ER XXII. DUG-OUT YARNS

Oft in the stilly night,
By yellow candle-light,
With finger in the sand
We mapped and planned.

"This is the Turkish well,
That's where the Captain fell,
There's the great Salt Lake bed,
Here's where the Munsters led."

Primitive man arose,
With prehistoric pose,
Like Dug-out Men of old,
By signs our thoughts were told.

I have slept and lived in every kind of camp and bivouac. I have dug and
helped to dig dug-outs. I have lain full length in the dry, dead grass
"under the wide and starry sky." I have crept behind a ledge of rock,
and gone to sleep with the ants crawling over me. I have slept with a
pair of boots for a pillow. I have lived and snoozed in the dried-up bed
of a mountain torrent for weeks. A ground-sheet tied to a bough has been
my bedroom. I have slumbered curled in a coil of rope on the deck of a
cattle-boat, in an ambulance wagon, on a stretcher, in farmhouse barns
and under hedges and haystacks. I have slept in the sand by the blue
Mediterranean Sea, with the crickets and grasshoppers "zipping" and
"zinging" all night long.

But our dug-out nights on the edge of the bay at Buccaneer Bivouac were
the most enjoyable.

It was here of a night-time that Hawk and I--sometimes alone, sometimes
with Brockley, or "Cherry Blossom," or "Corporal Mush," or Sergeant Joe
Smith, the sailormen as onlookers and listeners--it was here we drew
diagrams in the sand with our fingers, and talked on politics and
women's rights, marriage and immorality, drink and religion, customs and
habits; of life and death, peace and war.

Sometimes Hawk burst into a rare phrase of splendid
composition--well-balanced rhetoric, not unworthy of a Prime Minister.

At other times he is the buccaneer, the flinger of foul oaths, and
terrible damning curses. But as a rule they are not vindictive, they
have no sting--for Hawk is a forgiving and humble man in reality, in
spite of his mask of arrogance.

A remarkable character in every way, he fell unknowingly into the old
north-country Quaker talk of "thee and thou."

Another minute he gives an order in those hard, calm, commanding words
which, had he had the chance, would have made him, in spite of his lack
of schooling, one of the finest Generals the world could ever know.

On these occasional gleams of pure leadership he finds the finest King's
English ready to his lips, while at other times