“It was about one in the morning when that brush with the destroyers came off, and after that there was nothing to do but hang on till daylight and they could clear a way to reach us from abaft the wreckage of the bridge. It was pretty awful, ticking off the minutes there in the darkness. A good many of the worst knocked about were talking a bit wild, but I never heard the guy with the Chinook wa-wa again. He must have died and been pitched over while I was being bandaged up. I did hear the ‘wool-mat-maker’ yapping again, though, saying how ‘target cloth’ was better to work on than canvas, and describing how to pull the stuff through in a loose loop, and then cut them so that they bunched up in ‘soft, puffy balls.’ Seems like I was cussing him when I dropped off to sleep.
“I must have bled a good deal, for I slept like a log for four or five hours, and woke up only when some one turned me over and began to finger my hip. It was broad daylight, but hazy, and the sun just showing through. Some of the wounded had already been carried aft, and they were mostly dead ones that were lying around. These were being sewed up in canvas to get ready to bury. I thought there was something familiar in the face of one guy I saw them laying out and sort of collecting together, but it wasn’t till later that it suddenly came to me that he was the one I had seen
by firelight when he stood up and looked at himself where he’d been shot in two.
“The two guys who bundled me up in a ‘Neil Robertson’ stretcher and packed me aft, picking their way over and through the wreckage, were both all bound up with rags, and so was about every one else I saw. They took me below into the wardroom, and then, because that was full up, on to some officer’s cabin, where they found a place for me on the deck. After a while, a little dark guy—he was also a good deal bandaged, and so splashed with blood that I didn’t notice at the time he was a sick bay steward—came in, washed my wound out with some dope that smarted like the devil, and tied it up. He worked like a streak of greased lightning, and then went on to some one else. That chap was Pridmore, and, let me tell you, he was the real ‘top-liner’ of all the heroes of the Bow. The surgeon had been killed at the first salvo the night before, leaving no one but him to carry on through all the hell that followed. And some way—God knows how—he did it; yes, even though he was wounded three or four times himself, and though he had to go without sleep for more’n two days to find time to dress and tend the thirty or forty crocks he had on his hands. He was sure the star turn, that Pridmore, and I was glad to read the other day that they had given him the D.S.M. Not that he’d have all he deserved if they hung medals all over him; but—well, a guy likes
to have something to show that what he’s done hasn’t been lost in the shuffle entirely.”
I made an entry of “Pridmore, sick bay steward, Bow,” in my notebook for future reference, and as I was returning it to my pocket a sudden list to starboard, accompanied by a throbbing grind of the helm, heralded a sharp alteration of course. Round she went through ten or twelve points, finally to steady and stand away on a course that seemed to lead toward the dip in the skyline between the jagged range of mountains back of Monastir and the point where a lowering bank of cirro-cumuli hid the ancient abode of the gods on the snow-capped summit of Olympus. On Number Two assuring me that his yarn was spun, that there was nothing more to it save an attempt he had made, in spite of his wound, to get into a fight that started when some of the wounded were hissed by a gang of dockyard “mateys”—I clambered back to the bridge to learn the significance of the new move. I still wanted to hear Gains’ story of the Killarney, but I had already sized him up sufficiently to know that he was not the type of man who would unbosom himself before his mates. With him, I knew, I should have to watch my chances, and endeavour to have a yarn alone. Number Two’s parting injunction was to “try and have a go at Jock Campbell, ‘the human proj.’ Jock’s the guy at the after gun that looks like he was rigged out for deep-sea diving,” he said.
“Most likely he’ll only growl at you at first, but if he won’t warm up any other way, try him with a yarn about a skirt. He’s ‘verra fond o’ a braw lass,’ is Jock Campbell.”
Our alteration of course, the captain told me, was the consequence of an order received by wireless directing him to cross over and hunt down a strip along the western shore of the gulf which was not being covered by the present formation of the division. “I’ve had a signal stating that they’re on the track of one U-boat, and there may be something to make them think another has slipped further along and is lying in ambush for the convoy about off Volo. They’re evidently keeping the rest of the division heading in to meet the convoy itself.”
The Spark stood on to the north-west until the Vardar marshes showed as an olive-green rim around the bend of the gulf, before turning southward again to skirt the steep shingle-strewn beach along the alluvial “fans” spreading down to the sea from the base of Olympus. The wild-looking Thessalian shepherds were just driving their motley flocks down to the open foreshore to freshen up in the rising midday sea breeze, and it was when I assured Jock Campbell (where I found him leaning on the breech of the after gun and staring landwards with his bushy brows puckered in the incredulous scowl of a man who can’t credit the evidence