Men of the Tara

WHEN England took over something like half of her twenty millions of tons of merchant shipping for war service, among the requisitioned transports, colliers, hospital ships, and the like were a number of small but swift packets which were armed and employed as auxiliary cruisers or patrols. Of these was the Tara, which, under the name of Hibernia, had plied in the Irish service of the London and Northwestern Railway. Commanded by an officer of the Royal Navy, but still worked by her old crew, the Tara was sent to the bleak Cyrenaican coast of the Mediterranean, to keep a lookout for submarines and prevent the smuggling of arms and supplies to the small but dangerous Turkish forces which were operating in eastern Tripolitania with the object of inciting the Arabs to move against the lightly held western frontier of Egypt.

On the 5th of November, 1915,— Guy Fawkes Day, — the Tara was torpedoed by a German submarine in the Gulf of Sollum, and sunk, with the loss of eleven of her crew of something over one hundred. The ninety-two survivors were towed by the submarine to Port Suleiman and handed over to the Turks. The latter, in turn, passed the party on to the Senussi, a confederation of Arab tribes, who, as later events showed, were getting ready to launch a ‘Holy War’ against the Italians and English. The Arabs, short of food already, started marching their prisoners about the desert, and after several weeks established them in a sort of perron. ns-NO. 3 manent camp at an old Roman well in the interior. Here, eking out with snails and roots such scanty rations as their captors were able to provide, the unfortunate Britons, racked by disease and only half sheltered from the capricious winter weather, existed for three months and a half.

The trickle of food, now from one oasis, now from another, became thinner and thinner as time went on, and by the middle of March the failure of supplies had become so complete that absolute starvation in the course of the next few days appeared inevitable. But on the seventeenth of that month, as suddenly as though dropped from the sky, a squadron of armored automobiles appeared on the horizon. A few moments later the Arab guards had fallen before the fire of machine guns, and the half-delirious prisoners, plunging trembling hands into hastily broached tins of jam and condensed milk, were being bundled into Red Cross ambulances for the return journey. A couple of days more and they were in the hospitals of Alexandria, and a month later they were most of them back in England reporting for duty.

Through the courtesy of the British Admiralty, the writer was granted an extended interview with Captain Gwatkin-Williams, the naval officer in command of the Tara — the only one, indeed, that that distinguished officer gave before joining his new ship in the North Atlantic. Later the writer journeyed to Wales and Ireland to talk with Lieutenant Tanner, R.N.R., and several of the surviving members of the Tara’s crew.

I recognized Captain Gwatkin-Williams the instant his broad shoulders filled the door of the room — the den of his apartment on the fringe of Hampstead Heath — where I had been ushered to await him. I had met his type scores of times before: at Esquimault, Hongkong, Singapore, Capetown, Trinidad, Fiji, wherever the anchor chain of a British warship rattles down. I knew at once that he had the characteristics, as he had the appearance, of the typical British naval officer, and that among these was a distinct disinclination to tell of his own experiences. Knowing from past failures the futility of trying to draw one of his kind by frontal attack, I wasted no effort in that direction, but asked him pointblank if he had been able to preserve any souvenirs of his desert sojourn. By piecing together the things he told me over a brine-blotched naval uniform, a dented jam-tin, a handful of snailshells and dried roots, some camelbone needles, and a blood-stained whip of ’hippo’ hide, I synthesized the connected little story which follows.

‘It was about 10.30 in the forenoon of the fifth of last November,’ he said, ‘that I saw a torpedo heading straight for us at a distance of not over three hundred feet. It was painted a bright red, and in the clear water it showed up even more conspicuously than the wake from its propellers and air exhaust. It struck us fairly amidships on the starboard side, and my first order was to lower away the boats to port. I was not even thrown from my feet by the shock, nor was there any sharp detonation audible. Had I not seen the torpedo, I should for the moment have been in some doubt as to what had actually happened; and yet the explosion accounted for eleven of the crew.

‘My men were already standing by their gun, and the instant the submarine put up its “ eye” we took its range and opened up. At least one shell cracked right over the periscope, causing it to disappear at once. We did not see it again until salt water had stopped the mouth of our little rapid-firer.

‘The Tara, her engines still running, continued for some distance on a perfectly even keel, the boats meanwhile being safely launched with the surviving members of the crew. Then, all of a sudden, she began settling aft, and went down like a sounding lead, throwing her bows high in the air. My gun crew and I were caught beneath the forward awning, and owed our lives to the fact that we did not have lifebelts on, and were therefore able to dive and clamber clear.

‘The submarine — the U-35 — rose to the surface and came nosing into the wreckage before we had all been picked up by our boats; but the chaps on the deck contented themselves with covering us with their revolvers — a precautionary measure, doubtless — and the work of rescue was not interfered with. I asked the submarine commander if we might be allowed to go to X——, an Egyptian port where a small British force was stationed, and which we would have had no trouble in making in a few hours. He replied (in excellent English) that this would be impossible, as it was necessary for him to deliver us to the Turks as prisoners.

‘The submarine then took our three boats in tow and headed for Port Suleiman, where we were landed at about three in the afternoon. I made a part of the passage on t he deck of the Uboat, and had some little chat with its commander. He admitted that we had nearly put out his “eye” with one of our shells. He said that he had often been to England before the war, and even confessed to a visit to the Isle of Wight. He could not, of course, be blamed for wanting to prevent our getting to a British port and revealing the probable existence of a German submarine base on the Cyrenaican coast; the callousness of his action transpired later, however, when it became evident that neither the Turks nor the Arabs were able to house and feed us.

‘The Turkish officers at Port Suleiman were very courteous, — especially Nouri Pasha, who is a brother of Enver Pasha, — but they seemed somewhat perturbed at the prospect of caring for us. They were short of food themselves, apparently, and that region, like all the rest of eastern Tripolitania, is almost an absolute desert. Since their German masters had decreed the thing, however, there was nothing more to be said, and so, in the true Oriental fashion of following the line of least resistance, they passed us on to the Senussi. And since the Senussi had no one else to pass us along to, they had to shoulder the burden themselves and trudge on with it as best they might.

‘The ship’s cook, who had died from his wounds in one of the boats, we buried soon after landing, breaking an oar to form a rude cross above his grave. That night, still in our wet garments, we spent huddled together upon some rocks by the shore. The next morning we were given a small quantity of rice, which we had to cook as best we could in some beef-tins and eat with our lingers. There was less than a handful of the tasteless, unsalted mixture to each man. We were terribly cold, hungry, and thirsty; indeed, for the next four months and a half, there was hardly an hour in which we were not suffering a good deal from one — and usually all three — of these causes.

‘After a couple of days we were moved back from the coast to a primitive village where men and animals alike lived in dugouts in the rocks. A “stable” which had been occupied by goats, donkeys and pigs was cleared for us, and there, living in indescribable filth, we were kept for four days. We had been forced to carry with us on a stretcher a quartermaster of the Tara who had sustained a double fracture of the leg. At this juncture infection, fostered by filth and vermin, set in, and the only chance of saving his life appeared to be by amputation. This (I will spare you the harrowing details) was finally accomplished with no other instrument than a pair of old scissors and a few drops of whiskey — our very last — to steady the poor chap’s nerves. Of course he died.

‘The Arabs now told us that they were going to take us to a beautiful oasis where there was water and dates in plenty, and flocks of sheep and goats, and warm houses to shelter us in. Why they told us this I never have been able to make out. Possibly to make us forget our ever-empty stomachs; more likely because Arabs cannot tell the truth even when they want to. At any rate, we never reached the Paradise that our captors persistently dangled before us like a carrot before a donkey’s nose.

‘But march we did — march endlessly; and most of the time on less than a pint of vile water and a dozen ounces of cooked rice a day. The country was one endless stretch of small round pebbles that ground the soles from our boots and the skin from our feet. We were always hungry, always thirsty, always footsore. The sun at noonday scorched us, the cold of the night chilled us. One day, to make matters worse, a chap who was off his head from suffering ran away and evaded capture. Following the Oriental practice, our guards must needs punish the birds in the hand for the sins of the one in the bush. For two days we were marched without a drop of water or a morsel of food. The second day they goaded us forward from daybreak to sunset. It seemed as if we must have gone a hundred miles, and I learned later that it was actually over twenty. Even that was an awful distance for starving men, who had n’t the strength to walk in a straight line.

‘For three long weeks they herded us on. At the end of that time we arrived at what appeared to be our destination — some half-ruined Roman wells called Bir-Hakim. It was not an oasis in the true sense, but only three or four cavedin cisterns, partially filled with reeking run-off from the rains, which served as a caravan halt. There were no houses, no palms, no cultivation — only rocks and the crumbling copings of the ancient wells broke the monotony of the desert. Most of us arrived barefooted, all of us half-naked; but it is due to our guards to say that they were in scarcely better plight themselves, and that as opportunity offered to get old boots and rags from passing caravans, they gave them to us.

‘One day I found a bit of broken glass, and with this managed to scrape down some slivers of camels’ bone to the form of clumsy needles. Yarn we made by rolling tufts of camels’ hair, picked up along the way, between our palms. The resulting strand was seldom less than an eighth of an inch in diameter, and always lumpy and prone to pull apart at the joints; yet, by dint of patience and care, we were able to stitch fragments of rags together to form hats and long Arab shirts. Those of us who still had any parts of our socks and trousers left patched and darned them as best we could with our bunchy yarn.

‘Our daily ration, diminutive from the first, became smaller and smaller as the days went by, and finally, to stave off actual starvation, we began eating snails and the roots of a small plant, with spreading leaves like the arms of an octopus, which grew here and there among the rocks. The roots had a pleasant, nutty flavor, — I could eat these few I have kept with the greatest zest at this moment, — but the snails, roasted in their shells on a camel-dung fire and eaten without salt, were, to say the least, hardly up to the escargots served at the Café Riche. Most of us had a hard time bringing ourselves to eat them at all, and few ever came really to like them. One chap, however, — a Welsh quartermaster, — developed an almost uncanny taste for the things, eating several hundred every day and waxing fat on them. We have ever since called him the “Snail King.”

‘A few days after our arrival at BirHakim, an Arab woman came to our camp with some goats and sheep to sell, but our guards either could not or would not buy them for us. But that night a wolf killed one of the sheep, and some of the men, out foraging for snails, found and brought in the half-eaten carcass. Neither the wolf himself, nor the waiting vultures, could have rent that flesh more voraciously than did those half-famished sailors.

‘It was about this time that we first learned the true reason for the terrible scarcity of food — a scarcity which affected the Arabs as well as ourselves. The Turks, it appeared, had been successful in their intrigues with the Senussi, and the sheikhs of this powerful Arab confederation had declared war against England and thrown their forces against the Egyptian frontier. Solium, but lightly held at that time, had been taken, and the Arabs assured us that their armies were marching on Alexandria and Cairo. In retaliation for this treachery, the British fleet had extended its blockade to the “Senussi coast,” and the hinterland — barren, and almost entirely dependent for food upon Egypt — was already in the grip of famine. The impetuous Arabs were learning their lesson on the “influence of sea power” by being slowly starved into repentance; and, by a strange trick of fate, we British sailors, who naturally would have been helping to drive the lesson home, were starving with them.

‘For some reason the guards made us draw our water from the fouler of the two wells — the one from which the animals were watered. We boiled and settled the noisome green liquid — stagnant since the last rains and fouled by man and beast — and did our best to render it fit to drink. It was all to little purpose, however, for dysentery soon developed and spread rapidly through the camp. As there were no medicines of any kind available, there was little to do but let the disease run its course. This accentuated the weakening influence of the starvation, and the wonder is that we left no more than four graves behind us in that desolate spot.

‘About the 20th of December a little flour, tea and sugar were given us, and we were told that this was the last of such dainties that we might expect to receive. We decided unanimously to keep to our rice, snail, and root diet for four days longer, and save these luxuries for a Christmas “spread.” Here is our menu for that glad occasion as recorded in my diary:—

‘Christmas Day, 1915.

‘ Breakfast. Rice boiled with a little salt. Dinner. Two ounces of boiled goat-flesh and “pudding.” Tea. One small pancake with weak tea.

‘ By New Year’s Day we were practically on an “all-snail ” diet,and the epidemic of dysentery appeared to grow worse as a consequence. Two or three times in the succeeding weeks camels came in with food, but never in sufficient quantity to allow any increase in our ration. This continued to be rice, with an occasional goat or sheep divided among the nearly five score of us. Without the roots and snails it would not have been enough to keep us alive.

‘ Early in February I came to the conclusion that our only chance of rescue lay in getting word of our whereabouts through to some point in Egypt still occupied by our forces. Figuring that one man would have a better chance of escaping observation than two or three, I finally decided to make the attempt alone. The nights would be moonless, I calculated, for a week or more following the 20th of February. For a fortnight preceding that date I began saving half of my daily ration of rice, and as the news of my plan was gradually confided to other men of the camp, these also began laying by a share of their already pitifully small allowance. Thus about twenty pounds of cooked rice were saved up, and this I tied up in the legs of a pair of Turkish trousers given me by one of the guards. To keep the soft mass from settling down in one end, I tied the legs at frequent intervals with bits of yarn, so that my novel knapsack finally had much the appearance of a double string of German sausages. My goat-skin water-bag held just two and a half kettlefuls of water, or fortyeight of the little jam-tins with which I had to fill it.

‘The cordon round our camp was never tightly drawn, and I had no difficulty in slipping through it on the night of the 20th. I had kept mental note of the roundabout route by which the Arabs had brought us to Bir-Hakim, and felt sure that I should be able to strike the coast at some point near the Egyptian boundary. I held to my predetermined course by the stars, and stumbled on over the stones till daybreak. I had met no one, there were no signs of pursuit; but in the steady leaking of my water through the semi-porous bag and the frightful way in which the new Arab shoes I was wearing were rubbing the skin from my toes, I foresaw thus early the almost certain defeat of my hopes.

‘Lying down in as sheltered a place as I could find, I rested till nightfall before setting off again on my way. By morning my water, my toenails, and my strength were gone, on top of which I stumbled straight into a camp of nomad Arabs. Flight was out of the question, so I made the best of a bad situation by trying to induce them, in my fragmentary Arabic, to take me to the coast. They understood me all right, and appeared not a little tempted by the prospect of the double handful of gold I promised them. They debated the question for a while, but in the end their fear of the Turk was too strong, and they decided I must be delivered to the nearest Ottoman post.

’My captors were not unkind to me; indeed, they treated me rather as a prized animal pet, a sort of dancing bear, than as a dangerous captive. They exhibited me to every one they met along the way, and even made a point of traveling circuitously in order to display their strange find to encampments that would otherwise have missed the treat. They never ceased to marvel at my ability to tell the direction without a compass and the time without a watch, — simple tricks for a sailor,— and, as it kept them good-natured, I made a point of going through my tricks whenever they wanted them.

‘The Turks to whom I was finally brought were just as courteous and sympathetic as those to whom we had been delivered on landing, and they cannot be blamed for deciding that I should be returned to the camp at BirHakim. They were probably hard put for food themselves.

’I hardly care to go into details about that return journey. Except that it was two or three days of horrible nightmare, my memory of it is a good deal confused, and I am rather thankful that such is the case. I am afraid there were some things I should n’t care to remember too clearly. A fanatical old Senussi priest had come to fetch me, and he rode on a camel, driving me ahead of him with a long hippo-hide whip all the way. They gave me no food and no water for two days, and my one clear recollection of that whole period is of gulping down the nearly hatched eggs from a lark’s nest I stumbled upon, and of the horrible revulsion of my outraged stomach as the nauseous mess entered it. But I’d really rather not speak about that little interval at all.’

[Some idea of what Captain Gwatkin-Williams had to go through on this journey may be inferred from this entry in the diary of one of the Tara men under date of February 29: —

‘About three P.M. we suddenly heard rifle shots to the northwards. A few minutes later there appeared over the brow of a small hill some men and camels, and there, walking apart from the rest, was our brave captain. We were now witness of one of the most degrading and brutal sights it has ever been my lot to see. He was lashed with an elephant-thong whip, and the guard punched him violently in the face. Then the women came up and pelted him with the largest stones they could find.’]

‘As a punishment for running away,’he continued, ‘I was put in solitary confinement in a goat-pen, where, for a day or two, the old priest and some of the more temperamental of the Arab ladies — the one with his hippo-hide whip and the others with filth and stones — spent most of their idle hours in trying to bring me round to a state of true repentance for my truancy. This treatment raised such a protest from my comrades, however, that finally, on Lieutenant Tanner’s undertaking full responsibility for my docility in the future, the guards restored me to full camp privileges. That is to say, I was allowed my fistful of daily rice again, and liberty to hunt my own snails and dig my own roots.

‘Things grew rapidly worse during the next fortnight, and by the middle of March it seemed that the end we had feared and fought against for so long — slow starvation — could not be much longer postponed. No more food was coming in; the snails were breeding and absolutely unfit to eat, and all the roots within a distance that any of us still had the strength to walk were exhausted. Indeed, the strongest of us were by now so weak that we could no longer keep our balance in stooping to pull the roots, but had to kneel and worry them out by digging and tugging. The rice was entirely exhausted early in March, and from that time we lived on practically nothing but a few ounces of goat-meat per man as a daily ration. Famished as we were, even these tiny portions of unsalted meat seemed to nauseate rather than nourish, and in my own case the repulsion for meat engendered during that period has persisted to this day. I am now practically a vegetarian.

‘The plight of our guards was little better than our own, except, of course, when worst came to worst, they could always abandon us and make their way across the desert to some place where at least subsistence would be obtainable. For ourselves, we were now quite incapable of undertaking any kind of a march at all. Help would have to come to us; it was quite out of the question for us to search for it, even if our guards had been willing to allow us to try.

‘The last two or three days I do not like to think about. We were too weak to venture far afield, and there was little to do but sit about and brood over the fact that even such negligible rations as we still had were nearly at an end. We avoided each other as much as possible, and when we did come together we tried to speak of anything but the thing that occupied all of our minds. And then, from the one quarter whence we had long ago given up all hope of its coming, help arrived.

‘You see, we had written a good many letters from time to time, on the assurance of our guards that they would be handed to the Turks for forwarding to England. Most of these were probably thrown away or deliberately destroyed, but, by a kind trick of fate, one written by myself was taken by the Turks to Sollum when the Senussi occupied that port. In this letter — no matter how — I managed to indicate that we were held captive and in danger of starvation at Bir-Hakim. When the British retook Sollum, this letter, by a second lucky coincidence, was left behind in the hastily evacuated quarters of a Turkish officer.

‘When our whereabouts was once definitely located, our rescue was only a matter of assembling the requisite strength in armored cars and finding a competent guide. This done, our deliverance was but a question of hours. But I do not care to think of how they would have found things had anything delayed our rescuers even a few days.

‘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 — when the first car was sighted, and before we had finished pinching ourselves to prove we were not dreaming, the whole force of fortyone was thundering down on 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. The cars, spreading out into a “ fan,” swept on 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 these 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 in sight, and a panicky sort, of resistance on the part of a few of them when they were overtaken sealed the fate of the lot. Save for a few women and children, all of the Arabs about the place succumbed to the fire of the machine-guns, and a score or so of graves were added to those of the four Tara men we had already buried at Iiir-Hakim.

‘ We lost one more man in 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 is about to go back, on duty. Word of my own new command came only this morning.’

Lieutenant Tanner, R.N.R. (captain of the Tara in her merchant-marine days), was 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 Anglesey to where the slate-colored patrol boats kept guard in St. George’s Channel and the little coastal packets, ‘zigzagging’ against possible lurking submarines, shuttled back and forth across the heaving chrysoprase of the Irish Sea.

He, too, was a man I already knew — the best, and a by no means uncommon type in recent years, of the British merchant skipper. A half-dozen of the latest reviews were on his desk, and he had been dividing his time between these and helping one of his boys build a model aeroplane.

‘Lieutenant Tanner,’ I asked, ‘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 words — were of how the end would come. It was only in 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 lighting for our own flesh 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 that 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 extended even to non-interference in their increasingly frequent disputes. We held — and rightly, I am convinced — that anything calculated to provide an outlet for 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, 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.

‘I also made what effort I could to keep the minds of the men occupied. Every Sunday evening we met and sang hymns, and on these occasions I usually read from my prayer-book and invited discussion on some text I had given out the previous Sunday. Here,’he added, turning to his diary, ‘are some of the things we debated in our weekly “forums” by the old Roman wells: —

‘“More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.”

‘“Love took up the glass of time.”

‘“Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.”

‘“Does the end justify the means?”

‘As you may well imagine, strange theses were developed, and I am afraid that many a sore head resulted from the preliminary “ ’tween Sunday” discussions. It did n’t take much to start them going in that last fortnight after the snails failed us; but the diversion was good for them, and besides, poor chaps, they were far too weak to be able to hurt one another in the least. Their fights were like the tussles of a couple of puppies. When you see some of the boys on the steamer to-night, by the way, I can suggest no more promising line of inquiry for you than to ask them to tell you some of the things they used to fight about in the desert.’

Wireless Operator Birkby and Stewards Barton and Fenton, who were among the Tara survivors, on their return to England had been put to work on the Tara’s sister ship, the Greenore, and it was behind the darkened windows of the smoking-room of this smart little packet, as she bored into the sou’wester which swept St. George’s Channel, that I contrived to gather the three of them together to talk of their adventures. The forerunning news had been coming in that night of the great naval battle off the coast of Jutland, and at first I found them distrait and rather more inclined to discuss the loss of the Queen Mary than that of the Tara. It was, indeed, only to be expected that I should find them a little blase on a subject about which every one had been pestering them to talk for the last two months. It was Lieutenant Tanner’s tip that saved the situation.

‘All I want to know about,’ I said, ‘ is a few of the things you chaps used to punch each other’s heads about in the desert. I ’ve got all the rest of the story.’

They rose to that cast with a rush. All three commenced talking at once, but the two stewards quickly fell silent out of deference to the superior rank of the wireless operator,

‘Easier to tell you, sir, what we did n’t fight about,’ laughed Birkby. ‘At first it was mostly food. We did n’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 was n’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 give out the text, “Love thy neighbor like thyself” for us to ponder ower. You dipped into the pot a’ead of me, an’ I sez, “’Ow in ’ell’s a bloke goin’ to love ’is neighbor w’en that neighbor pinches ’arf ’is rice?” You filled yer mouth wi’ one ’and an’ clipped me one in the jaw wi’ t’other; an’ as I went reelin’ back I put me foot into Bill’s pile o’ toasted snails, squashin’ ’em flat. So ower ’e rolls an’ starts to beat me ’fore I cud get up, not to stop till ’e skinn’d ’is bare toes on the ’andle o’ me clasp knife. W’en at last I gets up, the rice was all gone an’ Bill ’ad copped all my snails in pay fer the ones I squashed. All I ’ad to put down me gullet that night was some o’ the squashed snails I salviged from the sand, an’ the grit I eat wi’ ’em started me dysentery goin’ again for 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 I 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. ‘ ’Is “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 blooming wrigglers, 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 t o a proper turn. Well, little old Barton here, by dint of long practicing alone in the desert, developed a bit of a whistle of his own which even “The Snail King” himself could n’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 most a week before he twigged the thing. 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 tuk three o’ ye tu ’old ’im the week arter w’en we planted the loaded shells on ’im. I pinched a ca’tridge frum one o’ the Avrabs, an’ filled the small end o’ the curl o’ a dozen snail shells wi’ powder. On top o’ this I rammed in the upper ’arf, the ’orned ’arf, o’ a snail, an’ scattered the shells w’ere “ ’Is ’Ighness” cud find ’em good an’ easy w’en ’e went foragin’. ’E’d a never found out wot wuz wrong wi’ ’em but fer not ’avin’ put ’em all on the coals at oncet. Arter the first uns ’gan tu blow off, a post-mortum on the remainin’ ones revealed some o’ my infernal machines, an’ then I larfed an’ giv the hull game aw’y.’

And so they ran on. Fenton confessed to having ‘ ’ad tu clout’ one of the quartermasters, because the latter had been so ‘swanky’ as to maintain that the torpedo that sank the Tara was scarlet ‘w’en 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, ‘If you still think “Love is the greatest thing in the world,” take that!’ And as we slid up the Liffey in the drizzle of the Irish dawn, with the pock-marked face of ‘Liberty Hall ’ and the tottering ruins of burned Sackville Street showing dimly ahead, Barton just finished telling me how some one accused the first man to sight the rescuing motors with eating the ‘Ayrabs’ ’emp an’ seein’ things,’ adding that the two were circling each other on tottering legs, looking for an opening to lead into, when the bout was interrupted by the arrival of the Red Cross ambulances.

‘ ’Arf a minit later,’ he concluded, ‘the two o’ ’em wuz both guzzlin’ ower 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 GwatkinWilliams and Lieutenant Tanner convinced me so thoroughly as these offhand recitals of the ancient British spirit of give-and-take in which they settled their petty troubles that, had the worst come to worst—had, for instance, the Duke of Westminster’s rescue party gone astray, as it so nearly did — it would have been the man, not the beast, in the Tara sailors that would have triumphed in the end.