CHAPTER V[ToC]
WAITING FOR THE WAR TO CEASE
We were still in dugouts when Art Pratt woke me one morning with a vicious kick, to show me my boots lying outside of the dugout, filled with rain water. All the night before it had poured steadily, but now it was clearing nicely. The Island of Imbros, fifteen miles away, that seemed to draw a great deal nearer before every rainstorm, had retreated to its normal position. The sky was still gray, but it was the leaden gray of a Turkish autumn day. From Suvla Bay the wind blew keen and piercing. I salved the boots from the rain puddle, emptied them, dried them out as best I could with my puttees, and put them on. Art, in his own inimitable way, said unprintable things about a rifle that had been left outside, and that now necessitated laborious cleaning, in time for rifle inspection. All through breakfast, Lew O'Dea elaborated on the much-quoted remarks of the Governor of North Carolina to the Governor of South Carolina. Rum had not been issued as per schedule the evening before. Art began a maliciously fabricated story of a conversation he had heard in which a senior officer had stated that now that the cold weather had come, there would be no more rum. Just then, some one shouted, to "Look up in the sky." From the direction of the trenches a dark cloud was coming rapidly toward us. (A few nights before, while we were in trenches, we had been ordered to put on our gas masks; for, a little to the right of us, the Turks had turned the poison gas on the Gurkhas.) At first, the dark mass in the sky appeared to some to be poison gas. They immediately dived for their gas masks. As it came nearer, however, we were able to distinguish that it was not a cloud, but a huge flock of wild geese, beginning their southern migration. O'Dea selected a rifle from his collection, loaded it, and waited till the geese were almost directly overhead; then, amid derisive cheering, he fired ten rounds at them. They were much too high in air for a successful shot, even if he had used gunshot; but even after they were almost over Imbros Island, Lew continued firing. When an officer arrived, demanding sarcastically if Lew O'Dea wouldn't sooner send some written invitations to the Turks to shell us, he subsided, and began cleaning his artillery. Until then, we had been wearing thin khaki duck uniforms with short pants that made us look like boy scouts. We had found these rather cool at night; but in the hot days we preferred them to the heavy khaki drill uniforms that were kept in kit bags at the beach. I had landed without a kit bag, and the change of uniform I kept in the pack I carried on my back. A little while before, I had put on the heavy uniform and thrown away the light weight one. On the Peninsula, when you have to walk with all your possessions on your back, each additional ounce counts for much. As soon as we found that it was impossible to get water to wash or shave in, we threw away our towels and soap. A few kept their razors. The only thing I hung on to was my tooth brush—not for its legitimate purpose, but to clean the sand and grit out of my rifle.
"Go over and ask Mr. Nunns," said Art to me, while we were cleaning our rifles, "if he'll give us a pass to go down to the beach to find my kit bag. I'll finish cleaning your rifle while you go over." I handed the rifle to Art, and went over to look for Mr. Nunns. When I found him he was censoring some letters.
"You'd better wait till this afternoon, before going," he said. "I want you to take twenty men and carry up ten boxes of ammunition to the firing line, where A Company are. They're coming out to-morrow night and we're to relieve them." He gave me a pass, and I took it over to Art.
"You can go down this morning if you like," I said, "or you can wait till I get back from this ammunition detail."
"If you're not later than two o'clock," said Art, "I'll wait for you."
I found the detail of twenty men for ammunition-carrying waiting for me near the field kitchen. We crawled cautiously along some open ground, past the quarter-master's dugout and the dugouts that were dignified by the name of orderly room, where the colonel and adjutant conducted the clerical business of the battalion, issued daily orders, and sentenced defaulters. "Napoleon knew what was what," said the man near me, as he wriggled along, "when he said that an army fights on its stomach. I've been on my stomach half the time since I've been in Gallipoli." We straightened up when we came to the communication trench that gave us cover from snipers. Ordinarily we walked upright when we were behind the lines, but for a few days past enemy snipers had been extraordinarily active. The Turkish snipers were the most effective part of their organization. Each sniper was armed with a rifle with telescopic sights. With a rifle so equipped, a good shot can hit a man at seven hundred yards, just as easily as the ordinary soldier can shoot at one hundred.
The ten boxes of ammunition were very heavy, and the heat of the day necessitated a great many rests, before we reached the part of the line held by A Company. A Company had been losing heavily for a day or two because of snipers. A couple of the men were talking about it when I came along.