July 3rd
Turks shell transport this morning, but no damage done. Feeling very run down and seedy, and doctor orders me away to Alexandria for a rest, but I do not think I shall go, as I should be fit in a day or so, if only they would stop shelling on the beach; we could then get exercise. Men fall ill day by day through having to continually lie in their dugouts and then go out in hourly fear of “Asiatic Annie’s” shells. It is much worse over in the French camp by Morto Bay.
The doctor says I have to catch the 2.30 boat for Lemnos. I tell him that I have decided not to go. He replies that in the Army you are under two forms of discipline—one when on the Active List, and one when on the Sick List; that I am on the Sick List, and that until an M.O. certifies that I am fit for active service my O.C. will be an M.O., whose orders I am bound to obey; that he has certified me as sick, for the Army cannot have men on the Peninsula who feel faint when they walk ten yards. This eases my conscience; I was beginning to feel like a man who was getting “cold feet,” and I tell him so. He tells me that a sick man always gets “cold feet” from shelling, and that it is due to his being a sick man more than to the shells.
So I proceed to catch the 2.30 boat. What are my honest feelings? I do want to stay and stick it out, and yet I want to go. There, I am quite honest about it—the two thoughts are equally blended. I go down to the beach along the Red Cross Pier, on to a lighter bobbing about in a rough sea, and then I wait. Sick officers and men dribble down steadily, each with a label attached to his tunic; my label has written on it “Syncopal attacks.” I look enviously at the labels on which are inscribed different kinds of wounds. By comparison with their inscriptions, mine reads like another title for “cold feet,” and I long to get up and walk back up to the beach.
We are towed away out to a little steamer called the Whitby Abbey, in charge of a good fellow, a “pukkah” Naval Lieutenant. I sit on deck and watch the land gradually get further and further away. Krithia looks but a short walk from “W” Beach, yet it is well within the Turkish lines. Never before did I realize what a little insignificant bight of land do we hold on the Gallipoli Peninsula, and Achi Baba looks impregnable. Tommies on board are telling each other how they came by their respective wounds. A few Punjabis, wounded, sit apart philosophically and say nothing. Officers in wardroom, mostly wounded, have tea and chat shop. I, not wounded, and A.S.C., sit in a corner by myself.
We arrive at Lemnos about 8 p.m. and enter the harbour that I was in last April. What a lot has happened since those days, and what ages it seems ago! We go alongside a hospital ship, the Sicilia, and our stretcher cases are taken off on to the ship. Have a look through the port-hole and see a very big saloon full of beds and doctors, orderlies and very smart and efficient nurses busily in attendance. Then we go nearer into the shore and get on to a pinnace, and go to a pier. Here three of us—namely Weatherall, Williams, of the Royal Scots, and myself—get into an ambulance motor and are driven inland, and arrive at the Australian hospital. Then we go into the orderly tent, and a sergeant takes down our names, etc., and religion. Religion! Let us talk of religion when all Huns are exterminated. Then a pleasant-looking Australian Captain comes in, diagnoses my case, and says “Milk diet,” which is entered in a book.
We are then taken to another group of three marquees joined together, full of wounded Tommies in bed. Then a Major Newlands, one of the leading surgeons of Australia, comes in and sees me, and after a cup of tea we go to sleep—at least, we are supposed to. Several of the Australians are chatting, and it is interesting listening to them. Suddenly one of the wounded stirs in his sleep and says “One, two, three, four; one, two, three, four,” several times, and finishing by “One, two, three, four,” and then a pause, and then “Five,” said with a sigh of relief. He sits up in bed, and making the row that one makes with one’s mouth when urging on a horse, he says, “Go on.” One of the orderlies goes over and gently puts his head back on to the pillow. He was fast asleep, and was going over in his dreams the taking up of ammunition to the trenches.