“IN CASE OF DEATH please post as soon as possible to
GORDON HARGRAVE,
Cinderbarrow Cottage,
Levens,
Westmorland.”
I remember printing the word “DEATH,” and wondering if the book would some day lie with my own dead body “somewhere in the Dardanelles.” Printing that word in England before we started made the whole thing seem very real. Somehow up to then I hadn't realised that I might get killed quite easily. I hadn't troubled to think about it.
We moved our camp from “A” Beach farther along towards the Salt Lake. We moved several times. Always Hawk and I “hung together.” Once he was very ill in the old dried-up water-course which wriggled down from the Kislar Dargh. He ate nothing for three days. I never saw anything like it before. He was as weak as a rat, and I know he came very near “pegging out.” He felt it himself. I was sitting on the ground near by.
“I may not pull through this, old fellow,” says Hawk, with just a tear-glint under one eyelid. He lay under a shelf of rock, safe from shrapnel.
“Come now, Fred,” says I, “you're not going to snuff it yet.”
“Weak as a rat—can't eat nothink, PRACtically... nothink; but see here, John,”—he seldom called me John—“if I do slip off the map, an' I feel PRACtically done for this time—if I SHOULD—you see that ration-bag”—he pointed to a little white bag bulging and tied up and knotted.
“Yes?”
“It's got some little things in it—for the kiddies at home—a little teapot I found up by the Turkish bivouac over there, and one or two more relics—I want 'em to have 'em—will you take care of it and send it home for me if you get out of this alive?”
Of course I promised to do this, but tried to cheer him up, and assured him he would soon pull round.
In a few days he threw off the fever and was about again.