Jimmy was much aggrieved, it appeared, at being detailed for the tiresome duty of looking for submarines.  It was the unseemly limit, he said, to watch all day for a periscope, and it would be the very devil suddenly to see one.  Besides, he had hoped that by losing 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 reclining on the decks outside, and fears the worst.” (Loud laughter, cheers, and Jimmy Doon’s weary voice:  “Good-bye-ee.”)

Sec.2