"Practise stooping and steering through the slit," the Sub ordered. "If you keep standing up and looking over the top, you'll get a bullet in your head when the time comes."
"But there can't possibly be anyone left alive there," the Orphan protested, as he watched the shells bursting.
"Just wait! You'll soon find out!" the Sub answered grimly, and noticing that the picket-boat was forging ahead of the line, sung out to the stoker petty officer to "ease her". This man was looking out of the engine-room hatch, just in front of the bullet-proof screen, and popped his head down to give another twist to the steam-valve. Old Fletcher, peering out of the stokehold hatch, farther for'ard, thought he, too, had been told to do so, and also bobbed his head down.
"Has the tortoise come along with us this time?" the Sub asked. The Orphan did not know; but Jarvis snorted: "Yes, 'Kaiser Bill's' 'ere all right; the old 'umbug!"—though whether he meant the tortoise was a humbug, or the old stoker, he didn't say.
The picket-boat fell back into line, and the Hun, standing behind his bullet-proof screen in the pinnace on the right, waved cheerfully across to the Orphan.
It was now clear daylight—about a quarter-past five.
The battleships still pounded the end of the Peninsula, and the six steamboats drew ahead of the Achates, which had now stopped engines. Behind them followed the trawlers, and the Newmarket, fleet sweeper, with the Pink Rat, Bubbles, the Lamp-post, and their beach parties, and behind her—far behind—came many transports.
"There's the River Clyde," called the Orphan, pointing away over the starboard quarter to where she was coming along, very slowly, towing the hopper and lighters which were presently to bridge the gap between her bows and the shore. After her, and with difficulty keeping pace with her, more ships' steamboats towed half a battalion of the Dublin Fusiliers.
"That's Cape Tekke—that high end bit, and that's Cape Helles—the higher cliff to the right, with the white lighthouse 'affair' on top," the Sub explained. "We've to land in between them. There's a bay there—'W' beach—underneath that smoke."
The sun itself had not yet been visible, but now it shot up from behind a distant ridge, humped like the back of a huge pig, and blazed straight in their faces.