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The next day, after Sir James Outram had, by his admirable manoeuvre, driven the rebels from their lines, Captain Vaughan being in front, Sir Colin Campbell met him, and desired him to bring up a gun's crew of bluejackets to man an abandoned gun, which was to be turned against the retreating enemy.
The bluejackets were always particularly welcome. Mrs. Strong tells of a party who came from H.M.S. Wallaroo on one Thanksgiving Day, when "the kitchen department was in great excitement over that foreign bird the turkey" and all was confusion. "But Louis kept his sailors on all the afternoon.
There were the officers of Greece and Serbia in smart uniforms of many colors blue, green, gray with much gold and silver braid, and wearing swords which in this war are obsolete; there were English officers, generals of many wars, and red-cheeked boys from Eton, clad in businesslike khaki, with huge, cape-like collars of red fox or wolf skin, and carrying, in place of the sword, a hunting-crop or a walking-stick; there were English bluejackets and marines, Scotch Highlanders, who were as much intrigued over the petticoats of the Evzones as were the Greeks astonished at their bare legs; there were French poilus wearing the steel casque, French aviators in short, shaggy fur coats that gave them the look of a grizzly bear balancing on his hind legs; there were Jews in gabardines, old men with the noble faces of Sargent's apostles, robed exactly as was Irving as Shylock; there were the Jewish married women in sleeveless cloaks of green silk trimmed with rich fur, and each wearing on her head a cushion of green that hung below her shoulders; there were Greek priests with matted hair reaching to the waist, and Turkish women, their faces hidden in yashmaks, who looked through them with horror, or envy, at the English, Scotch, and American nurses, with their cheeks bronzed by snow, sleet, and sun, wearing men's hobnailed boots, men's blouses, and, across their breasts, war medals for valor.
On the 12th of May, during a thick fog, the steam-sloop Tiger, sixteen guns, Commander Gifford, went on shore on the rocks near Odessa. The Russians, having removed her guns and stores, set fire to the vessel, and forwarded the flag as a trophy to Saint Petersburg. It was one of the very few, either from redcoats or bluejackets, they got during the war.
Then loud cheers, begun as of right by the bluejackets, representing the senior service, ran round our chains of outposts and fighting men, shaken into light echoes by the jagged rocks, to roll in mightier chorus through the camps, thence onward by river-banks, where groups emerged from their burrows, strengthening the shouts with even more fervour, and into the town, where loyalty to the Crown of England has a meaning at this moment deeper than any of us could ever have attached to it before.
The report tells of notable achievements in ordnance, especially the work of the 14-inch naval guns on railway mounts on the western front, which hurled shells far behind the German lines, these mounts being designed and completed in four months. The land battery of these naval guns was manned exclusively by bluejackets under command of Rear-Admiral C. P. Plunkett.
The citadel itself was now closely invested, and incessantly shelled, so that there was scarcely a spot within the walls where the besieged could find shelter. In this siege the bluejackets of Old England, as well as the redcoats, took a part.
A lively trade was done in forged papers of American citizenship, and the British naval officer who gave a boat-load of bluejackets shore leave at New York was liable to find them all Americans when their leave was up.
"I will do better than that," said I, as we both moved off to join some of the other bluejackets scouting away behind us, who had come up during the stoppage of our march through the wild country. "I will remember you, Larry, as long as I live!" The surgeon accompanying our column presently came up to me and neatly strapped up the cuts which the baboon had inflicted on me with his teeth.
The way that this destroyer slid up to the flagship without any fuss and the way her bluejackets held her off from the paint, as she rose on the crests and slipped back into the trough, did not tell the whole story.
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