"I bet that he got the fright of his life,", Bubbles gurgled; and then noticed that the Orphan's wrist, the right one, was bleeding, and that blood was coming through his own soaked trousers. They found a small cut on the Orphan's right wrist, and that Bubbles had a little gash behind the left knee—quite trivial things, only requiring a bandage round each. Actually, that was all the damage done to those two midshipmen, although the shell had burst immediately behind and between them.
"Fancy what might have happened if 'Kaiser Bill' had not been there," the superstitious Orphan, a little "shaken", kept saying.
The R.N.R. Lieutenant, having fixed them up with bandages, took them inside the dormitory to dig their things out again and get the place tidied up. They shook the sand and clay from their bedding; dug out the clothes which had been lying on the floor; found some of the fragments of the shell, probably a 4.1-inch from Achi Baba; looked at the jagged hole in the wooden roof; and when Bubbles, having changed his wet clothes, went away, limping a little, to take charge of his picket-boat again, the other two turned in and slept until midday. Directly the Orphan woke he hunted round for the tortoise, and felt greatly relieved when he saw "Kaiser Bill's" cunning old head peeping out.
On the next night it blew hard from the north-east—away from the end of the Peninsula. Unfortunately for Bubbles, he had the job, that night, of towing a big Malta lighter, full of mules, out to a transport, and when away from the shelter of the land something went wrong with the tow-rope, and it fouled the screw of his picket-boat. Both lighter and picket-boat drifted helplessly out to sea, and eventually became separated. It was a bitterly cold night—so dark that you could not see fifty yards in front of you, and two miles from the end of the Peninsula a very unpleasant sea was running. The lighter full of mules drifted away, but by some lucky chance stranded on Rabbit Island, and Bubbles in his helpless, waterlogged picket-boat had the luck to be found and picked up by a patrolling trawler, which towed him into safety.
He did not get back to "W" beach until long after daylight, and was then sent up to get his breakfast and some sleep. For some reason or other, his bed had been moved into the small "sleeping 'dug-out'" at the side of the Mess opposite to the dormitory, and almost at the same hour as the day before, a big shell from "Asiatic Annie" came in and completely wrecked it. No one else slept there that morning, and he had a most marvellous escape. The three empty beds, the wash-stands, and little stove were destroyed, and a macintosh which he had pulled over his blankets had several gashes torn in it, but he himself had not a scratch. Old Richards, running in through the Mess, and unable to see owing to the dust and smoke, switched on an electric torch and called out "Are you all right, sir?" never thinking that he could possibly be alive.
"I woke up," said Bubbles afterwards, bubbling over with excitement, "and found the whole place blooming dark; everything seemed to be tumbling down on top of me, and my hair was full of sand and stuff. I couldn't think what was the matter, and the smell of the place was simply beastly. It wasn't till old Richards came in, flashed his torch, wanted to know whether I was alive or not, and told me a shell had come in, that I knew what had happened. It spoilt that new macintosh I paid one pound ten for yesterday up at the Ordnance, confound it!"
The rest of the morning Bubbles and Richards spent digging out his "gear". They found his watch some two feet under the sand, still going, but the glass cracked. The "dug-out" was completely wrecked and quite uninhabitable.
He shifted back again into the dormitory, but had no more time for sleep. "I'll stick nearer to old 'Kaiser Bill' another time," he told the Orphan, poking fun at him and his superstitions.
The very next day, when on his way to the Mess for a hasty lunch, he stopped to speak to Richards, the Leading Seaman, who had just come out of the kitchen. At that moment a shell came past them, fell through the open kitchen door, and burst inside. Richards calmly put down the tureen of pea soup which he was carrying, and together they went in through the smoke to see if anyone had been injured. One man lay dead, and another had been badly cut about the shoulder by a splinter. He was carried away immediately to the Casualty Clearing-station beyond the gully, and the dead man covered up and removed. "Poor chap!" Richards muttered, "he only landed two hours ago for the first time. It's a strange thing how some get picked off, sir, isn't it?"
"Well, that's the third close shave for me—in three days too. I'll tell the Orphan that. He'll think it tremendously lucky," Bubbles said.