As the _Pamir_ was proceeding to Malta to carry those shells to the battleship that was being repaired there, they sent aboard a hundred broken arms and legs and as many sick. Fortunately, we had the planks left from the Morocco Boches and from the stowage of the field-artillery. We were able to manufacture a whole set of cots on the deck and in the forward hold. It was splendid the way the crew worked. Engine-room men, firemen, deckhands--everybody--nailed, screwed, and hammered for four days. You can do anything with fellows like that! Fourgues could grumble and say it was not going fast enough, but all the same there were tears in his eyes, especially when, almost before a cot was finished, it was filled with a poor devil who looked as if he were dying but smiled as soon as he was at rest. Sometimes three or four would come at once, and we put them where we could while we nailed on the last boards of their cots. The hammer-strokes gave them headache, but they waited smiling. Finally the _Pamir_ set out, with her explosives in the aft hold and her sick in the forward hold and everywhere else. They were able to give us a young doctor and two hospital orderlies. I don’t know why the three aren’t dead of fatigue, with their two hundred sick and wounded. For medicines and antiseptics we had a single chest which was emptied before Matapan. The fever patients and those who had colic began to improve, and as it was necessary to set them on their feet again, the crew of the _Pamir_ asked me to give them their ration of wine and meat if there wasn’t enough to go round. How can you punish jossers like that when they break loose on land? For four days the men of the _Pamir_ drank water and ate beans or the rice that was left from the Hindus, and nothing besides, for the storeroom was cleaned out. Fourgues gave all his rum, his brandy, his cigarettes, and his cigars. I, who hadn’t anything, turned over my handkerchiefs and shirts for dressings. We were lucky to have not one die in the crossing, because it was fine weather all the way and because Fourgues went very slowly in order not to shake the wounded. They were nearly all fellows from Australia or New Zealand--bony and long and lean. Those who got better told us something about themselves. They had thought they were leaving the Antipodes to defend old England on the French front and they didn’t at all expect to fight the Turks in a country where it can’t be done. Even though mere privates are paid five or six francs a day, the fellows still find that it was a rotten trick to give them a job “without any chance of success,” as they say. But they’ll deal with all that later; for the moment they are happy because after Malta they hope to visit London, which they have never seen.