Mulligan was not handsome; he had a face the colour of boiled beetroot, very blue eyes, and a humorous mouth. He was a Special Reserve subaltern, who before the war had done a chequered month's training with the battalion every year, and spent the other eleven months interesting himself in aviation, theatrical life, and the motor business. To go out to the Front with him as one's colleague in charge of a draft of 180 men was a certain way of avoiding ennui.
We had been waiting some while with the reserve battalion for our turn to go out, and now, just four weeks after the regiment sailed with the vanguard of the Expeditionary Force, we were sent for at two hours' notice.
We were ready, of course. There was not much to get ready, except our 35 lb. kit, and that we always kept rolled up by our beds. Our revolvers, field-glasses, water-bottles, and haversacks were hung on our belts, and we had only to tell our servants to take our kits down to the transport wagon and walk on to the square where the draft was paraded, which we did.
The Colonel said a few words, the town band fell in at the head of the column, the crowd waved good-bye, and the draft cheered and yelled and sang their way to the station. The draft was in the best of spirits; it cheered the colonel, adjutant, and any officers on sight; it leant out of the carriage windows and waved beer bottles, and rifles, and caps; and it greeted with such uproarious applause any attempt to give orders on the part of Mulligan or myself that we thought it best to remain in the corner of our first-class carriage. There were 180 men of all ages from nineteen to forty, old soldiers and young soldiers, militiamen, reservists, and a few regulars.
"We are going to have a jolly time with these," said Mulligan, indicating the draft.
Our transport was a converted Blue Line boat, which the trip before had brought over German prisoners, and the trip before that cattle from America. She had been carpentered up to carry troops, and her hold was a network of planks and scaffolding. She was to carry, besides ourselves, drafts for five other regiments, and each of these had to receive, on embarkation, rations to last for five days.
From the moment we got on board Mulligan began to prove invaluable. He collected our full number of rations from the bewildered and suspicious Army Service Corps official, he annexed an easily defended corner in the hold, stored the rations there, and put a guard over them; he frightened two other draft officers out of the only remaining officer's cabin and put our kit on to their bunks, and finally, when all was quiet, he led me to a hotel in the port where we could get a drink after ten.
The transport sailed the next morning, and once under way there was little or nothing for officers and men to do except lie about in the sun. It was a glorious September morning as we steamed past the Isle of Wight, with only two destroyers, one ahead and one to port, to remind us we were at war. But as we sat smoking and talking on deck there was a feeling in the air which dispelled the sense of being on a pleasure trip.
I think that just for those few hours as we left the shores of England there was heaviness in each man's heart. It was no holiday this we were going on. There was an officer in a Highland regiment, who was one of fifteen officers of the same regiment on their way out to replace fifteen brother officers who had only crossed the sea four weeks before: a splendid-looking fellow, with his kilt and gaily cocked glengarry; there would be very few fellows in the regiment that he knew out there now, he said to me. He had rather a serious expression. It was grim work going out to fill the place of a friend who had been killed. And there was another fellow whom I'd known well years ago and who welcomed me with delight when he found we were to be on the same transport. "You know, I don't like this a bit," he said, evidently much relieved to find some one to whom he could speak his heart, instead of keeping up the conventional mask of joy at having been ordered to the Front. "As far as I can see, one is certain to be killed."
We talked over old days when we had been quartered near London and gone off together to Covent Garden balls and other entertainments. "You know, I'm married now," he told me. "You're not?" I said, laughing; it seems so funny when one's bachelor friends get married; and he looked just the same dog as ever.