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We were by this time threading in and out among the transports on our way to a vacant berth at no great distance from the "Victory," and in about five minutes afterwards the "Requin" and her prizes came to an anchor.
"Mako!" she cried. "Puaa hae!" She pointed to starboard. A gray fin moved slowly through the water twenty feet away. "A shark, and a wicked beast he is!" She reached to pick up an opened cocoanut and tossed some of the milk over her shoulder to appease the demon. "Mako!" she repeated. "Puaa hae!" "Requin!" echoed Tetuahunahuna in French. "The devil of the Marquesas!"
The admiral, however, would not allow the men to row, being anxious that they should reach the scene of action fresh and vigorous; at the last moment, therefore, one of the lieutenants belonging to the "Victory" was sent onboard the "Requin" or the "Shark," as she was now almost universally called with orders to get under weigh and tow the flotilla down to the cove.
Thanks to powerful influence, he had just been appointed a member of the official expedition on board the Requin, which was to be sent to the Arctic Circle in search of the survivors of the D'Artoi's expedition, of whom nothing had been heard for three years.
One carried away the funnel and the other burst inboard doing much damage. Two of the crew were killed and nine wounded. George Carew, the pilot, lost a leg, but continued on duty and helped to bring the injured vessel into Ismailia. The French coast guard battleship Requin came now under the Turkish fire, but her 10.8-inch guns soon silenced the enemy's batteries.
On its north bank his gallant army must, if it could not do otherwise, "allow itself to be slain where it stands rather than give way." On that evening he sent Major Réquin to the Forty-second Division with orders for the morrow. The most incredible orders! The enemy had found his point of least resistance on his right wing. He ought to strengthen that wing, but he could not.
"Through his teachings and his example," Colonel Réquin goes on to say, in a 1918 number of the World's Work, "he was the moral director of the French general staff before becoming the supreme chief of the allied armies. Upon each one of us he has imprinted his strong mark. We owe to him in time of peace that unity of doctrine which was our strength.
Colonel Réquin calls that Battle of the Yser "like a preface to the great victory of 1918."
Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him Requin. Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's great, unflattering laureate, Nature.*
"In the first place, the brigantine is named the Francesca after my mother; she hails from Havana; and is commanded by my father, Don Fernando de Mendouca; and you were brought here by him, when he found you lying apparently dead upon the deck of the Requin after your people had been driven off and compelled to beat a retreat." "What?" I exclaimed. "Driven off? Compelled to retreat?"
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