No one who looked into those transports' boats as they were towed alongside the trawlers will ever forget what he saw: men dead, dying, and wounded, all huddled and jumbled together on the thwarts of the boats and on the bottom boards, with legs and arms twisted strangely; wounded unable to free themselves from the weight of dead bodies on top of them--those grey, placid faces and sightless eyes which, ten minutes before, had glowed with excitement as they turned them to the sun; the blood-stained, torn khaki; the blood-stained water lapping round them, and the one, two, and in some boats three bluejackets, in their Condy's-fluid-dyed jumpers, sitting among them, flopping, exhausted, over their oars.
In one boat there was a Scotsman, in gold spectacles--not unlike Fletcher the stoker--a St. John's Ambulance man, and now a Territorial ambulance orderly. He had already dressed all the wounded in his boat, and now stepped into another, working away quietly, as if he was doing it in the accident-room of a hospital.
"We must get a doctor," he told the Sub; and as the trawlers had not one, the boats requiring most urgent assistance were towed across to the _Newmarket_ anchored near. Here the wounded--most of them--received further treatment.
There was no time for sentiment. The boats were all urgently required to take more men ashore; three of them, those with the most dead and wounded, were told off to take on board the wounded from the others; bluejackets were told off to take the places of those of the crews who had been killed and wounded; and then the beach parties, Bubbles, the Pink Rat, and the Lamp-post, tumbled down into them. Bullets began flying round them and the _Newmarket_, but no one was hit. "Shove off!" was shouted; "land them under the rocks to the left of the beach;" and the Sub and the Orphan towed them inshore.
There was much less rifle-firing now, but many bullets came over and splashed round the picket-boat. The mist and smoke had cleared away, and the _Swiftsure_ was still firing very rapidly at the Turks' trenches on the edge of the cliff, to the right of the beach, the _Achates_ assisting with her small guns. Their shells burst along it one after the other, all along the dark line which marked the trenches, and scarcely a Turk dare expose himself to fire down at the beach.