We were a goodish bit behind time getting ashore, as the very dickens of a fog came up from the south and wrapped us in its "blissful mantle of white", as the young padré would have said if he'd been there. It was beastly annoying, and took all the gloss out of my moustache; but old Lawrence got us round to the back of the island somehow or other, chiefly by the sound of the Ringdove's guns, I think. Of course, he jolly well pretended that he did it with a boat's compass and a pair of parallel rulers on a chart he'd made. Bless me! I never could understand why navigators make such a song about their job; it's easy enough—shove on till you hit up against the shore—push off again and go on—that's all that's wanted. I bet I would navigate any ship you liked, anywhere you liked, if she'd stand a bit of bumping sometimes. I've often asked Lawrence to let me try, but, funnily enough, he won't.
I'd had an awful job with Grainger to let me wear my other serge tunic—my best one—and it was only by telling him that I wasn't going to bring discredit on "The Corps" by being found dead in the one I'd worn last night, that he let me wear it.
"I make it a rule in life," I had told him, "never to wear any serge in more than one battle," and he had gone away muttering that "he supposed that they hadn't either of 'em been paid for, and never would be, so it didn't hardly matter, though he was blowed if he knew what I was going to wear to-morrow".
Some of his statements were remarkably accurate. We had brought along one of Hoffman's Chinamen to guide us, but, bless me! by the time we'd got ashore, with wet feet, we couldn't see two yards in front of us. The fog was as thick as pea soup, and it was like trying to wade through velvet.
I had a pocket compass—we all had—and Lawrence had given us the course we were to steer, but I'm jiggered if I know how we got along at all. I was supposed to be in front, with people thrown out on either flank, as laid down in the "drill book", but it was all I could do to keep them bunched up together, touching each other, and the section leaders bawling out, every minute or two, to give the others a notion where they were. My old sergeant-major nearly wept because he couldn't know whether they were "dressed" in proper line.
We stumbled through it somehow, going on for two minutes and halting for five or ten, whilst they hauled one of our Maxims along on its carriage behind us, and the shouting that went on to know who was there, and where who was, was enough to wake the dead.
The Skipper landed with us, in an old pair of shooting-boots with huge soles on them—the two-to-an-acre kind—and with a big oak stick in his hands. Young Ponsonby came as his "doggy", and Whitmore had brought Rawlings as his. My marines—Langham with the machine gun section, old "B.-T." with "A" company, and Trevelyan with "B" company—brought our "field state" up to a hundred and fifty-four, all of them Vigilant's, and Barclay came along with a dozen stokers as stretcher-bearers. About two miles to our left, farther along the island, the other landing party, which was supposed to make for the walled house, with Sally in it, and join hands with us there, should have commenced their march already, but we hadn't the faintest notion whether they'd been able to find the place to land. The skipper of the Omaha, Captain John A. Parkinson, U.S.N.[#], was to have been in command, and to have had forty men from his own gunboat and thirty each from our three with him, bringing their brigade up to a strength of one hundred and forty-two—that is, with a few details of stretcher parties.
[#] United States Navy.
We only hoped that they'd been able to find each other and get ashore.
"'Old Lest' don't care whether they come or not," the Skipper growled to me, when we'd run up against each other in the fog. "'Old Lest's' going on. Umph!"