"It's Sir Ian Hamilton," I said. "Doesn't he look like the sort of man it would be wise to confide in?"
"Yes, he does," said Art. "Evidently he has confidence in our troops' ability to hold their own," added Art. "The Turks have four lines of trenches to fall back on; we have only one firing line."
There was the same group around the field kitchen when we arrived back at our lines. They were swapping yarns and telling stories with a lurid intermixture of profanity and a liberal sprinkling of trench slang. To me, one of the most interesting side lights of the war is the slang that forms a great part of the vocabulary of the trenches. Early morning tea, when we got it, was "gun-fire." A Turk was never a Turk. He was a Turkey, Abdul Pasha, or a cigarette maker. A regiment is a "mob." A psychologist would have been interested to see that nobody ever spoke of a comrade as having died or been killed, but had "gone west." All the time I was at the front, I never heard one of our men say that another had been killed. A man who was killed in our regiment had "lost his can," although this referred most particularly to men shot through the head. Ordinarily a dead man was called a "washout"; or it was said that he had "copped it." The caution to keep your head down always came, "Keep your napper down low." To get wounded with one of our own bullets was to get a "dose of three-o-three." The bullet has a diameter of three-hundred-and-three thousandths of an inch.
Mr. Nunns came toward the group, looking for Stenlake. It was Sunday afternoon, and he thought it would be well to have a service. Stenlake was found, and a crowd trailed after him to an empty dugout, where he gathered them about him and began. It was a simple, sincere service. Out there in that barren country, it seemed a strange thing to see those rough men gathered about Stenlake while he read a passage or led a hymn. But it was most impressive. The service was almost over, and Stenlake was offering a final prayer, when the Turkish batteries opened fire. Ordinarily at the first sound of a shell, men dived for shelter; but gathered around that dugout, where a single shell could have wrought awful havoc, not a man stirred. They stayed motionless, heads bowed reverently, until Stenlake had finished. Then quietly they dispersed. As a lesson in faith it was most illuminating.
It was strange to see week by week the psychological change that had come over the men. Most of all I noticed it in the songs they sang. At first the songs had been of a boisterous character, that foretold direful things that would happen to the Kaiser and his family "As we go marching through Germany." These had all given place to songs that voiced to some extent the longing for home that possessed these voluntary exiles. "I want to go back to Michigan" was a favorite. Perhaps even more so was "The little gray home in the West." "Tipperary" was still in demand, not because of the lilt of a march that it held, but for the pathetic little touch of "my heart's right there," and perhaps for the reference to "the sweetest girl I know."
Perhaps it may have been the effect of Stenlake's service, or it may have been the news that we were to go into the firing line the next day, that made the men seek their dugouts early that Sunday evening. But there was something heavy in the air that night. For almost a week we had been comparatively safe in dugouts. Tomorrow we were again to go into the firing line and wait impotently while our number was reduced gradually but pitilessly. The hopelessness of the thing seemed clearer that evening than any other time we had been there. Simpson, "the Man with the Donkeys," had been killed that day. After a whole summer in which he seemed to be impervious to bullets, a stray bullet had caught him in the heart on his way down Shrapnel Valley with a consignment of wounded. Simpson had been so much a part of the Peninsular life that it was hard to realize that he had gone to swell the list of heroes that Australia has so much cause to be proud of. A Company had suffered heavily in the front line trenches that day. A number of stretchers had passed down the road that ran in front of our dugouts, with A Company men for the dressing station on the beach. Snipers had been busy. From the A Company stretcher-bearers came news that others had been killed. One piece of news filtered slowly down to us that evening, that had an unaccountably strange effect on the men of B Company. Sam Lodge had been killed. Sam Lodge was perhaps the most widely known man in the whole regiment. There were very few Newfoundlanders who did not think kindly of the big, quiet, reliable looking college man. He had enlisted at the very first call for volunteers. Other men had been killed that day; and since the regiment had been at Gallipoli, men had stood by while their dugout mates were torn by shrapnel or sank down moaning, with a sniper's bullet in the brain; but nothing had ever had the same effect, at any rate on the men of our company, as the news that Sam Lodge had been killed that day. Perhaps it was that everybody knew him. Other nights men had crowded around the fire, telling stories, exchanging gossip, or singing. To-night all was quiet; there was not even the sound of men creeping about from dugout to dugout, visiting chums. Suddenly, from away up on the extreme right end of the line of dugouts, came the sound of a clear tenor voice, singing, "Tenting To-night on the Old Camp Ground." Never have I heard anything so mournful. It is impossible to describe the penetrating pathos of the old Civil War song. Slowly the singer continued, amidst a profound hush. His voice sank, until one could scarcely catch the words when he sang, "Waiting for the war to cease." At last he finished. There was scarcely a stir, as the men dropped off to sleep.
It was a quiet, sober lot of men who filed into a shady, tree-dotted ravine the next day behind the stretcher that bore the remains of Private Sam Lodge. Stenlake read the burial service. Everybody who could turned out to pay their last respects to the best liked man in the regiment. After the brief service, Colonel Burton, the commanding officer, Captain Carty, Lodge's company commander, a group of senior and junior officers, and a number of profoundly affected soldiers gathered about the grave while the body was lowered into it. In the shade of a spreading tree, within sound of the mournful wash of the tide in Suvla Bay, lies poor Sam Lodge, a good, cheerful soldier, uncomplaining always, a man whose last thought was for others. "Don't bother to lift me down off the parapet, boys," he had said when he was hit; "I'm finished."