LEMNOS

After many delays we landed, and after many wanderings arrived at a camping-ground, and went supperless and tentless to bed—too tired to remark, rolled in our blankets, either drenching dew or stony ground, but not so weary as to be unconscious of the absence of shell. Our Last Post for many months had been sounded by bursting shell (for many a man it had been Last Post indeed); the massed buglers of the battalions seemed now a voice from the land of spirits. There were men (they are to be believed) literally wakened by the stillness in the night, restless through the sudden deprivation of the midnight shriek from the flank and of our own roar of discharge from above. For the nocturnal crack and whistle of bullets, here was the distraction of utter quietness. For a week it was disconcerting.

The rÉveille which wakened you at dawn was hard to place in the first few moments of semi-consciousness. "Am I dreaming? Back in camp at Melbourne?" The flood of consciousness sweeps off that sweet delusion—however sweet this island of rest may be.... A woman's voice draws you blinking to the tent door—"Vashung! Vashung!" It has a Teutonic gerundial flavour. But it's only the Greek ladies soliciting in the mist the soiled garments of soldiers. They move about the camp until the sun is well transmuted from that dull-glowing ball into the mist-dispelling Day's-Eye, stripping the whole landscape down into stony detail and making those volcanic peaks in the north to glow. Before breakfast is well on the women have amassed their huge bundles, and the 'cute Greek boys, in pantaloons and soldiers' cast-off tunics, have sold you a day's store of oranges and chocolate.

The days are easy. We know we shall move to Egypt (or "elsewhere") incontinently, and will take the leisure the war-gods provide us while we may. Only the fatigues necessary to camp cleanliness and to eating mar the day. Most of it is spent lounging, reading, smoking, yarning reminiscently of Anzac, and scrambling. Write letters we may not at this stage. The general order prohibiting letters dealing with the evacuation and with movements of troops either known or surmised has never been revoked; and has been reinforced by a prohibition against correspondence of any sort—except upon field-service cards—those "printed abominations" for which correspondents at home "thank you very much indeed for sending me."

"What'll we do to-day? Go to the village or to Therma or to the stationary hospital?—to the Greek church or the monastery?—or on a voyage of discovery nowhere in particular?—or just have a loaf?—or go and see if there's any mail in?"

The Australian general hospitals claimed a high average of visits from those men who made friends there. They lay across the water. The Greek ferry-men transported passengers in their gaily coloured craft for as much as they could get. A fare was "laid down," but the Greek is as inveterate a bargainer as your Egyptian, and the Australian's hobby is to elude a fleecing. So that the burden of the conversation on the way over lay mostly upon fares, conducted in as good Grammar-School Greek as could be resurrected: which was not very good. But the cardinal numerals were all that was really necessary: gesture and other physical complementaries did the rest.

The stationary hospital is a township, downright, with canvas blocks and a main street and side-roads. Hospital marquees of the larger sort always convey a sense of permanency. But when pitched in such numbers and with a view to such a lengthy sojourn as these Lemnian hospitals anticipated, they gave an impression of stability not ordinarily associated with even a base. The huts of the Sisters' quarters, dental huts, canteen shacks, X-ray huts, and so forth, deepened the impression. And the furnishings took nothing from it: the matting, the iron beds, the chairs and lounges, the lockers, tables, medicine-chests. The blue suits of convalescents were in sympathy, too, though they smacked rather of the permanence of the penitentiary. And the traffic in the motor-lorries sometimes added the quasi-roar of street traffic.

The Sisters entertained friends at tea in their recreation-tent—a luxurious red and yellow snuggery, one of the largest marquees, furnished in a way quite adequate to the tone of a vice-regal garden-party. Distinctions in rank were deleted. Privates, and officers of the General Staff, hobnobbed as though in mufti. The recreation-tent was a great leveller; there a sergeant presumed with impunity to argue the point with a Colonel from Headquarters. It was the most democratic assembly active-service had yet produced. The common bond may have been the dainty afternoon-tea—the fine china; the tiny sandwiches, furnishing half an active-service mouthful; the fine linen of the table-cover; the gentle tones of the hostess's voice: all these were as unaccustomed to the Brigadier-General as to the Private on the Peninsula. There was here the sweet half-delusion of a tea-party at home, which broke down, for a couple of hours, barriers of rank. You can conceive the exquisite contrast of the whole thing (you who rail at afternoon-tea conventions—deliciously absent here, though!) with the enforced boorish ruggedness of Anzac. And there was the walk after along the ridge of the Peninsula on which the hospital lay, commanding the fine harbour both ways: on the south bulwarked by precipitous hills rising sheer as from a Scottish lake, and to the north checked by the gentle slopes of that rich-hued country, volcanic to the core, from which the afternoon sun drew out the warm, unnatural colour; and the purple of the peaks lay beyond by the seaboard. "Is there a war on?" The question recurred again and again, audibly, and was answered, not by the company, but by the blue-clothed figures hobbling painfully upon the broad road or lying helplessly in the warm December sun.

One of the finest churches stands on the border of Portianus, the village that was nearest to our Sarpi camp. It is richly decorated with a profusion of Apostles, Saints, and scenes from Biblical history on walls and roof. The altar stands beyond a screen as wide as the building, fairly overcrowded with symbolic paintings. The sanctuary was filled daily with soldiers, who placed baksheesh in the plate as they emerged past the old priest, smiling a Benediction at the door. Those who could make anything of it crowded round the fine black-letter vellum Greek Bible at the reading-desk—a treasure indeed. The rest made an attempt at transliteration of the titles daubed beneath the pictures of the Saints. (Most men on Lemnos acquired at least a nodding-acquaintance with the Greek alphabet.) The old priest had little English, but he was very willing to make a shot at exegesis upon the Biblical pictures. There was an enormously large group of them at the door of exit. He liked best to explicate, in his broken English, a painting of the Last Judgment—God, a stout and irascible-looking old gentleman sitting aloft upon the bench, with the Head-Saints about him, suspending above a mortal the scales of Justice; on the right the gaping mouth of hell, belching flame, and Satan uprising from the heat; on the left the golden gate of heaven, with St. Peter graciously admitting one of the approved, and a condemned wretch cowering towards Hell.... The realism of it appealed to the priest's powers of exposition. The others he passed over with a mere cursory indication of the subject. He was a genial old man—genial even when he took us out to the sepulchral yard behind the church and showed the vaults of departed parishioners, with the bones deposited upon the slabs.

Christmas came upon us in Lemnos. There was leisure to be unreservedly merry, and that was much. The Billies came a couple of days before. No one who does not remember well the unloading of Christmas stockings can have a notion of the merriment that was abroad. Santa Claus is not dead. Had the evacuation been timed a little later he would have visited the trenches. As it was, he came out of the mythological past as another Greek god to Lemnos. And the Greeks, in the whole gamut of their worship, never evolved a deity more beneficent. Psychologists may debate the point whether Santa Claus, had he visited Australians in the trenches, would have brought a keener zest of enjoyment with his gifts than in the quiet of Lemnos. But the luxury of appreciation of all things Christmas was upon the Australians at rest on this beautiful island, and what is certain is that had the blessed donors seen the distribution and the opening-up they could have had no more precious reward. The Peninsula would have offered a sharper contrast of enjoyment, but less leisure to enjoy. On the whole, it was probably a good thing that we got our Billies during a respite.

The letters enclosed mostly assumed the men in the trenches on Christmas Day. Other assumptions were made, notably that in the cartoon, on the Billies, of a conquering kangaroo and the inscription: "This bit o' the world belongs to us." That hurt.

Soldiers are children the world over—that is to say the best and the worst of them. In the throes of Turkish toil and peril they had read in the mailed newspapers of the initiation of the Billy-can scheme. Enemy submarines were uncommonly active at the time. Hypothetical philippics used to be launched at night against the submarine that might yet sink the transport conveying the Christmas mail. Men threatened to desert to the Navy for purposes of revenge in any such event.

Nothing was lost through the mundane fact that the Billies were a regimental issue—like bacon and jam and cheese. We forgot that. For a half-day (they came in the afternoon) the camp went mad. We masqueraded in fools' caps, swapped delicacies—and swapped (above all) letters. Whatever may have become of the age of chivalry since Edmund Burke mourned it in Europe, the age of sheer kindness-of-heart is vouchsafed to us for ever since reading the letters in our Billies. Those letters stand worthily beside the finest utterances with the indelible pencil from the trenches; for, after all, true heroism resides as much in those who wait and work in quietness at home for their men as in those at war. Some day an anthology of those letters should be made and published to correct selfishness and churlishness on the earth. For that there is no kind of space here. But it may be well to say, in all moderation, that no such fillip had before been given to the men in the war zone as came with those missives which lay beneath the treasures in the Billies. This was not Christmas at home; but it brought us near to it, and proved again unanswerably (if proof were needed) that intrinsic values in the gifts of this life are very little at all.

The revelry of Christmas had hardly subsided when embarkation orders came again. In the mist of a December morning we struck camp and moved out from the stone pier to the waiting transports—wondering, most of us, when embarkation in the service would cease to recur, and how long it would be before embarkation would come for that long voyage across the Pacific to a Christmas under the Southern Cross.