THE TALE OF THE "TARA" OFF THE AFRICAN COAST
Rescued by "Tanks in the Desert"
As told by survivors, set down by Lewis R. Freeman
The adventures of the crew of the auxiliary cruiser, Tara, torpedoed off the North African coast, form one of the most exciting and romantic chapters in the annals of the Great War. Handed over as prisoners to the fanatical Senussi Arabs, they were taken out into the heart of the desert, where for many weary months they were on the brink of starvation, eking out their scanty ration of rice with snails and roots. The captain escaped and tried to bring help, but was captured and brought back to be lashed and kept without food. Just when things were at their worst a squadron of British armored cars, commanded by the Duke of Westminster, appeared as though by magic, drove off the Arabs, and rescued the survivors of the sorely-tried crew. By courtesy of the Admiralty the author interviewed Captain Gwatkin-Williams, the Tara's commander; Lieutenant Tanner, R.N.R., and several members of the ship's company, and their stories give a vivid idea of the terrible experience they underwent, as told in the Wide World Magazine.
I—STORY OF THE BRITISH PACKET
When England took over something like half of her twenty million tons of merchant shipping for war service, among the transports, colliers, hospital ships, and the like were a number of small but swift packets which were armed and employed as auxiliary cruisers or patrols. One of these was the Tara, which, under the name Hibernia, had plied in the Irish service of the London and North-Western Railway. Commanded by an officer of the Royal Navy, but still worked by her old crew, the Tara was sent to the bleak Cyrenaican coast of the Mediterranean to keep a look-out for submarines and prevent the smuggling of arms and supplies to the small but dangerous Turkish forces which were operating in Eastern Tripolitana with the object of inciting the Arabs to move against the then lightly-held western frontier of Egypt.
On November 5th the Tara was torpedoed by a German submarine in the Gulf of Sollum, and sank with the loss of eleven of her crew of something over one hundred. The ninety-two survivors were towed by the submarine to Port Sulieman and handed over to the Turks. The latter, in turn, passed the party on to the Senussi, who, as shortly transpired, were getting ready to launch a "holy war" against the Italians and English. The Arabs, short of food already, started marching their prisoners about the desert, and after several weeks established them in a sort of permanent camp at an old Roman well in the interior. Here, ekeing out with snails and roots such scanty rations as their captors were able to provide, the unfortunate Britons, racked by disease, and only half sheltered from the capricious winter weather, existed for three months and a half. The trickle of food, now from one oasis, now from another, became thinner and thinner as time went on, and by the middle of March the failure of supplies had become so complete that absolute starvation in the course of the next few days appeared inevitable. But on the seventeenth of that month, as suddenly as though dropped from the sky, a squadron of armored automobiles appeared on the horizon, and a few moments later the Arab guards had fallen before the fire of machine-guns, and the half-delirious prisoners, clutching hastily-broached jam and condensed milk tins, were being bundled into Red Cross ambulances for the return journey. A couple of days more, and they were in the hospitals of Alexandria, and a month later the bulk of them were back in England reporting for duty.
Through the courtesy of the British Admiralty the writer was granted an extended interview with Captain Gwatkin-Williams—the only one, indeed, that that distinguished officer gave before going to his new command in the North Atlantic. Later I journeyed to Wales and Ireland, to talk with Lieutenant Tanner, R.N.R., and several of the surviving members of the Tara's crew. The narrative that follows is the result of these conversations.
I recognized Captain Gwatkin-Williams the instant his broad shoulders filled the door of the room. I knew at once that he had all the characteristics, as he had all the appearance, of the typical British naval officer, and that among these was a distinct disinclination to tell of his own experiences. Knowing from past failures the futility of trying to "draw" a man of his kind by frontal attack, I wasted no effort in that direction, but asked him pointblank if he had been able to preserve any souvenirs of his desert sojourn, and it is by piecing together the things he told me over a brine-blotched naval uniform, a dented jam tin, a handful of snail-shells and dried roots, three or four camel-bone needles, and a blood-stained whip of hippo hide, that I was able to construct the connected story which follows.
It was about ten-thirty in the forenoon of the fifth of last November that I saw a torpedo heading straight for us at a distance of not over three hundred feet. It was painted a bright red, and therefore, in the clear water, even more conspicuous than the wake from its propellers and air exhaust. It struck the ship fairly amidships on the starboard side, and my first order was to lower away the boats to port. I was not even thrown from my feet by the shock, nor was there any sharp explosion audible. Had I not seen the torpedo, I should for the moment have been in some doubt as to what had actually happened.
My men were already standing by their gun, and the instant the submarine put up its "eye" we took its range and opened fire. At least one shell cracked right over the periscope, causing it to disappear at once, and we did not see it again until salt water had stopped the mouth of our little rapid-firer.
The Tara, her engines still running, continued for some distance on a perfectly even keel, the boats meanwhile being safely launched with the surviving members of the crew. Eleven had been killed by the explosion. Then, all of a sudden, she began settling aft, and finally went down like a sounding-lead, throwing her bows high in the air. My gun crew and I were caught beneath the for'ard awning, and owed our lives to the fact that we had no lifebelts on, and were therefore able to dive and clamber clear.
The submarine—the U35—rose to the surface and came nosing into the wreckage before we had all been picked up by our boats, but the fellows on the deck of it contented themselves with covering us with their revolvers—a precautionary measure, doubtless—and not interfering with the work of rescue. I asked the commander of the submarine if we might be allowed to proceed to X——, an Egyptian port at which a small British force was stationed, and which we should have had no trouble in making in a few hours. He replied, in excellent English, that this would be impossible, as it was necessary for him to deliver us to the Turks as prisoners.
The submarine then took our three boats in tow, and headed for Port Sulieman, where we were landed at about three in the afternoon. I made a part of the passage on the deck of the U boat, and had some little chat with its commander. He admitted that we had nearly put his "eye" out with one of our shells. He said that he had been often to England before the war, and even confessed to a visit to the Isle of Wight. He could not, of course, be blamed for wanting to prevent our getting back to a British port to report the probable existence of a German submarine base on the Cyrenaican coast; the callousness of his action only transpired later, when it became evident that neither the Turks nor the Arabs were able to house or feed us.
II—HELD PRISONERS BY THE ARABS
The Turkish officers at Port Sulieman were very courteous, especially Nouri Pasha, who is a brother of Enver Pasha, but palpably perturbed at the prospect of caring for us. They were short of food themselves apparently, and that region, like all the rest of Eastern Tripolitana, is an almost absolute desert. Since their German masters had decreed the thing, however, there was nothing more to be said, and so, in the true Oriental fashion of following the line of least resistance, they passed us on to the Senussi. Since the Senussi had no one else to pass us along to, they had to shoulder the burden themselves and trudge on with it as best they might.
The ship's cook, who had died from his wounds in one of the boats, we buried soon after landing, breaking an oar to form a rude cross above his grave. That night, still in our wet garments, we spent huddled together upon some rocks by the shore. The next morning we were given a small quantity of rice, which we had to cook as best we could in some beef tins and eat with our fingers. There was less than a handful of the tasteless, unsalted mixture to each man. We were terribly cold, hungry, and thirsty; indeed, for the next four months and a half, there was hardly an hour in which we were not suffering a good deal from one, and usually all three, of these causes.
After a couple of days we were moved back from the coast to a primitive village where the people and animals alike lived in dug-outs in the rocks. A "stable" which had been occupied by goats, donkeys, and pigs was cleared for us, and there, living in indescribable filth, we were kept for four days. We had been forced to carry with us on a stretcher, a quartermaster of the Tara who had sustained a double fracture of one of his legs. At this juncture, between filth and vermin, infection set in, and the only chance of saving his life appeared to be amputation. This—I will spare you the harrowing details—was finally accomplished with no other instruments than a pair of old scissors and a drop of whisky—our last—to steady the poor fellow's nerves. Of course, he died.
The Arabs now told us that they were going to take us to a beautiful oasis, where there were water and dates in plenty, and flocks of sheep and goats, and warm houses to shelter us in. Why they told us this I have never been able to make out. Possibly to make us forget our ever-empty stomachs; more likely because Arabs are incapable of telling the truth even when they want to. At any rate, we never reached the paradise that our captors persistently dangled before us like the carrot on a donkey's nose.
But march we did, marched endlessly, and most of the time on less than a pint of vile water and a dozen ounces of cooked rice a day. The country was one endless stretch of small round pebbles that ground the soles from our boots and the skin from our feet. We were always hungry, always thirsty, always footsore. The sun at noonday scorched us, the cold of the night chilled us. One day, to make matters worse, a man who was off his head from suffering ran away and evaded capture. Following the Oriental practice, our guards must needs punish the birds in the hand for the sins of the one in the bush. For two days we were marched without a drop of water or a morsel of food. The second day they goaded us forward from daybreak to sunset. It seemed as though we must have gone a hundred miles, and I learned later that it was actually twenty. Even that was an awful distance for starving men, who hadn't the strength to walk in a straight line, to be driven.
For three long weeks they herded us on. At the end of that time we arrived at what appeared to be our destination, some half-ruined Roman wells called Bir-Hakkim, the "Red Doctor" and the "White Doctor." It was not an oasis in the true sense, but only three or four caved-in cisterns, partially filled with reeking rain-water, which served as a caravan halt. There were no houses, no palms, no cultivation; only rocks and the crumbling copings of the ancient wells broke the awful monotony of the desert. Most of us arrived barefooted, all of us half-naked; but it is due to our guards to say that they were in scarcely better plight themselves, and that as opportunity offered to get old boots and rags from passing caravans they gave them to us.
One day I found a bit of broken glass, and with this managed to scrape down some slivers of camel's bone to the form of clumsy needles. Yarn we made by rolling tufts of camels' hair, picked up along the way, between our palms. The resulting strand was seldom less than an eighth of an inch in diameter, and always lumpy and prone to pull apart at the joints; yet, by dint of patience and care, we were able to stitch fragments of rags together to form hats and long Arab shirts. Those of us who still had any parts of our socks and trousers left, patched and darned them as best we could with our bunchy yarn.
Our daily ration, diminutive from the first, became smaller and smaller as the days went by, and finally, to stave off actual starvation, we began eating snails and the roots of a small plant, with spreading leaves like the arms of an octopus, which grew here and there among the rocks. The roots had a pleasant, nutty flavour—I could eat these few I have kept with the greatest zest at this moment—but snails, roasted in their shells on a camel-dung fire and eaten without salt, were, to say the least, hardly up to that delicacy as served at the Maison Riche. Most of us had a hard time in bringing ourselves to eat them at all, and a few ever came really to like them. One chap, however, a Welsh quartermaster, developed an almost uncanny taste for the things, eating several hundred every day, and actually waxing fat on them. Ever since we have called him the "Snail King."
A few days after our arrival at Bir-Hakkim an Arab woman came to our camp with some goats and sheep to sell, but our guards either could not or would not buy them for us. That night, however, a wolf killed one of the sheep, and some of the men, out foraging for snails, found and brought in the half-eaten carcass. Neither the wolf himself, nor the waiting vultures, could have tackled that flesh more voraciously than those half-famished sailors did.
III—THE STRANGE TRICK OF FATE
It was about this time that we first learned the true reason for the terrible scarcity of food, a scarcity that affected the Arabs as well as ourselves. The Turks, it appeared, had been successful in their intrigues with the Senussi, and the sheikhs of this powerful Arab confederation had declared war upon England and thrown their forces against the Egyptian frontier. Sollum, but lightly held at that time, had been taken, and the Arabs assured us that their armies were marching on Alexandria and Cairo. In retaliation for this treachery, the British Fleet had extended its blockade to the Senussi coast, and the hinterland, barren and almost entirely dependent for food upon Egypt, was already in the grip of famine. The impetuous Arabs were learning their lesson on the "influence of sea-power" by being slowly starved into repentance, and by a strange trick of fate we British sailors, who otherwise would ourselves have been helping to drive the lesson home, were being starved with them.
For some reason the guards made us draw our water from the fouler of the two wells, the one from which the animals were watered. We boiled the noisome green liquid, and did our best to render it potable. It was all to little purpose, however, for dysentery soon developed and spread rapidly through the camp. As there were no medicines of any kind whatever available, there was little to do but let the disease run its course. This accentuated the weakening influence of the starvation, and the wonder is that we left no more than four graves behind us in the accursed spot.
About December 20th a little flour, tea, and sugar were given us, and we were told that this was the last of such dainties that we might expect to receive. We decided unanimously to keep on our diet of rice, snails, and roots for four days longer, and save these luxuries for a Christmas "spread." Here is our menu for that glad occasion, as recorded in my diary:—
"Christmas Day, 1915.—Breakfast, rice boiled with a little salt. Dinner, two ounces of boiled goat flesh and 'pudding.' Tea, one small pancake, with weak tea."
By New Year's Day we were practically on an "all-snail" diet, and the epidemic of dysentery appeared to grow worse as a consequence. Two or three times in the succeeding weeks camels came in with food, but never in sufficient quantity to allow any increase in our tiny ration. This continued to be rice, with an occasional goat or sheep divided among five score of us. Without the roots and snails it would not have been enough to keep us alive.
Early in February I came to the conclusion that our only chance of rescue lay in getting word of our whereabouts through to some point in Egypt still occupied by our forces. Figuring that one man would have a better chance of escaping observation than two or three, I finally decided to make the attempt alone. The nights would be moonless, I calculated, for a week or more following February 20th. For a fortnight preceding that date I began saving a half of my daily ration of rice, and as the news of my plan was gradually confided to other men of the camp, these also began laying by a share of their already pitifully small allowance. Thus about twenty pounds of cooked rice were saved up, and this I tied up in the legs of a pair of Turkish trousers given me by one of the guards. To keep the soft mass from settling down in one end, I tied the legs at frequent intervals with bits of yarn, so that my novel knapsack finally had much the appearance of a double string of German sausages. My goat-skin water-bag held just two and a half kettlefuls of water—forty-eight of the little jam-tins with which I had to fill it.
The cordon round our camp was never tightly drawn, and I had no difficulty in slipping through it on the night of the 20th. I had kept mental note of the roundabout route by which the Arabs had brought us to Bir-Hakkim, and felt sure that I should be able to strike the coast at some point near the Egyptian boundary. I held to my pre-determined course by the stars, and stumbled on over the stones till daybreak. I had met no one, and there were no signs of pursuit, but in the steady leaking of my water through the semi-porous bag and the frightful way in which the new Arab shoes I was wearing were rubbing the skin from my toes, I forsaw thus early the almost certain defeat of my hopes.
Lying down in as sheltered a place as I could find, I rested till nightfall before setting off again on my way. By morning my water, my toe-nails, and my strength were gone, on top of which I stumbled straight into a camp of nomad Arabs. Flight was out of the question, so I made the best of a bad situation by trying to induce them, in my fragmentary Arabic, to take me to the coast. They understood me all right, and appeared not a little tempted by the prospect of the double handful of gold I promised them. They debated the question for a while, but in the end their fear of the Turk was too strong, and they decided I must be delivered to the nearest Ottoman post.
My captors were not unkind to me; indeed, they treated me rather as a prized animal pet, a sort of dancing bear, than a dangerous captive. They exhibited me to everyone they met along the way, even made a point of travelling circuitously in order to show their strange find to some encampments that would otherwise have missed the treat. They never ceased to marvel at my ability to tell the direction without a compass and the time without a watch—simple tricks for a sailor—and seeing it kept them good-natured, I made a point of going through my tricks whenever they wanted them.
The Turks to whom I was finally brought were just as courteous and sympathetic as those to whom we had been delivered on landing, and they cannot be blamed for deciding that I should be returned to the camp at Bir-Hakkim. They were probably hard up for food themselves.
IV—HORRORS OF THE DESERT MARCH
I hardly care to go into details about that return journey. Except that it was two or three days of horrible nightmare, my memory of it is a good deal confused, and I am rather thankful that such is the case. I am afraid there were some things I shouldn't care to remember too clearly. A fanatical old Senussi priest had come to fetch me, and he rode on a camel and drove me ahead of him with a long hippo-hide whip all the way. They gave me no food and no water for two days, and my one clear recollection of the whole time is of gulping down the nearly-hatched eggs from a lark's nest I stumbled upon, and of the horrible revulsion of my outraged stomach as the nauseous mess entered it. But I'd really rather not speak about that little interval at all.
Something of the nature of what Captain Gwatkin-Williams had to go through on this journey may be inferred from this entry in the diary of one of the Tara men, under date of February 29th:—
"About 3 p.m. we suddenly heard rifle-shots to the northward. A few minutes later there appeared over the brow of a small hill some men and camels, and there, walking apart from the rest, was our brave captain. We were now witness of one of the most degrading and brutal sights it has ever been my lot to see. He was lashed with an elephant thong whip, and the guard punched him violently in the face. Then the women came up and pelted him with the largest stones they could find."
As a punishment for running away I was put in solitary confinement in a goat-pen, where, for a day or two, the old priest and some of the more temperamental of the Arab ladies—the one with his hippo-hide whip and the others with filth and stones—spent most of their idle hours in trying to bring me round to a state of true repentance for my truancy. This treatment raised such a protest from my comrades, however, that finally the guards, on Lieutenant Tanner's undertaking full responsibility for my docility in the future, restored me to full camp privileges. That is to say, I was allowed my fistful of daily rice again, and liberty to hunt my own snails and dig my own roots.
Things grew rapidly worse during the next fortnight, and by the middle of March it seemed that the end we had feared and fought against for so long—slow starvation—could not be much longer postponed. No more food was coming in, the snails were breeding and absolutely unfit to eat, and all the roots within a radius that any of us still had the strength to walk to gather were exhausted. Indeed, the strongest of us were by now so weak that we could no longer keep our balance in stooping to pull the roots, but had to kneel and worry them out by digging and tugging.
The stock of rice was entirely exhausted early in March, and from that time we lived on practically nothing but a few ounces of goat-meat per man as a daily ration. Famished as we were, even these tiny portions of unsalted meat seemed to nauseate rather than nourish, and in my own case the repulsion for meat engendered during this period has persisted to this day. I am now practically a vegetarian.
The plight of our guards was little better than our own, except, of course, that when worst came to worst, they could always abandon us and make their way across the desert to some place where at least subsistence would be obtainable. For ourselves, we were now quite incapable of undertaking any kind of a march at all. Help would have to come to us; it was quite out of the question for us to search for it, even if our guards had been willing to allow us to try.
The last two or three days I do not like to think about. We were too weak to venture far afield, and there was little to do but sit about and brood over the fact that even such almost negligible rations as we still had were nearly at an end. We avoided each other as much as possible, and when we did come together tried to speak of anything but the thing that occupied all our minds. And then, from the one quarter concerning which we had long ago given up all hope, help came.
You see, we had written a good many letters from time to time on the assurance of our guards that they would be handed to the Turks for forwarding to England. Most of these were probably thrown away or deliberately destroyed, but, by a kind trick of fate, one written by myself was taken by the Turks to Sollum when the Senussi occupied that port. In this letter—no matter how—I managed to indicate that we were held captive and in danger of starvation at Bir-Hakkim. When the British retook Sollum this letter, by a second lucky coincidence, was left behind in the hastily-evacuated quarters of a Turkish officer.
V—THE RESCUE AND THE RETURN TO ENGLAND
Once definitely located, our rescue was only the matter of assembling the requisite strength in armoured cars and finding a competent guide. This done, our deliverance was but a question of hours. But of how they would have found things had anything delayed them for even a few days I do not care to think.
It was about three in the afternoon of St. Patrick's Day—we had celebrated it in the morning by making a feeble attempt to kill off a few of the snakes that had recently begun to infest the camp—that the first car was sighted, and before we had finished pinching ourselves to prove we were not dreaming the whole force of forty-one were thundering down upon us. The ambulances pulled up, and the attendants, as soon as they could free themselves from the embraces of the men, began to shower food about. Meanwhile, the armoured cars, spreading out like a "fan," swept by in pursuit of our fleeing guards.
Except for the Senussi priest, whom the sailors had dubbed "The Old Black Devil," and who had departed a couple of days previously, we had no special grounds for complaint against the men upon whom the care of our party had fallen. They had, for the most part, done the best they could for us, and we had no reason to believe that they had fared much better than their prisoners. We would gladly have interceded for them if there had been any chance. Taking it for granted, apparently, that they would receive no quarter, they had taken to their heels the moment the first cars came into sight, and a panicky sort of resistance on a part of a few of them when they were overtaken sealed the fate of the lot. Save for a few women and children, all the Arabs about the place succumbed to the fire of the machine-guns, and a score or so of graves were added to the four of the Tara men we had already buried at Bir-Hakkim.
We lost one more man in a hospital at Alexandria, but the rest of us, thanks to good food and careful nursing, were soon quite our old selves again. Practically every man of us is back, or about to go back, on duty. Word of my own new command comes only this morning.
Lieutenant Tanner, R.N.R., captain of the Tara in her merchant marine days, I found in his home at Holyhead. Through the window of his cosy library, where he spun his yarn, I could look out across the rocky coast of Anglesea to where the slate-coloured patrol-boats kept guard in St. George's Channel.
"Lieutenant Tanner," I asked him, "what did the men of the Tara talk about and think about, once the excitement of the sinking, and the landing, and the march was over and you were all settled down to the routine of 'prison life'?"
"First and always—food," he replied, promptly. "We were famishing for the whole four months and more. For a while we thought and talked a good deal of the possibility of rescue; but as the weeks went by that hope gradually died out, and our speculations—perhaps more in thought than in word—were of how the end would come. It was only during the last couple of months that the men came to speak often on this subject, and they were, not unnaturally, most prone to discuss it in the intervals of deeper depression following the death of one of their mates. We seemed to divide into two sharply differentiated parties on this issue, the optimists holding that our heritage of civilization and our discipline would enable us to meet the worst bravely and resignedly, while the pessimists maintained that we would gradually slough off our civilized restraint—just as our clothes and our conventions had gone already—and end by fighting for life like a pack of wolves. The rate at which the bickerings and petty quarrels over trivialities increased as the days went by inclined more and more of the men to the latter theory, but a few of us never wavered in our belief, but it would be the man in us, and not the beast, that would be supreme at the last.
"We—the officers—made a point of imposing no discipline whatever upon the men, this extending even to non-interference in their increasingly frequent disputes. We held—and rightly, I am convinced—that anything calculated to give an outlet to their feelings would make them less likely to become a prey to gloomy thought. Sullen, silent brooding was what we feared more than anything else. Consequently, therefore, we rather welcomed the occasional bouts of fisticuffs that marked the later stages of our imprisonment. They unquestionably acted as safety-valves to prevent more dangerous explosions.
"I also made what effort I could to keep the minds of the men occupied. Every Sunday evening we met and sang hymns, and on these occasions I usually read from my Prayer Book and invited discussion on some text I had given out the previous Sunday. Here"—turning to his diary—"are some of the things we debated in our weekly desert 'forums' by the old Roman wells:—
"'More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.'—From 'The Passing of Arthur.'
"'Love took up the glass of time.'—From 'Locksley Hall.'
"'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.'
"'Does the end justify the means?'
"As you may well imagine, strange theses were developed, and I am afraid that many a sore head resulted from the preliminary discussions. It didn't take much to start them going in that last fortnight after the snails failed us; but the diversion was good for them, and, besides, poor chaps, they were far too weak to be able to hurt one another in the least. Their fights were like the tussles of a couple of puppies. When you see some of the boys on the steamer to-night, by the way, I can suggest no more promising line of inquiry for you to pursue than to ask them to tell you some of the things they used to fight about in the desert."
Wireless Operator Birkby and Stewards Barton and Fenton, who were among the Tara survivors, had, on their return to England, been put to work on the Tara's sister-ship, the Greenore, and it was behind the darkened windows of the smoking-room of this smart little packet, as she bore into the snoring sou'wester which swept St. George's Channel, that I contrived to gather the three of them together to talk of their adventures.
"All I want to know," I said, "is a few of the things you fellows used to punch each other's heads about in the desert. I've got all the rest of the story."
They rose to that cast with a rush. All three commenced talking at once, but the two stewards quickly fell silent out of deference to the superior rank of the wireless operator.
VI—THE WIRELESS OPERATOR'S TALE
"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.