Читать книгу The Scarlet Stripe--being the adventures of a naval surgeon - Henry Taprell Dorling - Страница 4

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WAR stories are out of fashion in these days of peace, disarmament, and perfervid internationalism, so let me say at the outset that this is not a war story pure and simple.

All the same, this book is to be more or less the story of my life up to date, so how can the war be excluded altogether? Moreover, the really interesting part of my existence—interesting to me, that is—started in 1914, and the war had a great deal to do with my joining the Navy, in which I still serve as a surgeon lieutenant-commander.

I am neither brave nor brainy. I do not intend to go into the details of what fighting I saw at sea; but one adventure of mine during the war was sufficiently agonising and unusual to cause me occasional bad dreams even now.

I am not as a rule troubled with nerves. On the contrary, I am ‘too fat and phlegmatic,’ as my wife—whom heaven preserve!—sometimes tells me, by which she means I am inclined to be lazy in the matter of violent exercise, and am sufficiently easy-going to be twiddled round her little finger.

My experiences between 1914 and 1918 were no more thrilling than hundreds of other people’s. But it is not everybody who has found himself adrift in an ordinary ship’s lifeboat with twenty-two men about 150 miles out in the Atlantic off the west coast of Ireland. Our ship, a ‘Q Ship,’ had been sunk by a submarine. We had in the boat as provisions one tin of corned beef, one box of ship’s biscuit, and a small wicker-covered rum-jar of water. There were three oars, some odd pieces of timber, but no rudder or compass. We made a sail of shirts and any odd stuff we could find, and steered to the eastward as best we could. The voyage took eight days, during which we weathered two heavy gales with the huge breaking seas rolling up from astern and threatening every moment to overwhelm us. When it was not blowing during the day the pitiless sun blazed remorselessly overhead. The nights were bitterly cold. Two men died of thirst and exposure on the way, and we had to heave the bodies overboard. Another man went off his head and tried to open a vein with a razor.

When we did finally make the land, we could only crawl on our hands and knees up the steps cut in the rock leading to a lighthouse. Our tongues and throats were so swollen we couldn’t swallow or articulate. Our chins and noses all raw and bleeding from licking up the dew that fell on the thwarts of the boat during the nights. Even so it tasted of the salt from the falling spray which seemed to have dried into the wood.

I was the only officer in the boat, and our allowance of water, which I was careful to ration from the start, amounted to about a full wineglass a day. I dreamt of water whenever I fell off into an uneasy doze, and woke up thinking of it. We prayed for rain; but no rain came.

The twenty-one of us who staggered or helped each other ashore and crawled up those steps could not have lasted much longer. Our water had given out three days previously. If the ship had been sunk thirty or forty miles further out at sea we should probably never have got through.

Yes. In various experiences during and since the war, that eight-day adventure in an open boat when I was twenty-five overshadows all others. So in trying to write about myself I may perhaps be forgiven for describing it later in some detail.

After all, even in these piping times of peace, ships may still be wrecked and people cast away in open boats to suffer the awful torments of raging thirst. And I know what thirst means—thirst, when you have no means of quenching it.

There must have been a good many people in the war who read of their own deaths in the official lists of casualties issued during the war by the Admiralty and War Office; but, believe me, the experience is rather thrilling. I still treasure cuttings from The Times in which, on one day, my name appears as ‘Missing (Feared killed),’ and, two days later, as ‘Previously reported Missing. Now reported not Missing.’ It gives me quite a peculiar sensation to read them. Moreover, it is the only occasion in my life on which I have ever succeeded in diddling the authorities at Whitehall and proving them wrong, and that on unimpeachable evidence in the shape of my own person. Nevertheless, some tuppenny clerk in one or other of the departments tried hard to dock two days’ pay for the reason that I was not officially in existence to earn it.