The Angels of Mons (second edition)/The Men from Troy
THE MEN FROM TROY
"Creep? And crawl? I believe you. I should never have said it could be done unless I'd seen it. I tell you those little men are fair marvels. Now, suppose you were on sentry-go at night, and standing there as it might be by that geranium bed, and you had your eyes open pretty wide, well knowing, as you would know, that it was as much as your life was worth to be caught winking. Well, I tell you, sir, that one of those little men if he set out to do it, moon or no moon, he'd creep out of that shrubbery and he'd crawl round to your back, and give an imitation of a shadow if you looked round. And then there'd be a bit of fancy work, a shriek owl letting off within an inch of your ear, and when you'd done wondering your throat'ld be cut and you'ld be dead. They have a nasty kind of knives, cookeries they call them. And quite right."
The wounded man was giving the chaplain his impressions of the war. He had lost an arm in the Gallipoli fighting, and had been invalided home. The two were sitting in deck-chairs in the hospital garden on a sunny afternoon. And between his bursts of information the soldier sucked gratefully at his pipe, drawing in rich fumes of shag tobacco. And then he looked out over shrubs and flowers on a deep, blue sea.
The chaplain had been trying a little Kipling on the soldier. He had experimented with "The Drums of the Fore and Aft," and he observed that the man listened with decent politeness and attention, as indeed he would have listened to Ezekiel's Vision of the Chariot. But the holy man noted that the true gleam of interest was lacking in the invalid's eye, till the Gurkhas were mentioned. He beamed then, and spoke with enthusiasm of the wiles and crafts and deadly works of the little hillmen—"have they got a touch of the Jap in them, do you think, sir? They look a bit like it; not like the other Indian troops. A different style of thing altogether."
So the soldier told of the devices of the men with the cookeries (or kukris as pedants spell the word); how it was impossible to hear them or to see them as they lurked in shadows or slid like snakes upon the ground, how they could throw those curving knives of theirs with sure, deadly aim.
"They've got ways that seem a bit queer to us," he said; "but they're wonderful fighting men; there's no denying it."
And, having summed up the Gurkhas, the soldier lapsed into sweet enjoyment of security and summer air, blue seas and blue skies, and shag tobacco.
"But there's no doubt," he went on, after a pause, "that the British Army's a wonderful body of men altogether. The Kaiser made a bit of a mistake when he called it contemptible, it seems to me. Look at the Australians and New Zealanders and Canadians what they've done, and the Indians too, and those Gurkhas I was telling you about. I don't know that there's ever been an army like it for real hard fighting."
Now a great white cloud, like a mighty galleon, came sailing up over the sky from the south-west and passed across the sun. And beneath, the sea changed from fairy olive-garths and emerald waters to a deep violet blue. The soldier blinked as he watched the change.
"And we've got other men," he began anew, "that you don't hear much about in the papers. There's lots of odd corners in the British Empire that hardly anyone does know anything about, and the best of it is they're all full of first-rate fighting men. The fact is we've the knack of training them; black or white, or yellow or mixed; it don't matter. I've known niggers from I don't know where or which way that were fine soldiers."
The chaplain allowed the soldier to run on, acting on the pastoral direction of George Herbert as to the wisdom and kindness of letting a body talk.
"And there's many people that think a nigger and an Indian's the same thing. Of course that's nonsense. Some of them are dark enough, but plenty are no darker than many a Welshman from the hills that I've seen, and now and then you will see them as white as you or me. There was that lot that I came across by Teddy Bear." This was said jocosely for Sid-ul-Bahr.
"They were the queerest I've ever touched, and I do believe the finest fighters. It's odd that dark patch over there on the sea reminding me of them."
"Patch on the sea?" said the chaplain. "What patch? Oh, that purple bit over there. Yes, I see. Fine colour. But what has that got to do with our fellows at Gallipoli, or these Indians or whatever they were?"
"Well, it's like this. 'Struck the wine-dark sea with our oars,' their sergeant, or whatever they call him, says to me, and a minute or two ago when that cloud came over and the sea got dark that brought that man and his queer way of talking back to my mind. So it is, I said to myself, and I've drunk wine just that colour at Marseilles down in the View Port, and not bad drink either if you get enough of it."
The chaplain was no longer the patient listener. He started as a terrier starts when he suspects rats at hand, and he said:
"What did the native call the sea?"
"The wine-dark sea, as I told you, sir—just his silly way of talking. You know, a lot of them natives can talk English of a sort, pidgin-English and all sorts of funny patter, but you can make out what they mean. This native sergeant he had a sort of lingo that he thought was English all right, and I could understand what he was driving at more or less, as you may say. I liked to listen to him when he got to his swear-words. I never heard the like. 'By Harris!' he'd say, as if he were talking of a Welshman, and then it would be 'By cloud-gathering Zoos,' and 'rosy-fingered dawn child of the morn,' and I don't know what else. He could curse. He was worse than old 'Damn-my-blanky-guts' in the Artillery."
The chaplain gasped. And he stared very straight at the soldier, having seen, as the soldier's friend might have put it, many cities of men. He knew, too, that the best of soldiers are not always the bond slaves of the truth.
"And I tell you what," the wounded man began anew, "those Maoris are hot stuff. I've seen them in a tight place"
"Look here," said the chaplain, "never mind about the Maoris just now. I want to hear about the other lot. They seem interesting. 'By Harris!' you say their sergeant swore. Wasn't it more like 'Ares'?" and he gave the vowels the broad "Continental" value.
"Now you mention it, that was more the way of it. A fine, tall man he was, too, with yellow hair, as English as English to look at, and a straight nose."
"How did you come across him?"
"It was like this. It was a darkish, cloudy sort of night. We'd captured a ridge the morning before, and we'd dug in. The word was 'Look out'; we knew the Turks—there's fighters for you!—would have a good shot to get the ridge back again. A cloudy night it was, and there was a sort of white mist rising, and now and again there'd be a pale sort of light from what was left of the moon, coming out from behind a cloud. I won't deny that I wasn't too comfortable; I wasn't easy about our supports, and then in that roasting sort of country it came over quite chilly, and I shivered a bit and looked behind me.
"Well, then I was all right, and I saw we were all right and no mistake. There were the supports and the reserve right down the slope of the hill and below in the valley; thousands of them. It was misty, as I said, and I couldn't make things out very clear, but so far as I could see these fellows were all in white, something like what the Moors wear. That struck me as funny, but I know we have to be pleasant to some of these tribesmen and let them have a lot of their own way.
"And then, when I turned round, one of them, the man I told you about, that is, was by me in the trench, and we started to chat. He had his spear in his hand and his short sword by his side, and he carried his shield on his arm. A wonderful bit of work that shield was, covered with all sorts of queer figures; regular native work, that takes about a hundred years to finish. They don't care: they've plenty of time and nothing to do. There was a man with thunderbolts in his hand sitting on a throne, and a naked woman coming out of the sea, and a little chap hammering away like a blacksmith, and a fellow with the sun behind him shooting with a bow and arrows; all of them his native gods, I suppose. He was a savage man, of course, but a fine man and a good man, I believe."
"Did you make out the name of the tribe?" said the chaplain, speaking with a sort of desperate calm.
"Galeenies I think, he said they were."
"Not Hellenes?"
"That was it. I see you've come across them yourself, sir."
"In a sort of way. Did the . . . sergeant say where they came from?"
"Well, you know the way those fellows talk, a sort of flowery way of putting it that's difficult to make out. They're straight men, very likely, but they don't seem as if they could give a straight answer to a straight question. He said, he and his pals were heroes—and by gum! he was right, though it isn't our way to talk like that—and they came from happy fields and the houses of the immortals, and the meadows of Arundel [the chaplain reads "asphodel" for "Arundel"], and a lot of stuff like that; I don't think they mean any harm by it. He said he and his people had fought some time ago not far from where we were. Ilion he said the place was.
"Still, all that don't matter. About two o'clock in the morning the Turks tried to rush us; tens of thousands of them. It looked ugly for a minute or two.
"Then my pal got up and he shouted and sang out, and he let off one of his worst. There was something like 'Now, O Pollo, lord of the far-shining bow,' and 'drive their souls squeaking like bats down to Hades'—and I knew quite well what he meant by that word, though I daresay he flattered himself I didn't. And then he and his men let off a howl that fairly scared the life out of me.
"Well, there it was. They poured over our trench like a big white wave, and off they go straight for the Turks. Now, look here, sir; this is straight. I knew these native chaps were on our side. I knew they'd made it all right for us; but I tell you I went cold as death.
"I don't know what it was. It may have been that frightful yell those natives let off. It may have been their way of fighting, and you can believe me or not as you like, but as sure as I'm here I saw those long spears of theirs go like lightning flashes; I mean it. And I've seen men draw their swords many a time; but I'll take my oath to this: I've never seen before hell-fire coming out of a scabbard. But I see it then in Gallipoli.
"But I believe what frightened me was the fright of the Turks, and you know they're difficult people to frighten. They screamed out 'Ginny! Ginny!'—which is queer enough, when you come to think of it—and then, poor . . . fellows, there were no Turks. They were gone; and I knew I was as white as paper. But it was like flaming, burning fire eating them up alive.
"What makes me sorry is that in the confusion of it all I couldn't make out what happened to my pal and his lot; the mist came on very thick, and I lost sight of them."
"But, look here," began the chaplain. "Do you mean"
And then the nurse came and smiled and beckoned the soldier indoors.