A Port Said miscellany

by William McFee

There is another sergeant, too, a young gentleman going home to get a commission. He is almost to be described as one apart, for he holds no converse with the others. He walks in a mincing way, he has a gold watch with a curb-chain on one wrist, a silver identification plate and a silver slave-bangle from Saloniki on the other, and an amethyst ring on one of his fingers. As the Chief Engineer said to me one day, he needed only a spear and a ring through his nose to be a complete fighting man. However, in this war it is unwise to make snap judgments. I understand that this young gentleman has an aptitude for certain esoteric brain-work of vast use in artillery. He never goes near the firing-line at all. Our young friend Angus MacFadden has that job. When the young gentleman with the slave-bangle and gold-mounted fountain-pen and expensive Kodak has figured out certain calculations in his dug-out office, Angus, who resembles an extremely warlike bellhop, with his gaunt Highland chum beside him, will scramble up out of his trench, make a most determined rush toward a given point, and, in short, complete the job, whatever it may be.

Now it is all very well to talk about the triumphs of mind over matter, but my interest is not with the young gentleman at all. He may carry Omar Khayyam in his kit. He may call the ‘Shropshire Lad’ ‘topping poetry.’ He may (as he does) borrow Swinburne from my bookshelf. My interest is with Angus and his chums. I look out of my machine-room window and watch them getting ready to disembark. They are very amusing, with their collapsible aluminium pannikins, their canvas washbasins and buckets, their fold-up shaving tackle and telescopic tooth-brushes.

There is one tough old private of the Old Army among them. He has the Egyptian and two South African medals. He never seems to have any kit to bother him. I see him in the galley, peeling potatoes for their dinner, deep in conversation with the pantryman and smoking an Irish clay. He knows all the twenty-one moves, as we say. Then there is a very young man who reads love stories all the time, a rosy-cheeked lad with the Distinguished Service Order ribbon on his tunic.

Another, almost as young, is tremendously interested in refrigeration. He comes into my engine-room and stares in rapt incredulity at the snow on the machine. ‘I don’t see why it doesn’t melt!’ he complains, as if he had a grievance. ‘How do you freeze? if it isn’t a rude question.’

I explain briefly how we utilize the latent heat of re-evaporation peculiar to certain gaseous media, in order to reduce the temperature. He turns on me with a rush of frankness and bursts out, ‘But, you know, that’s all Greek to me!’ Well, I suggest, his soldiering’s all Greek to me, come to that. He laughs shortly, with his eyes on the ever-moving engines, and says he supposes so. By and by he begins to talk of his experiences in Macedonia. He thinks the sea is beautiful, after the bare hot gulches and ravines. He is so fair that the sun has burned his face and knees pink instead of brown. I asked him what he was doing before the war, and he said his father had a seed-farm in Essex and he himself was learning the business.

Meanwhile we have arrived at Port Said. The engines stop and go astern violently, and the pilot comes alongside in a boat and climbs the rope-ladder. Just ahead is the breakwater, with a couple of motor patrols keeping guard over the fairway. Our escort puts on speed and goes in, for her job with us is done. She has gone in to coal, and she will be ready in a few hours to take another transport out. She and her sisters are like us—they are never through. The big ships may lie for days, or even weeks, in harbor. We small fry have to hurry. Back and forth we ply without ceasing. Sometimes we run ashore in our haste, and so make less speed. Sometimes we smash into each other in the dark, and have to stagger back to port and refit with all possible expedition. Sometimes, too, we go out and never come back, and nobody save the authorities and our relatives hears anything about it. To what end? Well—and herein lies my interest in those soldiers of the King on the after-deck—the one ultimate object we have in view is to get Master Angus MacFadden and his chums into that front-line trench, to keep them there, warm and fed, and fully supplied with every possible assistance when they climb over the parapet to make the aforesaid rush. Everything else, when you come to think of it, is subordinate to that.

The ship goes at half-speed now past the breakwater, a long gray finger pointing northwards from the beach. Half-way along we pass the De Lesseps statue on its high pedestal, the right hand flung out in a grandiose gesture toward the supreme achievement of his life. The warm wind from the westward is sending up the sea to break in dazzling white foam on the yellow sand below the pink and blue and brown bathing-huts. The breakwater is crowded with citizens taking the air, for the walks of Port Said are restricted and flavored with the odors of Arabian domesticity. We pass on, and the hotels and custom-house buildings come into view. All around are the transients of the ocean, anchored and for a moment at rest. Past the Canal building we steam, a pretentious stucco affair with three green-tiled domes and deep Byzantine galleries. Past also Navy House, a comely white building in the Venetian style, recalling the Doge’s Palace—an illusion heightened by the fleet of patrols anchored in front, busily getting ready to go out to work.

And then we stop, and manœuvre, and go astern; tugs whistle imperiously, motor-boats buzz around us, ropes are hurriedly ferried across to buoys and quays, and we are made fast and pulled into our berth alongside of an immense vessel which has come from the other side of the world with frozen meat to feed Master Angus and his chums. But by this time it is dark. The ochreous sheen on the sky behind Port Said is darkening to purple and violet, the stars are shining peacefully over us, and the sergeant comes to ask for a lantern by which to finish packing his kit.

It has been warm during the day, but now it is stifling. We are, as I said, close alongside a great ship. She extends beyond us and towers above us, and even the warm humid breeze of Port Said in August is shut out from us. Up from below comes a suffocating stench of hot bilge. The ship is invaded by a swarm of Arab cargo-men, who begin immediately to load us from our neighbor. Cargo lights, of a ghastly blue color, appear at the hatchways. Angus and his chums take up their kits and fall in on the bridge-deck. Officers hurry to and fro. Hatches are taken off, and the cold air of the holds comes up in thin wisps of fog into the tropic night. Winches rattle. Harsh words of French and Arabic commingle with the more intelligible shouts of the ship’s officers. All night this goes on. All night proceeds this preposterous traffic in frozen corpses amid the dim blue radiance of the cargo-clusters. Hundreds upon hundreds of frozen corpses!

I go off watch at eight and, seated in a room like a Turkish bath, I try to concentrate on the letters which have come over the sea. I am seized with a profound depression, arising, I suppose, from the bizarre discrepancy between the moods communicated by the letters and my own weariness. Most letters are so optimistic in tone. They clap one on the back and give one breezy news of the flowers in New Jersey gardens, of the heat in New Orleans, of bombs in London and reunions in English houses. All very nice; but I have to get up at two, and the thermometer over my bunk is now registering a hundred Fahrenheit. An electric fan buzzes and snaps in the corner and seems only to make the air hotter. An Arab passes in the alleyway outside and calls to some one named Achmet in an unmelodious howl. (All male Arabs are named Achmet apparently.)