The long procession of transports and their grim battleship escorts had stolen up in the night, a widely-spread yet organized, concrete group of slowly-moving, black, gloomy monsters. Every light aboard each ship had been ordered out. Not even the pin-head flame of a cigarette might show on any deck.
The only light we had was the faint green gleam that filtered over the smooth waters from a moon that had begun to wane and had, indeed, at this hour of three in the morning, nearly fallen behind the ragged jaw of the black cliffs.
I can tell you that we most heartily wished this moon in —— well, anywhere than shining just then upon this particular spot of the earth. We little cared for a moon to direct a spotlight on our surprise attack. It looked like an evil moon to us. Or rather, it looked like the evil, watchful eye of our enemy. For all of us knew well enough what was behind those cliffs—about two miles or thereabouts behind. Oh, we knew well enough that there lay the Turks and their big, German-managed guns.
The Turks couldn’t very well hear me talking at from four to five miles, yet such was the consciousness of the danger of our adventure and such the hypnotism of the scene that when I spoke to the comrade next to me, it was in a whisper.
“I wonder,” I said, “what that old green eye of a moon is looking at back of those dark, old cliffs? I wonder if he sees the big guns drowsing and the garrisons asleep or——”
“What he’s seeing,” said the man at my side in a grumble, “is the heathen blighters getting ready to bang hell out of us!”
“Cheerful beggar you are,” I whispered back the more gloomily because I was one of those who had argued and felt certain that we were not to take the Turks by surprise.
And now the men had assembled on the decks as soft-footedly as they might. They had gathered in the darkness into orderly rows like big companies of phantoms. The ships’ crews worked as spectrally and nearly as silently as the lowering of ladders and the launching of the boats would permit. Even the groaning and wrenching of the chains and cables seemed subdued and ghostly. Small steamboats each with a swerving tail made up of barges and small boats panted alongside the transports and battleships. With wonderful precision and swiftness the great ships spawned hundreds on hundreds of smaller craft, thousands on thousands of men, crowding the waters with them for as far as you could make out whichever way you looked in the faint moonlight.
“Fall in Number Nine platoon!” came the growled order.
That was my command.
I quickly had my men groping down the companion ladder. There were sixty in my special charge. By the time I had them all aboard and had stepped into the barge myself where we huddled with fully two hundred more, the voice of our cocky little midshipman sounded. He sat most correctly erect in the stern, his cap at a jaunty angle, his slender neck in its broad white collar. He was so very young and boyish but he had an alert and business-like eye.
“Full up, sir,” he said smartly.
God bless and care for that gallant little chap! I can’t help fervently wishing it as the memory of him comes to me now. He was only sixteen—the treble of childhood was still in his voice. But in it as he gave his orders then and afterward as well when frightful peril came, were the steadiness and the coolness of a brave man—the sort of man he must have become if the dandy little youngster had not been destined for death with those many, many others on this April night.
The men in our barge as it bobbed about began to pass jests, in whispers, of course. Not that they felt giddy—funny. Or, yes, in a way, a bit giddy—nervous tension, you know. Like a small boy whistling in the dark. And yet willing and eager to meet whatever dragon might be there. For now we felt and knew that all we had trained for, prepared for, thought about, imagined—the big time of actual warfare was at hand. That was what was most alive in every man’s mind. But they joked.
“I’ve remembered you in my will, Jimmy,” said one to a pal two rows behind him. “You’ll get nothing short of a million, my son.”
“What—‘cooties’?” demanded Jim. I think I need not stop to describe “cooties,” those “bosom friends” of the trenches.
“Don’t waste your millions on him, Bob,” advised another. “Just leave’m a lock o’ your ’air.”
A small but very sharp voice cut in:
“Silence!”
It was the middie, but for all save the pitch of the voice it might have been a veteran commander.
“Cast off and drift astern,” directed a basso from the transport’s deck.
Our little man expeditiously carried out the order and slowly we drifted astern until there came sudden twangs from the hawsers, startling because everything had been so quiet or muffled before. This was as the hawsers coupling boats and barges went taut as each boat in succession, filling with men, drew suddenly to a halt its drifting predecessor.
Two of the men in our boat who were standing were caught by the jerk of the hawser and snapped overboard. They were fished out with boathooks under the rapid, cool direction of the indignant middie.
“Disgusting carelessness,” he called the incident.
The Military Cross
When all the boats of our string had been filled, there came the order to the tugs: “Full steam ahead!”
Our tug was quite ready for it. Our string straightened out in a jiffy and we got off to a racing start—bounding, dipping and rolling. Sometimes we shot ahead in a straight line, sometimes in a half circle.
“God bless that damned old moon!” said a man near me. His jumble of reverence and profanity came from the fact that the old green wicked eye of a moon had blinked out behind the cliffs. A moment before I had looked back and could see the battleship coming on slowly in our rear with the obvious purpose of covering our attack.
Then I couldn’t see a blessed thing. The green waters had turned to ink. You only knew your comrades were with you in the same boat by the press of their swaying bodies against your shoulders and your ribs.
About this time some of the gay Johnnies got another severe reprimand from our kiddie commander. They had undertaken to rise and were holding their bayonets out over the waters like fish poles, chaffing one another as to which of them would catch the first Turk. All said they wished it would be a particularly fat one—say, a three hundred pounder.
But the middie’s eyes had got used to the inky darkness and he spotted the jokers.
“No skylarking and silence all!” said the infant “vet.” The men were pretty well on edge by this time. And, as the world generally knows, the Australian does not put much store in military discipline. But these men obeyed the little boy on the instant—all save one who though as quick as the others in resuming his proper place in the boat, disobeyed sufficiently to remark in a whisper, good-natured and admiring:
“Who’d ’a’ thought we had admirals so blarsted young!”
And by this time we were within two hundred yards of the shore. A man near me voiced the impression we all were getting.
“Shouldn’t wonder,” he said, “if we’re to surprise them after all.”
Then suddenly out of that weird darkness, that curious silence that had been disturbed only by the rapid, half-choked panting of the steam tugs, the surge of the water against the sides of the barges, the whispers, the occasional smothered laughs—all soft sounds—there came hell—veritable hell if ever hell comes to men on earth! And it came with a tremendous roar!
CHAPTER IV