Milsom fingered his moustache. "I might have realised——" he said musingly. He gave an imperceptible shrug of the shoulders and laughed softly.
I got rather irritated. "Come on, Soldier," I said. "For heaven's sake explain, and don't keep on with this Maskelyne and Devant business." But he shook his head, still laughing. "No," he said, "it's too good to waste here. Come and have dinner up at the Mess to-night and we'll exchange theories. And now," he continued, hauling in the slack of the spaniel's chain, "let's buy a pack of cards and play picquet. Our train's due already."
The carriage was too full for me to broach the subject again, and Milsom took thirty shillings out of me instead. At our destination we parted: he to go to the Marine Depôt, where he was Adjutant; I in a musty four wheeler to the dockyard where the ship was lying.
2
Milsom greeted me a couple of hours later in the big oak-panelled hall of the Officers' Mess at the Marine Headquarters. I had been on board the ship, had half an hour's yarn with the Skipper (who was full of the ways of Dockyard Officials and the tale of our Defect List), shifted, and got up to the Marines' Mess as the first dinner bugles were sounding.
Every time I enter that hall, with its tattered Colours hanging from the walls and the portraits of bygone Commandants staring down over their gorgets, I am struck afresh by the reminders, cherished here on all sides, of the proud past of the Corps. Greenwich Hospital excepted, the Navy has no shrines where the emblems of its traditions are preserved, but the Marine Headquarters always seem to echo with whispers of the Marines' history. In the seconds that it took me to cross the wide floor, I had a blurred vision of the Rock, taken by storm and held against odds; of haggard, fever-stricken detachments in rotting pith helmets, fighting their way through swamp and jungle, of the African sun catching the reddened bayonets of a desert square....
"Cocktail, I think." Milsom beckoned to a waiter, and, slipping his arm through mine, drew me down beside him on to the high-padded fender of the old fireplace that is a miracle of carving. He had had a game of squash, he explained, and a tub since his arrival, and felt that he had decidedly earned a drink. "Plenty of time," he added as he lit a cigarette. "Guest night, and the Colonel's waiting for a guest!" We sipped our cocktails, and while we yarned I studied the gathering all round us on the look-out for old shipmates and familiar faces. The Commandant I knew well, a grizzled veteran, whose skin had been so baked by tropic suns that it had the appearance of ancient parchment. He came towards us for a few minutes' chat, limping slightly from the effects (so it was said) of a mauling by a lion in Somaliland, and sat rolling his cigarette round and round between his fingers and thumb, his keen old eyes watching the door for his guest. Markham was there, upright and groomed to the last hair, and the sight of his face instantly recalled the vision I always cherish of him astride the wall of a Chinese fort, plying his sword like a swashbuckler, and endeavouring to shield the body of an unconscious N.C.O. from the pikes of the Boxer rabble below. Ye gods! And we called that war!
The hall was full, and the guests included a fair sprinkling of soldiers from neighbouring camps and a good many N.O.'s from ships in harbour. At one end of the room clustered a dozen freshly joined subalterns: they whispered constrainedly amongst themselves and eyed the assembly with furtive interest. "Straight out of the egg," observed Milsom. "Mammy's darlings, every one of 'em. They shall sing us Songs of Araby after dinner or I'll eat my hat." I had my own ideas how Milsom should amuse himself after dinner, but I said nothing. "Watch them gloating over Markham and his V.C." Markham, according to his kindly nature, had gone over and was talking to the new-comers. They clustered round him in the unabashed hero-worship of youth, their shyness perceptibly evaporating: clean, robust striplings with down on their upper lips and the stamp of the Public School plain upon them.
The swing doors opened and the Commandant tossed away his cigarette and rose as the guest of the Mess entered. He was a youthful Colonel of Marines on leave from the Western Front, a tall, lean man with a scar across his forehead and the look of wearied habitual alertness you always see in the faces of men fresh from the trenches, and also of our patrol Destroyer Officers. I had never seen him in the flesh, though the illustrated papers have by now made him a familiar figure enough. For this was Henry Havelock, destined to wear before he died every gallantry award in the gift of England and France. He was a contemporary of Milsom's, and when presently we adjourned to the vast arched messroom, I found myself sitting between them at the Commandant's end of the table. The talk was war, of course, because war made up every man's experience of life for the past three years and a half. But the range and variety of the fields which were being discussed down the shining length of the mahogany table made it unique. In one sector it was Antwerp and the raging inferno that had once been Lierre held for a live-long night against the headlong onslaught of the Hun. In another, Gallipoli held sway, and as the wine circulated and tongues were loosened, tales of that splendid failure were told that assuredly will never find their way into any printed history of the Great War. The hum of voices under the old beams of the vaulted roof was the echo of strife carried from Serbia to the Cameroons, with Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf thrown in. The only man who appeared disinclined to talk war was Havelock; he and Milsom were exchanging pre-war reminiscences of a visit paid by the Mediterranean Fleet to Monte Carlo; how a certain lady with an impulsive temperament lost her heart to the embarrassed Milsom, who was challenged to a duel by an indignant husband; this worthy Havelock plied with absinthe until he (the husband) was all for Havelock running off with the lady and thus easing a complicated situation; and as the evening wore on and the assiduous Corporal of Marines—brooding behind us with a gold-topped bottle gripped in one white cotton gloved fist—redoubled his attentions, Havelock's eyes lost their weary strained expression, and the stern lines round his mouth relaxed.
We had finished dinner and the port had gone round for the King, and following the second circulation the Commandant rose, and after a neat little speech, proposed Havelock's health, which we drank with musical honours. Havelock replied, and in a few brief sentences he sketched the part played, not by himself but by the Royal Marine Units at the front under his command. Listening to his pithy descriptive rendering into prose of the epic of Beaumont Hamel, it was not difficult to understand the magnetic command of men with which he has been credited, nor the devotion of their willingness to follow him to the gates of Hell.