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They all bid the "Colonel" good-bye, the "Tommies" exchanging some familiarities with the women till these screamed with laughter, and then the "Colonel" and his commando of two men remounted their big clumsy English horses and rode proudly away.
The Arabs began to harangue the occupants of the lower deck. We watched them curiously, perhaps wondering if they had poisoned the fish. The Tommies stared at them in silence. They were the first inhabitants of the country that we had seen. The business of transhipping at the bar is a burden to all concerned.
"How is it," said one man in faded uniform, "that the British always manage to keep themselves correct and shaven?" "La barbe!" interrupted another; "the Tommies don't keep clean on the Somme. Even the lilies of the état-majeur can't."
Behind them, a sister ship containing Tommies ploughed steadily along, serene and graceful in the sunlight, and above an airship of silvery aluminum, bearing the tricoloured circle of the Allies, kept pace with the swift ship without an effort. Four destroyers were visible, their low, dark shapes ploughing regularly along at stated intervals, and someone said a fifth was out of sight behind.
What strikes you most is the bored air of the Tommies, the undivided interest of the engineers in the construction of a pontoon bridge, the solicitude of the medical staff over the long lines of wounded, the rage of the naked Kaffirs at their lumbering steers; the fact that every one is intent on something anything but the battle. They are wearied with battles.
The saloon looks like a pig-pen, two tramps lying drunk on the floor, and the bartender in a dirty shirt with his sleeves rolled up, asleep with his head on the bar. Enter Abe, Sambo, and Ikey, and the fun commences. One of the characters in the second act was named Broadway Kate, and I had an awful job to break in one of the Tommies to act and talk like a woman.
There were fourteen hundred German prisoners awaiting entrainment, a mass of slate-gray men lying on the wet earth in huddled heaps of misery, while a few of our fresh-faced Tommies stood among them with fixed bayonets. They were the men who had surrendered from deep dugouts in the trenches between us and Loos and from the cellars of Loos itself. They had seen many of their comrades bayoneted.
You see he's been well brought up, and is well off. On his mother's side he belongs to one of the best families in the West of England, and and well, Tommies are having to rough it just now." "And none the worse for it," snapped the Colonel. "Exactly; and he's quite prepared to enlist as a private. I was only answering your question." "Just so: let's see him."
It is only then that there are signs of envy, and the men whose wounds are not bad enough to take them back to "Blighty" curse because the bullet did not go deeper, or the bit of shrapnel did not touch the bone. It is a wonderful moment for the "Tommies" when they reach their convalescent hospital in England.
Our intermediaries came back and their doleful faces told us more eloquently than words that their interview had proved barren. Some of the prisoners were giving way. A basin of acorn coffee and a small piece of black bread was all we had eaten for breakfast, and we were commencing to feel the pangs of hunger disconcertingly. In an adjacent field were some British Tommies from Mons.
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