The Secrets of a Kuttite Part 13

I respectfully suggest a variation of Watts's "Hope"--that popular picture. A junior sub asleep in a barricaded corner of a room in Kut beside a four-ounce slice of bread, listening in his dreams to distant guns.

I must now make one of the most important entries of the whole siege. General Smith gave me a _Punch_. I mean that having finished with a copy of _Punch_, sent to him by aeroplane, he has pa.s.sed it on to me.

Shakespeare, Thackeray, and Punch. In the flesh, what friends those three would have been!

"If," writes an unborn Teufeldrockh, "I were not a German, I would like to be Punch."

"If," replies Punch, with a dignified bow, "you were not a German, you could aspire."

For what duellist but that great English gentleman Punch has the seeing eye, the delicate wrist, the merciful smile?

_March 26th._--I am in Indian khaki again, for summer has come to Kut. It is even getting unpleasantly warm.

The ma.s.saging has decreased the rheumatics if anything, although I am very much weaker and can't walk 400 yards without getting blown. It is worth while to avoid the chaff bread, and I stick to an occasional egg and rice-husk and soup.

How fit I was when I started on this front! Square-Peg was seedy yesterday and in pain. I gave him some essence of ginger tabloids, and later on opium, which relieved him somewhat.

It is rumoured that the 6-inch guns from home have at last reached Gorringe. The enemy is now completely outcla.s.sed in artillery.

Tudway took me with him on board the _Sumana_ to see the effects of the recent bombardment. By a miracle one sh.e.l.l missed the main steam-pipes and carried away part of the bridge and cabin and funnel. Tudway is a keen officer, and has all the delightful insouciance of his service. We went over the whole boat and the barges. He was all on the alert, in his quiet way, to gather any suggestions for further protecting his alumnus. We sat in his dismantled cabin and talked of the sea, or rather he did, and I mentally annotated him with my own dreams. The sea, the sea, so vast, so great, so deep, so far away! As the hart panteth after the water-brooks so pant we Englishmen after thee, O Sea, even after thee, wild and lonely as thou art, and after thy waters briny as tears. Mighty, untamed, eternal! We, thy children, love thee. Alone, thou art free!

Turkish snipers followed us up, and we had to run the gauntlet on the way to the sh.o.r.e over the waters of the flood.

I bought three small fish yesterday here, but some one's native servant was killed last evening by a stray sh.e.l.l while fishing, so for the future it's all off. On one occasion, Tudway and I tried to net some, but both the Turks and the fish were against us.

This siege is a perfect device for leaving a man to his own plaguings. A book is now almost as great a luxury as bread.

I am even driven to re-robing and criticizing some of our early endeared legacies. Let us begin with the poet's notion of service--admittedly of a bygone day.

_The Soldier's Dream._

By the other Campbell.

_Our bugles sang truce for the night-cloud had lowered--_

Delightful arrangement that, one must admit. A truce is, after all, more fun than a night attack. And perhaps the cloud was a big one and it looked like rain!

_And the Sentinel stars set their watch in the sky--_

Much better! But that does away with the rain theory.

_And thousands had sunk on the ground overpowered--_

Bad-fitting word. Sounds like avoirdupois. But it must have referred to gas fumes, otherwise the line certainly reflects on the condition of the men. This climate could be called "overpowering."

_The weary to sleep and the wounded to die--_

That scouts the gas theory! As a matter of fact it's the last thing the weary have a chance to do, and the wounded certainly take weeks to die. Look at c.o.c.kie!

_While reposing one night on my pallet of straw--_

Fancy Tommy "reposing"! Campbell, may I inform you that Thomas neither poses nor reposes, which suggests the soft, rounded limbs of a Grecian maiden on a bed of rose-leaves. Tommy likes his mouth open, and often prefers to lie on his stomach with his legs wide apart. Reposing! My hat! What an awful sw.a.n.k the man was with his knocking off work because of the night-cloud, and what with his reposing on a pallet of straw. Why he didn't go in for a convertible four-legged wheelbarrow bedstead puzzles me. Tommy lies on the "good 'ole dirt" if it's hot, and otherwise screws himself up into his blanket, head and all. I hear Graoul asking his pal, "O, Halgie, koindly porse erlong may pallet hof straarw hat wance."

"Roight yer hare! 'Ere, Toenails, pallit-er strore is forwerd--hand the quilt halso."

_At the dead of night a sweet vision I saw, And thrice ere the morning I dreamed it again--_

Kindly eliminate "dreamed" and subst.i.tute "saw,"

then re-read it. Don't laugh! Why shouldn't he "see" it the second and even the third time also?

Tommy sees lots of things--at times.

_I dreamed from the battlefield's dreadful array Far, far, I had roamed on a desolate track.

It was springtime and summer arose on the way-- To the home of my fathers that welcomed me back--_

Tommy wouldn't dream of dreaming such a thing.

As for the "home of my fathers," the shape of the idea would give him a fit. "Bit o' skirt more like it."

_Stay, stay with us, thou art weary and worn; And fain was the war beaten soldier to stay-- But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away--_

"D'ye 'ear this, Spud?" says Tommy Toenails.

"The voice in 'is dreeamin' hear melted."

"Bit o' wax, more like," says Spud.

"I say a flea an' charnce it," adds Tooting Tom.

"Hand," says Spud, "wen 'e hawoke 'e got anuther stomikful o' sorrer. Marrid man, too. Gawd 'elp 'im."

We pa.s.s on. Let us take that dear little hymn lots of us learned at our mother's knee--

"_There is a green hill far away Without a city wall._"

How I used to wonder what a green hill could possibly want _with_ a city wall. Ah! the dear doubts of childhood!

I shall be told that "without" meant "beyond."

Another doubt was about "Llewellyn and his Dog." How the siege has helped us to join hands with childhood once more. Surely I haven't thought of the lines for many years. They run--

"_The gallant hound the wolf had slain, To save Llewellyn's heir._"

I remember we had to write a composition on the poem, and having decided that it was the wolf that had killed the hound--just as one says, "The scanty bone the beggar picked"--I had to square matters so as to explain how the hound died a second time at the hands of Llewellyn. It's all misty now, but I at least remember propounding the theory that the Welsh chieftain, in his terror, must have mistaken the wolf for the hound, and consequently did _him_ in for murdering the lost child.

It was this incident, I believe, that induced my parents to select for me a career at the Bar.

That incident recalls another one later on. At school we had a delightful master who hated using chalk. He informed us that we were to write an essay on--

"_Beneath the rule of men entirely great The pen is mightier than the sword._"

One promising fellow misheard the last word as "saw." He was rather an authority on saws, and treated us to a delightful treatise on saws in general, band-saws, hand-saws, rip-saws, fret-saws, and circular saws. As far as I remember, the drift of his argument was that a pen could merely write, whereas a saw could cut a piece of wood.

Once more, "Eheu! _Fugaces postumi----_"

I wonder where that lad is now. I should think he must be a large saw-miller somewhere--possibly asleep on a "pallet of straw" in France, and seeing "visions"

of his beloved saws. Why not! G.o.d bless him. I've forgotten his name and even what he was like.