As the two snotties drank their tea, two men on stretchers were carried past, on their way to a Dressing Station, a little way below and to the left. One man smoked a cigarette and looked quite cheery; the head of the other lay back oddly on the stretcher, with that horrid grey colour on his face—he was dead.
"Have another cup of tea? I'm sorry there's no cake," the Commander said. "Those infernal snipers get some fifteen or twenty of our chaps up here every day. They paint themselves green—their hands and faces—dress up in green clothes, or fix themselves up in twigs and leaves. They're plucky chaps, I must say. We found one chap, down in the plain, the other day, over there"—and he jerked his thumb up the ridge towards Anafarta—"we found him half a mile inside our lines, up a tree, lashed to a branch. One of our chaps happened to be walking back from the trenches, and walked right under the tree; thought he heard a noise, looked up and saw him. Luckily he had his rifle, so he shot him, but had to climb the tree and cut him clear before the body fell to the ground. On one side of that Turk hung a basket with a few figs in it, and on the other side a basket full of cartridge cases. Most of them were empty, so that he must have had a pretty good 'run' for his money."
A messenger came to say that the Turks were commencing their usual evening "hate" on the beaches and ships. "Well, you'd better get along back," he said. "Now, don't play the fool. For the first few hundred yards past the Observation Post you will be in full view of their firing-trench along the ridge; so don't loiter. I must be off to see whether any of those guns have shifted since yesterday. Good-bye!"
So back they went, with the base of one shell, the fuse of another, and that broken stick belonging to the Pink Rat. As they neared the beach, big shells kept dropping on it, so they waited a little while before going down to "A West". A friendly A.S.C. sergeant invited them into his roomy "dug-out"; and luckily they did go in, for shrapnel began bursting very close, and an empty case buried itself in some ground between two lines of mules, not twenty yards away.
Flies had been bad up in the Commander's "dug-out". Here they were ten times worse—worse even than they had been before they left "W" beach at Cape Helles.
Having added to their trophies that empty shrapnel case (the A.S.C. sergeant had sent across a couple of Indians belonging to his transport column to dig it up), and the firing having ceased, they presently found themselves in the Hun's steam pinnace, on their way off to the ship.
You can imagine that these two young officers had a good deal to talk about when they did get on board. Neither of them had much chance of going ashore, because, after the first few days, so many of the original midshipmen of the "stray" boats broke down and had to be sent back to their ships, that they were almost constantly employed in steam-boats.
There were the "night patrols", when they steamed, up and down, along the line of submarine-net buoys, from sunset to sunrise—fearfully tedious and monotonous work, only enlivened by the very occasional submarine "scares". Some trawler or drifter—out beyond—would think she had seen one, and fire two Very's lights; and then there would be a hustle and a bustle, and the patrolling picket-boats with their maxims would dash up and down, in case Fritz came along, and they could get a shot at his periscope. For some days the Orphan had to take charge of the Harbour-master's picket-boat, and used to spend most of his nights outside the nets, often in a lumpy, unpleasant sea, meeting troop-carriers coming across with reinforcements, or store ships—all according to programme—and imploring their Captains to go between the two lights on the buoys at the submarine-net "gate"; not that the troop-carriers ever made mistakes—they had had too much practice—but some of these store ships seemed incapable of coming in without fouling the net, picking up some of it with their screws, and giving twenty-four hours' work hacking it clear and then repairing it. Most of the daylight hours during that time the Orphan spent in sleep, but not all by a long chalk, for things were always going wrong with a line of lighters supporting some borrowed torpedo-nets, and the Harbour-master was always wanting to go along and see what could be done. As these lighters were constantly being shelled, this was a most unpleasant job.
One evening, after snatching a couple of hours' sleep, he found that a 3-pounder gun had been mounted in the bows of his boat, and the usual maxim taken away.
"Hello!" he said to the coxswain. "What's this for?"