The Orphan, looking down through the hatch, was glad he couldn't see them.
"There are a lot more 'deaders' under that tarpaulin. Come on deck—your Doctor is 'nosing round' there."
When they went up the ladder, the Orphan concealed his cigarette in his hand. But Dr. O'Neill was not worrying about a midshipman, under eighteen years of age, smoking; he was examining the wounded on the stretchers lying under the bulwarks, and looked very old and haggard in the dim light of the dawn.
The two donkeys seemed horribly miserable, nosing wearily at some dirty straw and cabbage-leaves on the deck. "Poor little blighters!" said the Sub-lieutenant. "They've not been really happy since one of those shells went through the deck between them—look at the hole it made. We've brought them along with us, from Port Said, to carry ammunition—poor little chaps!" and he fondled them as they put up their noses to be petted.
He was a very restless individual, and seemed not in the least affected by the strain of the last twenty-four hours. He pointed out the grey cliffs of Cape Helles. They seemed uncomfortably close, and looked right down upon the deck.
"That's where those snipers are—they're there still—I thought so—d'you hear that?" (a bullet pinged past); "you needn't worry—they can't shoot for toffee. If we move about and show ourselves, some more of them will start potting at us. Let's try!"
The Orphan found himself crouching behind one of the donkeys, but stood up again as his extremely cool friend laughed at him.
Dr. O'Neill now sent him to collect a dozen of those sleeping orderlies and start handing the wounded men, in their stretchers, down the ladder from the upper deck, and then down into the launch. They were very sleepy, and not too inclined to stir themselves; but he found a weather-beaten R.A.M.C. sergeant—a regular "terror"—who soon began "rousting them up". For the next hour this job kept him busy, his maxim-gun friend sitting all the time on top of the hatchway, smoking his pipe contentedly and warning him whenever the snipers from the cliff became too busy. "Better keep under cover for a bit, sonny," he would sing out; "your chaps are getting on their nerves." He never shifted his own position, although he was entirely in view; and after a few minutes, would call down: "All right; you can carry on!", and the Orphan and the orderlies would rush up, and start moving more men down. It was quite safe moving them along, under the bulwarks; but what the Orphan did not like was taking them across the deck, and lifting them over the coaming, with the delay there, whilst men standing on the steps of the ladder took charge of the stretcher. Those cliffs seemed so horribly near.
At last they had all been struck down below, and the Orphan was listening to a very humorous dissertation from his loquacious friend, on the merits of different kinds of rifles (they were both standing at the foot of the ladder, and it was broad daylight), when suddenly there was a roaring noise, followed immediately afterwards by a most terrific explosion, which made them both quail, and made the River Clyde tremble as though a mine had exploded under her bows. The youthful orderlies handing the stretchers down into the launch dashed for cover, their nerves much "rattled"; but the Orphan and his friend, recovering themselves, jumped across to the gangway port to see what had happened. As they did so, the Albion—perhaps a thousand yards away—fired one of the 12-inch guns in her fore turret, and another terrific thunder-clap crashed out as a lyddite shell burst against one of the big bastions of the castle. When the smoke cleared away, they saw that the top half of it had been almost destroyed.
The R.N.D. Sub-lieutenant grinned. "'Finished' that battery of maxims they had up there all day yesterday; we couldn't turn them out." The Albion continued to fire her big shells, and the bursting of the high explosive against the solid masonry of the castle, not more than 250 yards from the River Clyde, made the most overwhelming and overpowering noise inside the poor old ship. Some of those youthful orderlies were very nerve-shaken indeed.