Always we were in the midst of pain and misery, hunger and death. We do not get much of the rush and glory of battle in the “Linseed Lancers.” We deal with the wreckage thrown up by the tide of battle, and wreckage is always a sad sight—human wreckage most of all.
But the bay was always full of interest for me, with its ever-changing colour, and the imprint of the ripples in the gleaming silver-sand.
And the silver moonlight silvers the silver-sand, while the skeletons of the Xth sink deeper and deeper, to be rediscovered perhaps at some future geological period, and recognised as a type of primitive man.
CHAPTER XXII. DUG-OUT YARNS
Oft in the stilly night,
By yellow candle-light,
With finger in the sand
We mapped and planned.
“This is the Turkish well,
That's where the Captain fell,
There's the great Salt Lake bed,
Here's where the Munsters led.”
Primitive man arose,
With prehistoric pose,
Like Dug-out Men of old,
By signs our thoughts were told.
I have slept and lived in every kind of camp and bivouac. I have dug and helped to dig dug-outs. I have lain full length in the dry, dead grass “under the wide and starry sky.” I have crept behind a ledge of rock, and gone to sleep with the ants crawling over me. I have slept with a pair of boots for a pillow. I have lived and snoozed in the dried-up bed of a mountain torrent for weeks. A ground-sheet tied to a bough has been my bedroom. I have slumbered curled in a coil of rope on the deck of a cattle-boat, in an ambulance wagon, on a stretcher, in farmhouse barns and under hedges and haystacks. I have slept in the sand by the blue Mediterranean Sea, with the crickets and grasshoppers “zipping” and “zinging” all night long.
But our dug-out nights on the edge of the bay at Buccaneer Bivouac were the most enjoyable.
It was here of a night-time that Hawk and I—sometimes alone, sometimes with Brockley, or “Cherry Blossom,” or “Corporal Mush,” or Sergeant Joe Smith, the sailormen as onlookers and listeners—it was here we drew diagrams in the sand with our fingers, and talked on politics and women's rights, marriage and immorality, drink and religion, customs and habits; of life and death, peace and war.
Sometimes Hawk burst into a rare phrase of splendid composition—well-balanced rhetoric, not unworthy of a Prime Minister.