All that afternoon our six surviving boats drifted within sight of each other. When darkness fell large yellow lanterns were lit, and from time to time Bengal lights flared and fell. It looked like a regatta held on the River Styx, in Hell. The sailors had exhausted themselves rowing, so the improvised sails were set. The boat-loads of survivors had run the gamut of every emotion. They were now mere stocks of insensibility, numb, dumb, and inert.
At six in the afternoon a boat just behind us began sending us signals of distress. The men had taken off their shirts and were waving them to us on oars. Our sailors objected to turning back, saying that both boats would be sunk if we tried to relieve them. But Carlo Lamberti, the chief engineer, with a quiet look in his blue eyes, with a rather careless, engaging smile, which was habitual to him all the time, presented his revolver—and we went back to see what was wrong.
We found that the boat had been struck by a shell and was leaking badly. True enough, most of the people in it tried to make an immediate stampede into our boat. But again Lamberti presented his eloquent pistol and his quiet smile, and with order and precision we took aboard the wounded, the women, and children. Then the leaky craft was tied to our stern and the men left were easily able to keep it afloat by bailing.
"We'll save you, or go down with you!" Lamberti reassured them. This chief engineer was the only man who showed signal bravery.
One of the first of the wounded rescued from the leaky boat was my former companion, the Marquis Serra Cassano. He did not wish to join in the incipient stampede. With four toes of his foot shot away, he rose limpingly to assist the other wounded into our boat first, before he himself came in. Then with an air of pathetic aristocracy he seated himself by me, and wanted to know if any one had a cigaret to spare. We had four cigarets on the boat. The men took turns puffing them.
A frantic mother had dropped her baby in the water. I jumped out and rescued it. Later on, she got separated from it, and I had it in my charge for several days—but that is not in the present story.
We kept close watch on each other's boats till nightfall. As the other five would appear and disappear, we would be alternately cheered and frightened.
It must have been nearly midnight when one of our sailors cried out that he saw a ship's light. But for a long while nothing appeared but thin threads of light that filtered through the fog. After some discussion as to whether it might not be an enemy craft, we approached the direction of the light, till it burst on us in a powerful, searching blaze. And we discerned the other boats converging toward it, mere moving yellow splurges in the gloom.
The ship that was rescuing us was a French mine layer, the Pluton. It was hellish-looking, as it beetled over us, but none the less it looked like heaven, too!
And now our boat-loads of survivors were close together, and suddenly everybody grew voluble and chatty. We shouted across the water to each other. I even heard a voice singing. We were saved! We were saved!