Cinderella in the South | Page 5

was beginning. I crept aft and looked over the bulwark, wondering how far we were away now. The shore Maxim was in place there with plenty of sand bags about it, but the officer in charge of it was still stretched abed. His friend the Intelligence Officer, who had messed with us last night, was snoring on another bed beside him. I stood looking at a dusky island in the moonlight, and began praying a favorite prayer of mine for those times, asking God to let Saint Michael cover our heads in the day of battle. I muttered the prayer very low, but it appeared that somebody heard. A slim figure, seemingly in khaki, that I had not noticed, rose up from a seal; on the sand bags.
'Are you praying something about battles?' it asked. I started, and assented clumsily.
'How does one pray about battles nowadays?' the investigator proceeded. He spoke in the friendliest way, and managed to set even me at ease. So I told him what I had prayed for.
'It sounds a fair sort of prayer; better than some I've heard,' he allowed, as he sat down again. 'Some people seem to forget the last lot of the Books in the Bible when they pray nowadays.' I heartily agreed.
'I don't believe for one,' he went on, 'that Saint Michael is passionately interested in wiping out either English or askaris or Germans. It's surely better to pray about him like you prayed. I should think the negative work appeals to him more than the positive, the salvage more than the blotting.'
His voice was clear, and evidently carried. The Maxim's warden grumbled, and began to sit up in bed.
'Possibly,' this disturber of slumber went on quite unconcernedly, 'Saint Michael has a clearer notion as to the real enemy than some clients who invoke him.'
Then the officer in pyjamas accosted me, and the thread of the other's talk was lost. When I moved off to dress he had already left his perch among the sand bags. I climbed the ladder, and had my coffee. Soon after came the scurry to stations. We were coming into the bay in the glory of that morning under hangings of amber and rose and feathery grey. The four-inch gun's crew were in their places. I stood trying to read the Prayer before Action in its very small print. I murmured what I was doing to my cheery colleague, so much more enthusiastic than I was about what seemed to be coming. Then someone came up and spoke to me. It was surely my friend from the sand bags. I could see him properly now. He was surely an officer. He stood up slender and shapely in his khaki, but he was not wearing a single star or a regimental badge of any kind. Had he forgotten these in the hurry of this eager morning? With but a few words, he passed on towards the guns' crews. Soon our four-inch gun was shaking the ship horribly. We were shelling a trench that ran up a hillside, they said. I sat under cover of the bulwark near some kneeling riflemen, far from enjoying myself. Yet no gun roared back in answer to our own. It seemed to be one-sided enough, this operation of war.
'It's a fearful weapon,' remarked my colleague rather complacently, as he paced towards the gun platform. One prayed for those who were naked to its fearsomeness up on the hill there, and prayed about Saint Michael's intervention to Saint Michael's Commander-in-Chief. The long-drawn moments slurred by us. A bell rang as the ship wound her way in slowly. The mournful cry of him who took the soundings came again and again. Then we stopped dead anew, and our gun's mouth roared and flamed.
'Such a crowd of askaris; the hill's black with them!' So the signalman cried to the doctor, as he sped by on a message. I was interested in watching the gun-layer as he readjusted the dragon mouth. But what had my friend of the sand-bags to do with the matter? He moved among the gun's crew, and none said him nay; his hands were on the gun after the accredited gunlayer's. We shelled another position, and then another. Afterwards came a lull, and some of us hurried up to breakfast.
There was much talk there of the possible or probable slaughter we had effected. Doubtless the store ship that had followed us and hung behind us had served us well. Those on shore Had surely been more disposed to hold to their positions, fearing that she carried troops, and meant to land them. Now she was steaming slowly away. How many did our bag amount to? The Intelligence Officer was sanguine, so was my colleague, but the gunnery officer was rather pessimistic. 'Two