"It's tea," I said. "We get it every evening,—just as if we were human beings, and not Colonials." After that I think she liked Colonials even less.
The Bay of Biscay was just a little rough when we went through it, but it did not affect the Aquitania very much.
When the word went around on the day that land had been sighted, every man that could hobble went on deck to get a first glimpse of England. We could not see very far because of the thick mist of an English December. About ten o'clock we were at the entrance to Southampton, but the tide was out, or the chief engineer was out, so we could not go up until that evening. That last day was a tedious one. Every one was eager to get ashore. To most of the men, England was home; and after the trenches and the hospitals, home meant much.
As soon as we landed, a train took us to a place near London. It was twenty-five miles from the hospital that was our destination. Here we were met by automobiles that took us to the hospital for Newfoundlanders at Wandsworth Common, London. There were only half a dozen of us from Newfoundland. At first the doctor on the Aquitania persisted in calling us Canadians, and wanted to send us to Walton-on-Thames. It took us two hours to convince him that Newfoundland had no connection with Canada. Two automobiles were enough for our little party. The man who drove me in told me that he had come a hundred miles to do it. All the automobiles that met the hospital trains were loaned by people who wanted to do whatever they could to help the cause. He was a dairy farmer, he said, and gave me uninteresting statistical information about cows and the amount of milk he sold in London each day. But apart from that, I enjoyed the smooth drive over the faultless roads.
The Third London hospital at Wandsworth Common is a military hospital; and although the discipline is strict, everything possible is done for the comfort of the patients. Concerts are given every few evenings; almost every afternoon people send around automobiles to take the wounded men for a drive. Twice a week visitors come in for three hours in the afternoon. At Wandsworth I stayed only a very few days. Two days before Christmas I was sent to Esher to the convalescent home run by the V.A.D. Sisters. Nobody at this hospital received any remuneration. Esher is in Surrey, not many miles from London. Even in the winter the weather was pleasant. Here we had a great deal of liberty, being allowed out all day until six at night. Only thirty men were in Esher at one time. The hospital contained a piano, victrola, pool table, and materials for playing all sorts of games. At Esher one felt like an individual, and not like a cog in a machine. Paddy Walsh, the corporal, who had hesitated so long about leaving me on the Peninsula, was at Esher when I arrived. He was almost well now, he told me, and was looking forward to a furlough. After his furlough he was going back, he said, in the first draft. "No forming fours for me, around Scotland," said Walsh, "drilling a bunch of rookies. I want to get back with the boys."
After two weeks, Esher closed for repairs. We all went back to the hospital at Wandsworth. News had just come of the evacuation of the Peninsula. In the ward I was sent to were half a dozen of our boys. I asked them what was the trouble, and they told me frozen feet. "Frozen feet," I said, "in Gallipoli? You're joking." They assured me that they were not and referred me to their case sheets that hung beside the beds. Shortly before the evacuation a storm had swept over the Peninsula. First it had rained for two days, the third day it snowed, and the next it froze. A torrent of water had poured down the mountain side, flooding the trenches, and carrying with it blankets, equipments, rifles, portions of the parapet, and the dead bodies of men who had been drowned while they were sleeping. The men who were left had to forsake their trenches and go above ground. Turks and British alike suffered. The last day of the storm, while some of our men were waiting on the beach to be taken to the hospital ship, they told me they saw the bodies of at least two thousand men, frozen to death. Our regiment stood it perhaps better than any of the others. It was the sort of climate they were accustomed to. The Australasians suffered tremendously. I met one man who had been on the Peninsula during the evacuation. They had got away with the loss of two men killed and one wounded for the entire British force. The papers that day said that the Turks claimed to have driven the entire British army into the sea, and to have gained an immense amount of booty. The booty gained, our men said, was bully beef and biscuits. Far from being driven into the sea, the British got off in two hours without the Turks suspecting at all; and it was not till the second day after that the Turks really found out. It had taken a great deal of ingenuity to devise a scheme that would let the evacuation take place secretly. The distance from the shore was about four miles. As soon as the troops knew they were to leave, they ripped up the sand bags on the parapets, and broke the glass in the periscopes, so they would be useless to the enemy. Then they attached the broken periscopes to the parapets, so that the Turks looking over would see the periscopes above the trench, just as they would any ordinary day at the front. Only one problem remained unsolved. As soon as the Turks heard the firing cease entirely, they would think something was not as it should be. If they began to investigate before the troops got away, it might mean annihilation. At first it was planned to leave a small party scattered through the trenches, but this meant that they would have to be sacrificed in order to allow their comrades to escape. An Australian devised a scheme. He took a number of rifles, placed them at different points along the parapets, and lashed them to it. In each one he put a cartridge. From the trigger he suspended a bully beef tin, weighted with sand. This was not quite heavy enough to pull the trigger. On top of the rifle he placed another tin, filled with water, and pierced a small hole in the bottom of it. After a while the water, dripping slowly from the top tin, made the lower one heavy enough to pull the trigger. Some of the tins were heavier than the others, and the rifles did not all go off at once. As soon as things were ready, the troops moved off silently, "Just as if they were going into dugouts," Art Pratt wrote me. They got aboard the warships waiting for them in the bay, and went to Mudros and Imbros. The evacuation was facilitated by the fact that the Salt Lake that had been dried up when I was there was swollen high by the rain of the previous weeks. All that night the firing continued at intervals, and kept up all through the next day. The Turks, taking the usual cautious survey of the enemy trenches, saw, as they did every other day, periscopes sticking up over the parapets and heard the ordinary reports of rifle fire; to them it looked like what the official reports call a "quiet day on the Eastern front."
One other item of news I received that pleased me very greatly. Art Pratt had taken my place as corporal of the section, and had sent me word that he had got the sniper who shot me.
After I had been back in the Wandsworth Common hospital a few days, I was "boarded." That is, I was sent up to be examined by a board of doctors. They found me "unfit for further service," and I was sent to my depot in Scotland for disposal. The next day I was given all my back pay and took the train for Ayr, Scotland. There I was given my discharge "in consequence of wounds received in action in Gallipoli." Major Whitaker, the officer in charge, paused and looked at me, while he was signing the discharge paper.
"I imagine," he said, "you feel rather sorry that you caught that train, Corporal."
"What train is that, sir?" I said.