"Easier to tell you, sir, what we didn't fight about," laughed Birkby. "At first it was mostly food. We didn't have any 'pothecary's scales to divide it exactly with, and when one lad got a few grains of rice more than another, it wasn't in human nature not to make some bit of a mention of it."
"That was wot you an' me 'ad our first tiff over, matey," cut in Fenton. "It was the day after Captain Tanner gave out the text 'love thy neighbour like thyself' for us to ponder ower. You dipped into the pot ahead of me, an' I said, 'How's a bloke goin' to love his neighbour when that neighbour pinches half his rice?' You filled your mouth with one hand an' clipped me one in the jaw wi' t'other; an' as I went reelin' back I put my foot into Bill's pile of toasted snails, squashing 'em flat. So over he rolls an' starts to beat me afore I cud get up. W'en at last I gets up the rice was all gone an' Bill had copped all my snails to pay for the ones I squashed. All I had to put down me gullet that night was some of the squashed snails I salvaged from the sand, an' the grit I ate with 'em started my dysentery going again fer a week."
Birkby smiled, and nodded confirmatively. "Yes," he resumed, "most of our fights were about food, but my first one was about my trousers. You see, I was off watch and turned in asleep when the torpedo struck the Tara, and only just managed to get away in my pajamas. The lower part of these I kicked out of in the water, and one of the sailors of the submarine gave me a spare pair of his German naval breeches. It was glad indeed I was to have them. At first no one remarked them, but finally, at the end of a hard day's march, one of the Welsh lads passed some observation in his own language about me accepting the bounty of the Hun. I didn't understand exactly what he said, but to be on the safe side I clouted him one then and there. But all the same," he concluded after a pause, "I traded the Hun trousers to one of the guards for a long Arab shirt, and got on without any breeches for the rest of the time."
"An' not a bit worse off than most of the rest of us," added Fenton. "His 'burnoose' was a good foot longer than mine."
"But it was X—-, the 'Snail King,'" continued Birkby, "who was oftenest in trouble. We were all jealous of his appetite for the wriggling things, jealous of the quick way he had of spying and picking them up, and, most of all, jealous of the way he was getting fat on them while all the rest of us were wasting away to skeletons. First and last, though, I think we were about quits with him. You see, the way we cooked the snails was to throw them on the coals till the blow-off of steam made a sort of whistle to announce that they were done to a proper turn. Well, little old Barton here, by dint of long practising alone in the desert, developed a bit of a whistle of his own which even the 'Snail King' himself couldn't tell from the real thing. By tooting up at the proper moments, old Barty had the 'King' setting his teeth in half-cooked snails for nearly a week before he twigged the thing. Then, of course, he jumped on our little friend here with both feet, and it took two of us half-fed ones to drag him off."
"Aye, matey," Barton chipped in, "an' it took three o' ye to hold him the week after when we planted the loaded shells on him. I pinched a cartridge from one o' a dozen snail-shells wi' powder. On top o' this I rammed in the upper half—the 'orned half—of a snail, an' scattered the shells where 'His Highness' cu'd find 'em, but for not 'avin' put 'em all on the coals at onct. After the first ones began to blow up a post-mortem on the remainin' ones revealed some of my infernal machines, and then I laughed and gave the whole game away."
And so they ran on. Fenton confessed to having had to "clout" one of the quartermasters, because the latter had been so "swanky" as to maintain that the torpedo that sank the Tara was scarlet "when the bally thing was only red"; and Birkby admitted to having closed his argument for the negative on one of Lieutenant Tanner's Sunday texts with, "And if you still think that 'Love is the greatest thing in the world'—take that!" And as we slid up the Liffey in the drizzle of the Irish dawn, Barton just finished telling me how someone accused the first man to sight the rescuing motors with eating the "Arabs' hemp and 'seeing' things,'" adding that the two were circling each other on tottering legs, looking for an opening, when the bout was interrupted by the arrival of the Red Cross ambulances. "Half a minute later," he concluded, "the two of 'em was both guzzlin' over the same jam-tin."
There had, it appears, been some kind of a dispute over everything, from the sand beneath their feet to the sky above their heads, and, except for the higher officers, just about every man of them had had some kind of a set-to with every other one. And yet not even the fine optimism of Captain Gwatkin-Williams and Lieutenant Tanner convinced me so thoroughly as these off-hand recitals of the ancient British spirit of give-and-take in which they settled their petty troubles that, had the worst come to the worst—had, for instance, the Duke of Westminister's rescue party gone astray, as it nearly did—it would have been the man, not the beast, in the Tara sailors that would have triumphed in the end.