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Wounded by a ball which had plowed through the lower part of his stomach and covered with lance thrusts, he was removed from the battlefield during the night, and learned he had been promoted to be a sublieutenant and nominated chevalier in the Legion of Honor. This incident of decorating a soldier on the battlefield recalls Napoleonic times.
The man-of-war was short-handed, and did not see the necessity for putting a prize-crew aboard the Haliotis. So she sent one sublieutenant, whom the skipper kept very drunk, for he did not wish to make the tow too easy, and, moreover, he had an inconspicuous little rope hanging from the stem of his ship. Then they began to tow at an average speed of four knots an hour.
With his rags out-blown in the monsoon he looked like a sea wraith come to life. The big gongs clanged again, and the Puncher drifted rather than drove down on the smaller craft. A hand line caught the pilot precisely in the face. He grabbed it frantically, fell headlong in the sea, and was hauled aboard. "He says he wants a tow for that boat of his," reported the sublieutenant.
"The aviators, Lieutenant Sergeev and Sublieutenant Thur, seeing a Turkish schooner, attacked it by opening machine-gun fire. The crew thereupon left the schooner. Our aviators, having sunk their machine after taking from it the compass, machine gun, and valuable belongings, boarded the schooner and set sail for our shores.
Goodness knows I was tired enough, but I lay awake a while thinking what changes in our journalistic fortunes thirty days had brought us. Five weeks before, bearing dangerously dubious credentials, we had trailed afoot a suspicious squad at the tail of the German columns, liable to be halted and locked up any minute by any fingerling of a sublieutenant who might be so minded to so serve us.
He had been a sublieutenant in the Zouaves, was tall and thin and as hard as steel, and during the whole campaign he had cut out their work for the Germans. He fretted in inactivity, and could not accustom himself to the idea of being a prisoner and of doing nothing. "Confound it!" he said to us, "does it not pain you to know that there is a number of uhlans within two hours of us?
I believe I am the last and only one. As to my forefathers, they have always been a poor lot; my own father was a sublieutenant in the army. I don't know how Mrs. Epanchin comes into the Muishkin family, but she is descended from the Princess Muishkin, and she, too, is the last of her line."
The little boat had drifted fast before the wind, and the sublieutenant had to bellow through a megaphone to where the three men bailed and the ragged oarsmen swung their weight against the storm. The man of ebony, who would be pilot and disgrace the Navy, balanced on a thwart with wide-spread naked toes and yelled an ululating answer.
The man-of-war was short-handed, and did not see the necessity for putting a prize-crew aboard the Haliotis. So she sent one sublieutenant, whom the skipper kept very drunk, for he did not wish to make the tow too easy, and, moreover, he had an inconspicuous little rope hanging from the stem of his ship. Then they began to tow at an average speed of four knots an hour.
The sublieutenant hauled himself in turn to windward. Curley Crothers gave the wheel a half-spoke and looked as if he had no interest in anything. Joe Byng in the chains bowed his head and groaned inwardly; his sticky, spray-washed lead seemed all-absorbing. "Tell that black robber to hurry aboard, unless he wants me to come in without him."
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