I obtained permission to make a "voyage" in an ambulance train.
On a grey, drizzling morning one of the Royal Naval trains glided into a siding at Queensferry—a dozen miles from Edinburgh. In less than ten minutes six hefty stretcher-bearers steadily and silently bore the first cot patient from a waiting ambulance to the war-coloured train. Cot then followed cot with precision, only two of the patients being in the open at a time; and as quickly as mortals could accomplish it these cots were set swinging in the "eyes" set for the lanyards.
Being about half-past eight o'clock, nobody had much to say. The faces of the sick and wounded bluejackets told you nothing as they lazily gazed around them while being hoisted into the hospital train. They looked like men sewed into white sailcloth sacks. Surgeons, with two and three gold stripes, between which runs the red—blood red, some say—denoting their department in the Navy, glanced occasionally at the patients.
"Carry on, there," then came from the R.N.V.R. lieutenant in charge of the stretcher-bearers, when one of the coaches had received its quota of sick and wounded. Then the sliding doors of the next coach yawned for its measure of sick men, who presented an interesting rather than a pathetic picture, for every bluejacket wore his cap, looking like a sailor who had gone to bed with his clothes on. That cap travels with him like his papers. The bluejacket has many important things which he conceals in it, and the most important of all is his package of "gaspers," as he terms his particular brand of cigarettes. The cap is placed firmly on his head, and occasionally a flannelled arm protruded from the cot. No moan or groan escaped from these plucky patients, for the sailor always lives up to the traditions of the Royal Navy.
From one of the cots there showed a head covered in bandages with only two small openings for the patient's eyes. His cap was on his bed. As this sailor was being hoisted into the train a deep voice came from the bed:—
"Mind yer eye, Bill, or yer'll get yer feet wet."
Bill was a "sitting case." He had come up on the same ambulance as his pal. He had been in the same fo'castle and had been hurt in the same accident. And now they were going aboard the same train to the same port. Bill paid little heed at that moment to his chum as he picked his way through the water and mud. His right arm was in a sling and the comforting cigarette between his teeth. Standing on the last rung of the little ladder before going into the car, I heard him say to another sailor:—
"She's over yonder. Bye-bye for the present."
His cap came off as he looked in the direction of the great deep water where lay the hazy forms of ships. Others looked, but said nothing about the sailor doffing his cap to his grey-steel sweetheart who had weathered the fight against odds.
"That makes 110," said the train surgeon. "Six, four, seventy-three, twenty-seven—what?"