V—THE RESCUE AND THE RETURN TO ENGLAND
Once definitely located, our rescue was only the matter of assembling the requisite strength in armoured cars and finding a competent guide. This done, our deliverance was but a question of hours. But of how they would have found things had anything delayed them for even a few days I do not care to think.
It was about three in the afternoon of St. Patrick's Day—we had celebrated it in the morning by making a feeble attempt to kill off a few of the snakes that had recently begun to infest the camp—that the first car was sighted, and before we had finished pinching ourselves to prove we were not dreaming the whole force of forty-one were thundering down upon us. The ambulances pulled up, and the attendants, as soon as they could free themselves from the embraces of the men, began to shower food about. Meanwhile, the armoured cars, spreading out like a "fan," swept by in pursuit of our fleeing guards.
Except for the Senussi priest, whom the sailors had dubbed "The Old Black Devil," and who had departed a couple of days previously, we had no special grounds for complaint against the men upon whom the care of our party had fallen. They had, for the most part, done the best they could for us, and we had no reason to believe that they had fared much better than their prisoners. We would gladly have interceded for them if there had been any chance. Taking it for granted, apparently, that they would receive no quarter, they had taken to their heels the moment the first cars came into sight, and a panicky sort of resistance on a part of a few of them when they were overtaken sealed the fate of the lot. Save for a few women and children, all the Arabs about the place succumbed to the fire of the machine-guns, and a score or so of graves were added to the four of the Tara men we had already buried at Bir-Hakkim.
We lost one more man in a hospital at Alexandria, but the rest of us, thanks to good food and careful nursing, were soon quite our old selves again. Practically every man of us is back, or about to go back, on duty. Word of my own new command comes only this morning.
Lieutenant Tanner, R.N.R., captain of the Tara in her merchant marine days, I found in his home at Holyhead. Through the window of his cosy library, where he spun his yarn, I could look out across the rocky coast of Anglesea to where the slate-coloured patrol-boats kept guard in St. George's Channel.
"Lieutenant Tanner," I asked him, "what did the men of the Tara talk about and think about, once the excitement of the sinking, and the landing, and the march was over and you were all settled down to the routine of 'prison life'?"
"First and always—food," he replied, promptly. "We were famishing for the whole four months and more. For a while we thought and talked a good deal of the possibility of rescue; but as the weeks went by that hope gradually died out, and our speculations—perhaps more in thought than in word—were of how the end would come. It was only during the last couple of months that the men came to speak often on this subject, and they were, not unnaturally, most prone to discuss it in the intervals of deeper depression following the death of one of their mates. We seemed to divide into two sharply differentiated parties on this issue, the optimists holding that our heritage of civilization and our discipline would enable us to meet the worst bravely and resignedly, while the pessimists maintained that we would gradually slough off our civilized restraint—just as our clothes and our conventions had gone already—and end by fighting for life like a pack of wolves. The rate at which the bickerings and petty quarrels over trivialities increased as the days went by inclined more and more of the men to the latter theory, but a few of us never wavered in our belief, but it would be the man in us, and not the beast, that would be supreme at the last.
"We—the officers—made a point of imposing no discipline whatever upon the men, this extending even to non-interference in their increasingly frequent disputes. We held—and rightly, I am convinced—that anything calculated to give an outlet to their feelings would make them less likely to become a prey to gloomy thought. Sullen, silent brooding was what we feared more than anything else. Consequently, therefore, we rather welcomed the occasional bouts of fisticuffs that marked the later stages of our imprisonment. They unquestionably acted as safety-valves to prevent more dangerous explosions.