ng his
draft of men he would be freed from all duties, and a passenger for
a fortnight. He would have just sat down, and drawn his pay. As it
was, he assured us, he hadn't the faintest idea what to do if he
should sight a submarine--whether to shoot it, or tell the skipper.
He was nervous lest in his excitement he should shoot the skipper.
At any rate, he had a firing-party of twenty in the bows, and was
determined to shoot someone, if he spotted a periscope. And,
moreover, the whole thing made him tediously homesick, and he wanted
his mother.

He was mouching off quite sad and sulky about it all, when the
ship's clock pointed to 4 p.m. (and no one ever argues with a ship's
clock), eight bells rang out, and all the junior officers were
impressed into a lecture on Turkey--even including Jimmy Doon, who
thought that his important duties ought to have secured him
exemption from such an ordeal. The lecturer was Major Hardy, who,
being a man of the wanderlust, had planted in Assam, done some shady
gun-running in Mexico, fought for one, or both, or all sides in the
late Balkan War, and sauntered, with a hammock to hang under the
trees, in all parts of Turkey, Anatolia, and the Ottoman world. He
limped to the lecturer's table, in the lounge, and, holding his
monocle in his hand from the first word to the last, delivered a
discourse of which this was the gist:

Before Christmas we should be in Constantinople--_what_. (Laughter,
rather at the _what_ than at the substance of the sentence.) He was
confident the Dardanelles would be conquered any day now, and wished
the ship would go a bit faster, so that we should not be too late to
miss all the fun. (Hear, hear.) The only thing that was holding up
our army at Cape Helles was the hill of Achi Baba. Now he had stood
on Achi Baba and looked down upon the Straits at that point where
they became the silver Narrows: and he knew that old Achi was a wee
pimple, which he could capture before breakfast, given a fighting
crowd of blaspheming heathens, like those he saw before him. (Loud
cheers.) When we penetrated Turkey, we were to understand that the
Turk with a beard was a teetotaller, like himself, Major Hardy.
(Cheers.) We were never to kick a dog in Turkey--_what_ (laughter),
and, above all, never to raise our eyes to a Turkish woman, whether
veiled or not, if we would keep our lives worth the value of a tram
ticket. "One thinks," he concluded, "of the crowd of susceptible
Tommies