Gallipoli, October, 1915.
THE TURKISH TRENCH DOG
Night held me as I crawled and scrambled near
The Turkish lines. Above, the mocking stars
Silvered the curving parapet, and clear
Cloud-latticed beams o’erflecked the land with bars
I, crouching, lay between
Tense-listening armies peering through the night,
Twin giants bound by tentacles unseen.
Here in dim-shadowed light
I saw him, as a sudden movement turned
His eyes towards me, glowing eyes that burned
A moment ere his snuffling muzzle found
My trail; and then as serpents mesmerise
He chained me with those unrelenting eyes,
That muscle-sliding rhythm, knit and bound
In spare-limbed symmetry, those perfect jaws
And soft-approaching pitter-patter paws.
Nearer and nearer like a wolf he crept—
That moment had my swift revolver leapt—
But terror seized me, terror born of shame
Brought flooding revelation. For he came
As one who offers comradeship deserved,
An open ally of the human race,
And sniffing at my prostrate form unnerved
He licked my face!
THE SENTINEL
An Episode at the Evacuation of Gallipoli.
He stood enveloped in the darkening mist
High on the cape that proudly kept her tryst
Above the narrow portal. All the day
White shell-flung water-spouts had scattered spray
Round Helles, warden of the Eastern seas;
And still the boom of Asian batteries
Rumbled around the cape. The sentinel
Spied from his high cliff-towered citadel
The leaping flash of guns; but ere the roar
Sprang from its den on the dim Asian shore,
He blew a trumpet. Then, like burrowing moles,
Dim forms below dashed headlong to their holes,
The while that hurtling iron crossed the sea,
And fifteen seconds seemed eternity.
Below we lay
Crushed in a lighter; and the towering spray
That lately blurred the clear star-laden sea
Subsided in the vast tranquillity.
Now, chafing like taut-muscled charioteers
With every sense on tiptoe, we strained ears
For whispers, or the catch of indrawn breath.
Still not the word to cut adrift the rope
That moored us to a wharf of floating piers:
And thus alternately in fear and hope
Swung the grim pendulum of life and death.
Then suddenly the sound
Of that loud warning rang the cape around.
We knew a gun had flashed, we knew the roar
That instant rumbled from the Asian shore;
And we lie fettered to a raft!... The shell
Climbs its high trajectory ... Well,
What of it? Fifteen seconds less or more
One—two—three—four—five—six—seven
(Steady, man,
It’s only Asiatic Ann) ...
How slow the moments trickle—eight—nine—ten
(They’re wonderful, these men).
Am I a coward? I can count no more;
Hold Thou my hands, O God.
The sea, upheaved in anger, rocked and swirled;
Niagara seemed pelting from the stars
In tumult that epitomised a world
Roused by the battling impotence of wars.
We heard a whispered order to escape,
And casting loose, incredulously free,
Unscathed, exulting in the amber light
We left behind the immemorial cape.
But still above the indomitable sea
From his high cliff a sentry watched the night