World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Turkey -- Gallipoli Peninsula
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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