our own were pouring through the Mediterranean to retrieve the fight.

On with the war, then. One morning I was wakened by much talking and movement all over the boat, and by Doe's leaping out of his top bunk, kicking me in pa.s.sing, and disappearing through the cabin door. Back he came in a minute, crying: "You must come out and see this lovely, white dream-city. We're outside Malta."

I rushed out to find Valetta, the grand harbour of Malta, on three sides of us. We were anch.o.r.ed; and the hull of the _Rangoon_, which looked very huge now, was surrounded by Maltese b.u.mboats.

Sh.o.r.e leave was granted us. And, ash.o.r.e, we hurried through the blazing heat to visit the hospitals and learn from the crowds of Gallipoli sick and wounded something about the fighting at h.e.l.les.

These cheery patients shocked our optimism by telling us that it was hopeless to expect the capture of the hill of Achi Baba by frontal a.s.sault and that any further advance at Cape h.e.l.les was scratched off the programme. The hosts of troops that were pa.s.sing through Malta must, they surprised us by declaring, be destined for some secret move elsewhere than at h.e.l.les, for there was no room for them on the narrow tongue of land beneath Achi Baba.

"We're wild to know what's in the wind," said a sister. "The stream of transports has never stopped for the last few days."

That we could well believe. There were two huge liners crammed with khaki figures in the harbour that morning.

"We are going to win, I imagine?" asked Monty, with a note of doubt.

"O lord, yes," replied a superbly bonny youngster, without a right arm. "But I don't envy you going to the Peninsula. It's heat, dust, flies, and dysentery. And Mudros is ten times worse."

"What's Mudros?" asked I.

"Mudros," broke in Doe, blushing, as he aired his cla.s.sical learning, "is a harbour in the Isle of Lemnos famous in cla.s.sical--"

"Mudros," interrupted the one-armed man, proud of his experience, "is a harbour in the Island of Lemnos, and the filthiest hole--"

"Mudros," continued Doe, refusing to be beaten, "is a harbour in the Isle of Lemnos, which is the island where Jason and the Argonauts landed, and found Hypsipele and the women who had murdered their husbands. Jupiter hurled Vulcan from Heaven, and he fell upon Lemnos. And it's sad to relate that Achilles and Agamemnon had a bit of a dust-up there."

"Well, that may be," said the one-armed hero, rather crushed by Doe's weighty lecture. "But you're going to Mudros first in your transport, and you'll probably die of dysentery there."

"Good Lord," said I.

We selected the ward where we would have our beds when we came down wounded, and the particular pretty sister who should nurse us; and went out into the dazzling sun. Having climbed to a high level that overlooked the harbour, we leaned against a stone parapet, and examined the French warships that slept, with one eye open, up a narrow blue waterway. For Malta in 1915 was a French naval base.

"Sad to see them there, sir," said a convalescent Tommy, pointing to the grey cruisers flying the tricolour. "They've been bottled up there, since the submarines appeared off h.e.l.les and sank the _Majestic_ and t'other boats. There's only destroyers loafing around Cape h.e.l.les now, sir."

"Great Scott, is that so?" asked Monty. "But I suppose we're going to win?"

"O lord, yes," said the Tommy.

We got back to the _Rangoon_ just before sundown. And, when the sun began to soften and to bathe the white buildings of Valetta in ruddy hues, our siren boomed out its farewell, and two English girls in a small boat waved an incessant good-bye. Crowds gathered to brandish handkerchiefs, as our transport crept away, with the boys singing: "Roaming in the gloaming on the banks of the Dardanelles," and yelling: "Are we downhearted? NO! Are we going to win? YES!"

"Well, that's the last of Malta," murmured Jimmy Doon. "Another landmark in our lives gone."

--2

Two days' run brought us outside Alexandria. And the confoundedly learned Doe, pointing out to me the pink and yellow town upon the African sands, among its palms and its shipping, said: "Behold the city of Alexander the Great, of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra; the home of the Greek scriptures; and the see of the great saints, Clement, Athanasius, and Cyril."

So I did what he wanted. I called him a Cla.s.sical Encyclopaedia, at which he looked uncomfortable and pleased.

It was Alexandria right enough. We had reached at last the base of the Dardanelles fight, and entered the outskirts of that ancient imperial world, which the old Colonel had told us was the theatre of the campaign.

Travelling very slowly, we steamed into the huge harbour. And soon we were moored against one of its forty quays, and being addressed in an infernal jangle of tongues by hundreds of begging Arabs who came rushing through the guns, limbers and field kitchens arrayed on the quay.

More anxious than ever for news of the fight, we applied for sh.o.r.e leave, and, after lunch, went down the gangway, and trod the soil of Africa for the first time.

At once, like an overpowering personality, the East rose up to greet us, oppressing us with its merciless Egyptian sun and its pungent smell of dark humanity. Heady with the sun, and sick with the smell, we found ourselves in one of the worst streets of Alexandria, the "Rue des Soeurs," a filthy thoroughfare of brothels masquerading as shops, and of taverns, which, like the rest of the world, had gone into military dress and called themselves: "The Army and Navy Bar," "The Lord Kitchener Bar," and "The Victory Bar."

Phew! the sweat and the stench! The East was a vapour bath. What a climate for a white man to make war in! And yet everywhere in this city of Alexander and Athanasius, British and Australian soldiers sauntered on foot or drove government waggons through the streets.

Sick and wounded, too, roamed abroad in their blue hospital uniforms. Only too pleased to display before three eager novices their superior acquaintance with Gallipoli, they told us the story we had heard at Malta: the h.e.l.les army, firmly stopped by the hill of Achi Baba, was melting away in the atrocious heat; but some startling new venture was expected, for the forty quays of Alexandria had been scarcely sufficient to cater for the troops and stores that had put in there; and all the hospitals in Egypt had been emptied to admit twenty thousand casualties.

We hired a buggy, and drove back through the same odorous street to the dockyard, and, having given the thief of an Arab driver a third of his demands, went straight to our cabins to rinse our mouths out.

Next day at sundown, the siren boomed good-bye. Perhaps there was a military reason for it, but we always left these ports at sunset. It was sunset, as we steamed out of Malta; and now, with the sky flushed and the air rose-tinted, we began to slip gently out of the harbour, amid cheers and handwavings from every ship that we pa.s.sed.

We were picking our course between the ships, when Monty plucked my sleeve, and, pointing to a home-bound liner, murmured:

"Beauty, Rupert."

I looked, and saw what he meant. For in the big liner's bows two tiny English children clad in white, a little boy and girl, waved mechanically under the instructions of their sweet-faced English mother, who, though a young one, looked with a mother's eyes at our yellow rows of helmeted lads, and waved the more energetically (I doubt not) as she strove to keep back her tears. In the sad eyes of that youthful mother I saw looking out at us the maternal love of her s.e.x for all the sons of woman. She was the last Englishwoman that many of these boys ever saw.