By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal

BY-WAYS ON SERVICE

NOTES FROM
AN AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL

BY

HECTOR DINNING

LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY, LTD.
1918

Printed in Great Britain

To
AUSTRALIA

NOTE BY THE AUTHOR

These sketches were not originally written for publication in the form of a book; and there has been little opportunity of revising them with that object. The idea of collection and publication came late, after they (most of them) had appeared in the daily press or in some other journal; and it came rather by suggestion from friends than on the writer's initiative.

The collection is rough and inconsecutive. It does not attempt to give a complete picture of what was to be seen by an Australian at any stage after embarkation from Australia. It is a series of impressions gained from an outlook necessarily limited. I wrote about the things that impressed me most, chiefly for the reason that they impressed me; there was also the motive of conveying to a small circle of friends some notion of what I saw.

In the light of the offensive fighting of 1917 in Western Europe, a great deal of this book will appear feeble, and even flippant. Descriptions of Egyptian cities and of the Canal-Zone will seem a kind of impertinence, in a book from the War-area, after tales of the fighting in Picardy. But they are published with the belief that after Peace has broken out some soldiers may find an interest in awakening the memory of their first-love in the world outside Australia. For most of them Egypt was that; and though in the desert they often declared themselves "fed-up" with Egypt, it was a transient and liverish judgment, and their relationship with this first-love was never stodgy. For the East of the sort they stumbled across in Cairo and on the Canal, Australians discovered in themselves a liveliness of interest that was almost an affinity.

But no apology for reminiscences of Anzac is called for, let the fighting at Pozieres be never so fierce. It is certain that Gallipoli is overshadowed by the fierce intensity and ceaselessness of the struggle in France. But it is only the intensity of the Turkish fighting that is overshadowed. No intensity of the struggle on the Somme will ever eclipse the intense pathos of that ill-starred adventure on the ridges of Anzac.

These sketches were written hurriedly and in the midst of a good deal of distraction. There has been no time to attend to considerations of style or arrangement of the matter within the limits of single articles. Often I was stuck for leisure, and sometimes for paper. Most of the Anzac sketches were written in the dug-out at nights in circumstances that would have contented transitorily the most Bohemian scribbler. Those from Egypt were mostly scrawled in a desert camp. In either case there was the Censor to reckon with. That is seized as another excuse for inconsecutiveness.

My acknowledgments are due to Messrs. Cassell and Company for their permission to include in this volume the sketch of Anzac which appeared in the Anzac-Book.

HECTOR DINNING.
Somme,
December, 1917.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

WAITING

BY-WAYS ON SERVICE

Section A.—ON THE WAY

CHAPTER I

TRANSPORT

There is something high-sounding in the name Australian Imperial Expeditionary Force. The expedition with which our troop-ship cast loose justified, so far, our part in that name. The false alarms relating to the date of embarkation, raised whilst we were still in camp, had bred in us a kind of scepticism as to all such pronouncements. When it was told that we would go aboard on Tuesday, most of us emitted a sarcastic "te-hee!" And it was not until on Monday morning our black kit-bags were piled meaningly on the parade ground for transport that we began to rein-in our humour and visualise the method of voyaging and believe there must have been some fragment of truth in what we called the Tuesday fable. We believed it all when the unit marched in column of route on Tuesday to the ship, and the quartermaster brought up the odds and ends on a lorry in the rear. But even so, we were prepared to lie a few hours, at least (and some said a few days), before casting-off. Some of us had even devised visits to and from the homes of our friends, in our mongrel-civilian fashion, to sit once more—or twice—and say good-bye. Quite the majority of us saw ourselves swaggering about the port, slaking thirst, and being pointed at as "the Boys." By two o'clock the last baggage came over the side, and we sat a moment to breathe. Some didn't wait to breathe. As soon as they got well off the pier, the gangways were raised. By 2.20 we were in motion. The hope of embarkation, deferred so long, was realised with a suddenness that almost forbade the saying good-bye. Many a friend, expecting the hand-clasp, watched the transport steam relentlessly away; many a man, bracing himself to the final show of a light heart, saw the gangway rudely raised as he innocently rested after the labour of embarkation; and all his show of bravery ended in an unwonted glistening of the eye and a silent turning away from those who would have turned homewards from the shore, but could not. Many smothered what they felt in the wild hilarity of jingoistic dialogue with the shore and with civilian craft flitting about the transport. Two belated members of the column tore along the pier towards the ship in motion, embarked in a launch, and were received; and three months of irksome sitting in a preparatory camp were well-nigh gone for nothing. Two others, who had "gone up the street for an hour" to make merry finally with their friends, were left lamenting.

It was a Leviathan we found ourselves upon; the largest boat—as they say—that ever has come to us. And certainly she carries more men than one ever expected to find afloat (in these waters) on one vessel—a kind of city full. So huge is she that you wonder, in the half-logical excitement of the first few hours, whether she will pitch on the open sea. "Sweet delusion!" smiles the quizzical reader; "you'll soon see." Well, we haven't seen. She has pitched hardly enough to upset the gentlest sucking-dove. That, however, is, perhaps, not all by virtue of our tonnage; so smooth a sea, and so consistently smooth, the tenderest liver could hardly hope for. There have, perhaps, a dozen men been ill; and what are they among so many? With a smooth start, such as we are blest with, notoriously weak sailors may even hope to get through without a spasm. At least there are those aboard amazed at their own heartiness.

Is there any call to relate the daily routine on a troop-ship? Everyone at home, you say, knows it; it's all there is in most letters from the fleet. But all kind and patient readers of these notes may not have friends in the fleet.

Well, then, réveille blows providentially later than on shore—six o'clock; providentially and paradoxically, for who wants "a little more folding of the hands to sleep" at sea? Who, on land, does not, save the few fanatical or deranged? As many as can find ground-room there, sleep on deck, and have been peeping at the Day's-Eye for half an hour before the strident note crashes along the decks. He is blasé and weary indeed who can lie insensible to the dawn here. There is one glory of the hills at sunrise; the sea hath another glory. On land you see the dawn in part, here the whole stately procession lies to your eye, and you see all the detail of the lengthening march defined by the gently heaving sea. He who sees it not has got well to the Devil! But whether you are of the Devil or not, you obey the summons to get up, and cut short your contemplation of the pageant. There is no before breakfast duty, except for a casual swabbing-fatigue. The men mess at seven on their troop-decks; the sergeants and officers at 8.30. Thereby hang two digressions.

The troop-decks have been installed in the holds, or located where old passenger cabins have been knocked out. Much refitting of a liner, indeed, had been necessary to make of her a troop-ship. The troops have been quartered thus: the sergeants mess and sleep in the old dining-saloon; the officers' mess is the old music-room; both the smoke-room and gymnasium have been transferred into hospitals. The sergeants and the men sleep in hammocks slung above their mess-tables. The officers sleep in such cabins as are left standing.

The other digression ought to show why the sergeants and officers (apart from the distinctions which the superiority of those creatures demands) mess an-hour-and-a-half later than the men. Each unit must appoint, as ashore, an orderly-officer and orderly-sergeant for the day, and part of their duty is to supervise the issue and distribution of rations. Each sergeant is given, beside, the supervision of the quarters of a section of the unit, and this includes overlooking the complete setting-in-order after messing. Each unit in rotation supplies a ship's orderly-officer and ship's troop-deck sergeant, whose duties are general and at the dictation of the ship's commandant.

After breakfast we massage ourselves internally and open up our chests with an hour's exercise, much as ashore; but we must drill in small sections, for want of space. Most parades, apart from this last, which is universal, are for lectures; in which the officers endeavour to put the theoretical side—appropriately enough, for the practice must precede the theory in any matter whatsoever, but especially in the game of war. We were men before we became philosophers; we digested our food before we thought of physiological research; and we can put a bullet through a vulnerable part before we know much about the chemical combustion preceding the discharge. Lectures are, naturally, more or less directly on the topic of mechanical-transport, in some aspect of it, but some are on topics of generally military importance.

Curious is the variety in the method of receiving lecture; the rank and file do not readily adjust themselves to the academic outlook. "Another b——y lecture, Bill!" "That's all right; 'e'll take a tumble——" (The Censor did not pass the rest of this conversation.) But these are extreme comments, and rather a form of playfulness than serious utterances. Of the rest, some sit it through in a bovine complacency, some take the risks of dozing, some crack furtive jokes; most listen attentively enough. There are many intelligent, well-trained men who prick up their ears here and there and carry on a muffled discussion, in a sort of unauthorised semina. There is, on an average, one hour's lecture in the day.

Perhaps half the day is the men's own—clear. It is spent largely in lounging and smoking, partly in sleeping, a little in reading. There are well-worn magazines—such as Mr. Ruskin would disapprove—and little else, except sixpenny editions of the limelight authors. But in reading and such effeminate arts what good soldier will languish long?

There are sports, of a sort—very sporadic and very confined. They commonly take the form of passing-the-ball and leap-frog.

The Censor has an ipse dixit way, and is his own court of appeal. These notes could otherwise be made a little less inconsecutive.

We steamed out of —— a little after dawn in column of half sections, artistically out of step and with the alignment nautically groggy. Our ship took the head of one column; the flagship led the other. That procession is a sight unique, which you are defied to parallel in the annals of passenger shipping. The files come heaving along, like a school of marine monsters disporting themselves....

(Censor at work again.)

In preparation for the European winter in store for us, about which so much has been written and spoken at home, and by which so much Red Cross knitting and tea-drinking have been inspired—as a preparation for this, the weather is becoming intolerably hot. As we approach the line the best traditions of that vicinity are being maintained. We wake in the morning with that sense of lassitude you read of as the regular matutinal sensation of the Anglo-Indian in Calcutta. At six o'clock the sun beats down—or beats along—with as much effect as he achieves high in the heavens in the early Australian summer. No sluggard sleeping on deck but would rather get up and under cover than remain stewing in the oblique, biting rays. At the breakfast-mess, situated in as cool and strategic a position as the brazen sergeants could get chosen, you perspire as though violently exercising. In a few isolated cases this is justified; but as the day wears on you perspire without provocation of any sort. The men on their improvised troop-decks are in hell—and use a language and attitude appropriate in the circumstances. Not unnaturally, you see the most grotesque attires designed to make life tolerable. To the devil with uniformity! Men must first live. The general effect is motley. Leggings and breeches and regimental boots are not to be seen—except on the unhappy sentry. A following wind blows upon us, and just keeps our pace; there is not a breath; the sea is unruffled; the men lie limp off parade (for parade persists); one begins to recall an ancient mariner and the tricks the sultry main played upon him. And discussions arise, as animated as the heat will allow, as to whether you'd rather fight in the burning Sahara or the frozen trenches of Northern Europe.

A change in the manner of life on a troop-ship has been effected almost as complete as Oliver Twist shows to have taken place in the administration of public charity, or as Charles Reade shows in the conduct of His Majesty's prisons. Trooping in the 'seventies and 'eighties resembled pretty closely transport on an old slaver—in respect of rations, ventilation, dirt, and space for exercise. By comparison this is luxurious. Perhaps the most notable difference is that there is no beer. The traditional regimental issue of one pint per man per diem (and three pints for sergeants) has been abolished. It is chiefly in a kind of Hogarth theory that this is deplorable; most of the romance of beer-drinking is confined to the art of such delineators as Hogarth and Thackeray. But amongst a section of the men the regret is genuine. Especially hard was a beerless Christmas for many who had been accustomed to charge themselves up with goodwill towards men at that season.

There is a dry canteen, the most violent beverage, obtainable at which is Schweppes's Dry, and hot coffee. Besides, it drives an incessant trade in tobacco, groceries, clothing, and chocolate. We are a people whose god is their belly. During canteen hours an endless queue moves up the promenade-deck to either window of the store, and men purchase, at the most prodigal rate, creature comforts they would despise on land. With many of them it is part of the day's routine.

The leisure and associations of Christmas Day here brought home to the bosoms of most men, more clearly than anything had done previously, what they had departed from. There was hilarity spontaneous; there was some forced to exaggeration, probably with the motive of smothering all the feelings raised by the associations of the festival. You may see, in your "mind's eye, Horatio," the troop-decks festooned above the mess-tables, and all beneath softened with coloured sheaths about the electric bulbs. There is strange and wonderful masquerading amongst the diners, and much song. A good deal of the singing is facetiously woven about the defective theme of "No Beer."

But beside, the old home-songs were given, and here and there a Christmas hymn. It was a strangely mingled scene, but not all tomfooling—not by a great deal.

The Chaplain-Colonel celebrated Holy Communion in the officers' mess at 7 and 8 a.m., and afterwards at Divine-Service on deck addressed the men. Chiefly he was concerned with an attempted reconciliation of the War with the teaching of Christianity. The rest of the day went ad lib.

The night is the unsullied property of the men—in a manner of speaking; but in a manner only. The same could not be said of the officers, as a body. The officers, it is true, fare sumptuously every night, and dress elaborately to dine. The ill-starred private, his simple meal long since consumed, perambulates, and looks on at this good feasting from the promenade deck. "Gawd! I'd like them blokes' job. Givin' b——y orders all day, an' feedin' like that—dressin' up, too! 'Struth! Nothin' better t' do!" Now, that is the everlasting cry of the rank-and-file against those in authority. It's in the business house, where the artificer glares after the managing director—"'Olds all the brass, an' never done a day's work in 'is loife!" It's not so common in military as in civil experience. But as the artisan overlooks the brooding of the managing director in the night watches, whilst he sleeps dreamless, filled with bread, so the private tends to forget that when the Major's dinner is over and his cigar well through, he may work like the deuce until midnight, and be up at réveille with the most private of them. The officers are a picturesque group of diners, and they promenade impressively for an hour thereafter; but they have their night cares, which persist long after the rank and file is well hammocked and snoring.

But before any snoring is engaged in there is a couple of hours of yarning and repartee and horse-play and mirth of all orders. The band plays; the name of the band is legion aboard, and often several members of the legion are in action simultaneously, blaring out their brazen hearts in some imperial noise about (say) Britannia and the waves and the way she rules them; and if you're one of the dozen ill, you cast up a prayer that she will see fit, in her own time, to rule them rather more straight.

Hardly a night but there is a concert, from which the downright song—as such—is rigidly excluded, and nothing but burlesque will be listened to.

As the sun sets, you may lie and wait the lift of the long southern swell of the Indian Ocean. The sunsets are already coloured with the rich ultra-tropical warmth that caught the imagination of so many who looked on that "Sunset at Agra." "Yet but a little while," you say fondly, "and we shall glide south of that fabled Indian land of spice"; and you shudder at the vileness of contending man. There is danger in the distracting fascination of a voyage of discovery, embraced by this transporting to the land of war. For the old soldier—of whom the fleet carries more than a few—it is hardly possible to realise the utter glow of the imagination in the tyro, seeing for the first time those spaces of the earth he has visualised for twenty years. You, therefore, like a good soldier, put on the breast-plate of common sense, and look up on the fore-masthead at the tiny mouth of fire, delicately gaping and closing, uttering the Morse lingo (St. Elmo's fire, caught and harnessed to human uses, by some collective Prospero) and make an attempt to construe in your clumsy, 'prentice way.

Almost you will always fall asleep at this, and lie there a couple of hours. And when you wake you go on lying there; and it is of little consequence whether you lie there all night, or not, in the delicate tropic air. And often you do so, and dream of all things but war.

CHAPTER II

UP THE CANAL

We put into the outer harbour at Aden for some hours to wait for the main fleet, from which we had been parted mysteriously off Colombo. They came in the early morning, handed us a heavy home-mail, and by sundown we were all in motion, steaming up into the heat of the Red Sea. If this is the Red Sea in midwinter, the Lord deliver us from its summer! The heat is beguiled by heavy betting as to the port of disembarkation. But as we get up towards Suez the hand of the war-lords begins to show itself in cryptic paragraphs of troop-ship orders—and the like. Marseilles is our desired haven, and next to that Southampton. But—

It sounds like stories from the land of spirits
If any man get that which he desires,
Or any merit that which he obtains.

Before lunch on the —th the African coast loomed up on the port-bow. About mid-day we were steaming over the traditionally located Israelitish crossing. Curious! the entirely unquestioning attitude of the most blasphemous trooper afloat towards the literal authenticity of Old Testament history. The Higher Criticism has, at any rate, no part with the devil-may-care soldier full of strange oaths. Apparently to a man the troops speak in quite an accepted fashion of the miraculous Israelitish triumph over the Egyptian army: the inference from which is, perhaps, that blasphemy is rather an habitual mannerism in such men than anything deliberate. But after a month's living in their midst it requires no such occasion as this discussion of Mosaic geography to tell you that.

After lunch the Arabian coast also was to be seen. The contrast between the coasts is memorable. It was a warm, grey day, and Arabia showed more delicate than we had yet seen it. The immense mountains were almost beyond sight. All the foreground was opalescent sand shot with tiny cones and ridges of rock, themselves streaked with colour as though sprinkled with the same sand. The effect of opalescence must be purely atmospheric—but it is very beautiful.

But the African coast is rugged to the water's edge. The mountains tower out of the sea; and the grey day, which drew out the iridescence of Arabia, only blackened deeper the gigantic mountains of Africa. The one is delicate pearl and amber, the other is ebony. Well justified by sight and feeling were the judgments of books upon the perfumes and delicate-bred steeds and philosophy of Arabia as over against the grimness of "Darkest Africa."

All gazing was distracted by a death on board at sunset. The body was buried under the moon at eight o'clock. Every soldier stands to attention; the engines are stopped; in the sudden silence the solemn service is read; the body is slid from the plank; the massed buglers sound the Last Post.... The engines begin again to throb and grind, and the routine, broken rudely but momentarily, resumes.

Next morning we wakened in the harbour of Suez. We lay here a day. There appeared to have been some guerilla sniping from the banks of the Canal. The troop-ship bridges were barricaded with sandbags, and all ranks warned against exposing themselves unnecessarily. A shot in the back out of the desert would be a more or less ignominious beginning, and, as an ending, unutterable!

At ten in the morning we started into the Canal. Much valuable Egyptian shore was missed by our being obliged to cross to starboard and salute a French cruiser lying in the mouth. But before we had well passed her the Arabian bank became thick with Ghurkas. War—or the rumour of war—was brought home to our bosoms by their deep and elaborate entrenchments, barbed-wire entanglements, and outworks. The Ghurkas justify, seen in the flesh, all that has been said of their physique: short, deep-chested fellows, with a grin that suggests war is their sport indeed.

On the Egyptian side the Suez suburbs stretched away in a thin strip of fertile country bearing crops and palm-groves and following the rail to Cairo—easily visible, running neck-and-neck with a half-dozen telegraph-lines. Later on, the line draws still nearer to the Canal, making a halt at each of the Canal stations. The stations, with their neat courtyards and neat French offices, and the neat and handsome red-roofed villa, break the monotony of sand-ridge. And the monotony of ejaculation from the deck is broken by a robust French voice shouting a greeting through the megaphone from the station pontoon.

The Egyptian bank is still more strongly fortified; for in addition to the entrenchments and entanglements of the other shore, the place bristles with masked-batteries. The troops here were chiefly Australian, with a sprinkling of Ghurka and of Sikh cavalry. Here and there an Indian trooper would indicate by pantomime that firing and bayoneting were in progress in the interior. But how much was histrionic fervour and how much the truth remains to be known.

The Canal is embanked with limestone as far as the Bitter Lakes, and at intervals thereafter. The Egyptian shore from the Lakes almost to Ismailia is planted with a graceful grove of fir. The controllers of the Canal evidently intend it shall be more than a commercial channel—in some sense, a place to be seen. This is essentially French.

It was evident that trouble from the Turk was expected. The strongest fortifications yet seen had been erected on the Arabian bank: much artillery, thousands of men, searchlight, and frequent outpost. Our own stern-chasers were unmasked and charged, ready in the event of game showing. Almost every hour the troops were called to attention to pass a British or French gunboat. All the warships had their guns run out and their sandbags piled.

We steamed steadily to Port Said, at a pace which, if made habitual by shipping here, would prove bad for the Canal shore and channel.

The towns of this route increase in size as we progress. Port Said spreads herself out to prodigal limits.... On a nearer approach you may see the wharves of the Arabian side lined with coal-tramps, backed in like so many vans and disgorging into barges. There is the flash of a grin, the white of an eye. The Port-side is the more interesting. The finest buildings of the city would seem to be standing along the water's edge. The business advertisements of the most cosmopolitan city in the world are emphatically English; the signs for Kodak, and Lipton's, and King George the Fourth Whisky, and the rest of them, look familiarly out.

The touch of war is to be seen at any interval along the Canal; here it is laid on with a trowel. Ghurkas are encamped in the suburb; reclining at the foot of the Admiralty steps is a submarine rusted and disfigured; ten minutes after, you pass the seaplane station; and before the ship is at rest a hydroplane has buzzed over our masthead and taken the water for a half-mile at the stern. Before dark three monoplanes and a biplane have swept in out of the southern distance and gone to roost after their scouting flight.

We were anchored within fifty yards of the heart of the city. One knew not whether to be galled by the proximity of our prison-house to the blandishments of such a city or grateful for a proximity which let us see so much of it from deck. Seen through a glass, Arab, Frenchmen, Italian, British, Yankee, Jap, and Jew justified the cosmopolitan reputation of a city mid-set on the trade-route between the East and West. The Canal here is gay as a Venetian highway and busy with flying official cutters and pleasure craft and native boats. These last swarmed to the side and drove a trade that was fierce; for the night was coming, when no man could work at that. This was the degenerate East indeed—not a cigar to be had, nothing to smoke but cheap and foul Turkish and Egyptian cigarettes, fit food for eunuchs and such effeminate rascals—for their vendors (for example) dressed in a most ambiguous skirt: you never know whether, beneath skirt and turban, you have a man or a woman!

The money-getters over the side included, here, a boat-load of serenaders and one of jugglers. The first rung the changes on their orchestra and their throats until we were as tired as they; and in consequence their gorgeous parasol, gaping for coin in the hands of the boy, gathered in some missiles whose purchasing power was not high. The jugglers were more deserving.

The same unhallowed load of black bargees as at Aden came alongside to coal and make night hideous. But they worked harder—time was short and the boss used a rope's-end, and actually "laid out" more than one who dared to stop for scraps thrown. They eked out their industry with an alleged chant, echoed in derision by the troops all over the ship. About midnight firing—or its equivalent—began to the south. At the sound of guns the Mohammedan bargees forgot their labours and the rope's-end—as did the boss, together with his authority—cast aside their baskets, and incontinently fell on their faces in the coal-dust and called in terror upon Allah.

Soon after dawn we stood out for Alexandria, and were there early the following morning. The sun rising behind the city cast into flat black Pompey's Pillar and the Port. It was hard to see, in the first blush, in this city—when the sun had risen above it—a centre of action of Pompey and of Alexander and of Cæsar. There is a curious blending of age and of what is intensely modern; and so it is more easy to conceive Sir Charles Beresford bombarding from the Condor, with Admiral Seymour pounding from behind; or Napoleon storming the citadel. From our anchorage it was with ease we saw the scene of bombardment and the converging-point from which the Egyptians fled helter-skelter to the hinterland.

Anchored in the harbour, we supposed by habit we should have to be content with externals and with conjecture as to what was to be seen in the midst of the city. But we loitered some days to disembark infantry, and leave was granted freely. One would have easily given a month's pay for a day ashore—apart from the month's pay he could spend there—had that been necessary.

Your first business after leaving the gangway is to stave-off the horde of beggars and gharry-drivers (an Australian cab-rank is put to shame here) and choose one of the latter's vehicles approximately respectable. It takes ten minutes' brisk driving to get you well out of the labyrinth of wharves, docks, and dhows. You emerge by one of seven dock-gates, vigilated by native police, into the Arab quarter, by which alone approach to the city proper is possible. Cook's tourists drive hurriedly through this region, and protect their eyes and noses with the daily newspaper. The wise man knows that if he is to see Alexandria he will dismiss the gharry and walk—and walk slowly—through the native-quarter. In fact, he will care not a damn whether he ever gets to imposing French and English residential quarters or not....

So, in your wonder at the utter strangeness of everything you overpay the driver some five piastres and begin to thread your way over the cobbles. All building is of stone, with a facing of cement, which once was bright-coloured, but has faded into faint blues and browns and greys; and if you look up and along the street of crumbling, flat-faced upper storeys broken by tiny balconies, you feel intensely the gentle irregularity and the mass of mellow colour. The one and the other is never seen in Australia, with our new shining-painted angularities of hardwood and bright nails and eaves and gables and sharp-sloping roofs. A gentle irregularity, in a street where boards thrust out and planks give way and vulgarly project themselves, where neither roofs nor fronts are flat, is unknown in our country.

What Mr. Wells calls "the inundating flood of babies" ebbs and flows in the streets. The Arab women, bare-legged, slovenly of gait, broad of person, with swaying, unstable bust, move up and down or sit in the doorways, or lounge and haggle over a purchase. Every hovel in the bazaars, with its low door and dark recesses, sells or makes something, and the Arab quarter is a succession of bazaars. The artificers squat at their work in brass or clay or fabric or gold; the greybeards sit at the doors with hubble-bubble and dream through the day in a state of coma. Fruits and dates, sweets and pastry, and Eastern culinary products that defy nomenclature by the Australian, are piled in an Eastern profusion. Sweets and pastry abound in excess and are curiously cheap. Toffee is sold from stands at every street-corner, and the quantity you might carry off for sixpence would be embarrassing. Pastry is made here of a flavour and lightness unexcelled by any English housewife. Sit at an open restaurant, call for a light lunch, and you will have a plate heaped with the most delicious meat and spice pastry and sugared fruits, for something less than the price of a street-stall pie in Australia, and with a glass of sherbet thrown in. The fineness of the fabrics sold (amongst bales of Manchester rubbish) will draw the better class of Egyptian woman into the bazaars of this east-end; they are beautiful in rich black silk from head to toe, with a delicate white yashmak; they have a regularity of feature and a complexion and a beauty of eye and of gait to make you look again. Nothing is lost to them by the setting through which they glide: the ragged bargainers, the sluttishness of the women, the unmitigated dirt of earth and asses and children and tethered goats, and water-carriers with their greasy swine-skins filled and shining. They offer an analogy to the stately mosque and minaret which lifts its graceful head above the squalid erections of the poor. And as futilely might the stranger pry into those features with his free curiosity as attempt an entrance to the Mosque unattended.

Progress is slow towards the Square. Not the interest of the scene alone invites you to linger: the whole atmosphere is one of lounge. Everyone moves at a lounging pace; those not in motion lounge; there are periodical cafés where the men lounge in the fumes of smoke and native spirits by the half-day together. No one hurries. Business seems rather a hobby and an incident than the earnest, insistent thing it is in England. The advantage surely lies with the Arab; he finds time to live and contemplate and get to know something of himself. God help the American! Better, perhaps, to spend the evening of your life with your chin on your knees and your hubble-bubble adjacent, looking out on the life before you, and within upon your own, than boast yourself still keen in the steel trade; that your features are "mobile and alert," though your head is grey, whereas your contemporaries are "failing." ...

At the end of a half-day you'll know your proximity to the Centre by the uprising of "respectable" cafés and imposing cigarette-manufactories and of hotels. And you come into the Square overlooked by the noble statue of the noble Mahomet Aly—every ounce a soldier.

Wide and well-built streets lead away into the regions of high-class trade and residence. You had best take a gharry here. There are two extreme classes amongst tourists—the thoroughgoing Cook's sight-seer who works exclusively by the vehicle and the book, and the tourist who steadily refuses to "do" the stock places. Each is at fault if he is inflexible: the former in the Arab quarter, the latter when he emerges from it. For in a city such as Alexandria the visitor who declines to see the spots relict of the ancient history of this world is clearly an obdurate fool with a strange topsy-turvey-dom of values. Let him take a gharry and a book in his hand when the time is ripe; let him be free with his piastres when Pompey's Pillar stands over the catacombs of the city. The Forts of Cæsar and of Napoleon watch over the sea. He may stand upon the ground where was the library of Alexandria and where Euclid reasoned over his geometrical figures in the sand. Here Hypatia suffered martyrdom and Cleopatra held her court and died in her palace. On the northern horn of the harbour stood the great Beacon of Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders.

So you get your vehicle and a chattering guide....

On the way back to ship the Park and the Nouzha Gardens are a delicious sight after the aridity of the desert.... The gharry is dismissed on re-entering the Arab quarter; it would be a sad waste of opportunity to drive....

We climbed the gangway bearing much fruit and dirt, and very much late for dinner. And after mess the boat-deck and the pipes and our purchases in tobacco and our ventures in cigars—and the day all over again.

CHAPTER III

ABBASSIEH

We left the ship's side in a barge that might have carried twice our number without crowding. Every man of us had chafed at the confinement of the voyage, but not one did not now regret the dissociation from our unit, with all the chances it carried of never rejoining, and even, possibly, of never getting to Europe at all. Private friendships do not fall within the consideration of motives in the issue of military orders. Men were calling a farewell from the deck with whom we would have given much to go through the campaign. There was nothing for it but to cultivate the philosophy of the grin and simulate an elation at being free, at last, from the prison-house, and chaff the others about the bitter English winter they were sailing into, and claim we had the best of it. But in our hearts we coveted their chances of moving into Europe first. No part in the Egyptian army of occupation, with the off-chance of a fitful brawl with the Turk, compensated for that.

Baggage required but brief handling. We had little more than our rifles and equipment and kit-bags. By sunset we were entrained, and flying between the back-yards of Alexandria. A five hours' run was before us. There was nothing to be seen except each other, and we had had enough of that in the last five weeks. We cast about for something to eat (the ship's cooks' fatigue had bagged a sack of cold fowl before making their exit from the bowels of the transport), and composed ourselves to sleep. The cessation of motion at Cairo, at 2 a.m., awakened us. Half an hour afterwards we were at Abbassieh, tumbling out into the cold and "falling-in." A guide was waiting. The baggage was piled on the platform under a guard until the morning. A pair of blankets per man was issued, and we marched through a mile of barracks to the camp. The fuddled brains of those still half asleep had conceived a picture of tents and the soft, warm sand and the immediate resumption of slumber. This was ill-founded. We poked about for a place in which to sleep. Ultimately we stumbled upon a line of blockhouses erected for messing, wherein we crept, posted a couple of sentries, and disposed ourselves about the tables. It was very cold; had we been less tired, we should have been about before seven the next morning.

Abbassieh, except for its mosque, is nothing but a barrack-settlement. Barracks almost encircle the camp. Indeed, it would appear that the Regular Cairene troops are mostly quartered in this suburb. The eastern and northern barracks are for the Egyptian Regulars; the Territorials occupy those on the west. We see much of either. The Egyptians are impressive—very lithe and strongly built, but not tall. Alertness is the badge of all their tribe. The first impression they give is that everything in their training is done "at the double." As you turn in your bed at 5.30, you hear their réveille trumpeted forth from the whole barrack settlement; and that is significant. To a man, they bear about the mouth those lines seen upon the face of the thoroughgoing athlete. They love to fraternise with the Australians. The Turks they hate with a perfect hatred; more than one has lost a brother "down the Canal." If this is the type of man Kitchener had with his British, the consistent victories of his Egyptian campaign are quite in the order of nature. They show an individual strength, efficiency, and alertfulness which probably is to be seen nowhere else—except, perhaps, among the Ghurkas—in all the British forces now under arms. The best Australian or Territorial unit will have its weeds and its blear-eyed and its round-shouldered and its slouchers. Here you look for them in vain.

The Camp is busy enough at any time of the day, and the Army Service Corps which supplies it is almost as busy as any unit on active service. The difference is that it is not feverishly busy, and that it has a convenient and resourceful base from which to work—the city of Cairo, as well and variously stocked as the most fastidious army could wish. And an army which is merely sitting in occupation is in danger of growing fastidious—with shops of Parisian splendour and Turkish baths and cafés of the standard of the Francatelli within two miles, and opportunity of generous leave. In the first half of the day the camp supply depôt is animated with men of more than one race and beasts of many breeds. Long trains of camels and donkeys move in from the irrigation with their loads of green fodder and vegetables, and the high and narrow Arab carts, decorated fore and aft in quasi-hieroglyphic, bring in the chaff and grain. General service waggons, manned by Australians, are there too. The unloading and distribution is done chiefly by hired Arabs working under the superintendence of our men. The din is terrific; no Arab can work without much talk and shout. If he has no companion to be voluble with, he talks with and at his beast. But here is a crowd of a hundred of them, and it is with difficulty the superintendents make themselves audible, much less intelligible. All the heavy fatigue work is done by natives attached—splitting wood, digging drains and soakage-pits, erection of out-houses, removal of refuse of all sorts. Native labour is extremely cheap, and beside its official employment the men use it for such purposes as private washing; a native takes your week's soiled clothes and returns them next day, snow white, for a couple of piastres. During certain hours the camp swarms with Arab vendors of newspapers, fruit, sweets, cakes, post-cards, Arab-English phrase-books, rifle-covers (invaluable, almost indispensable, here to the right preservation of arms), clothing, tobacco and cigarettes. They easily become a bane if encouraged in any degree. Native police patrol the place day and night for the sole purpose of keeping them in check. This is no easy matter. They are slippery as eels, cunning as foxes, and impudent as they make 'em. They fight incessantly; bloody coxcombs are to be seen daily, and the men rarely hesitate to fan an embryonic fight into a serious combat as a relief from the lassitude of the mid-day; for the noon is as hot as the night is cold. To incite is the soldier's delight: "Go it, Snowball!"—"Well hit, Pompey!"—"Get after him!" ... until a couple of native police break in and carry off the combatants by the lug. Even then, they often break away and resume, or clear off into the desert. And a policeman in thick blue serge, with leggings and bayonet, is no match in a chase for a bare-footed Arab in his cotton skirt.

The Arab is intelligent, and in many cases has picked up decent English and speaks with fluency. Between the early parade and breakfast we often engage them in talk, partly for amusement, partly to improve our mongrel Arabic. They are good subjects for interrogation, with a nice sense of humour—indulged often at your expense—and a knack of getting behind the mind of the questioner. They excel, too, in the furnishing of examples in illustration of answers to questions about custom and usage in Egypt. The best conversationalists, by far, are the native police sergeants, who are chosen a good deal for their intelligence and mental alertfulness. Get a police sergeant into your tent after tea, and you have a fruitful evening before you. He readily discusses Mohammedanism, and Egyptian history and peoples, and local geography and customs, and is as pleased to discuss as you to start him. The intelligent Arab in British employ is a revelation in intellectual freshness and open-mindedness. He never speaks in formula, and is clearly astonished at the want of intellectual curiosity in many of his interlocutors.

The men sleep in bell-tents—some in the sand; others, more flush of piastres, on a species of matting supplied by the native weavers. Sand may be warm and comfortable enough in itself, but it breeds vermin prolifically, specialising in fleas. And at midnight you will see an unhappy infested fellow squatting, roused from sleep because of their importunity, conducting a search by candle-light, engaged in much the same business as his Simian ancestors; the difference is that whereas they were too strong-minded to be disturbed in their sleep by any such trifle, his search is mostly nocturnal—though not exclusively so; and, moreover, in place of their merely impatient gibbering, he speaks with eloquence and consecutiveness, often in quite sustained periods, logically constructed and glowing with purple patches.... The Medical Officer has got a paragraph inserted in camp routine orders about a bathing parade on Fridays, compelling a complete ablution. But what avails cold water, once a week? Most men, however, have been known to bathe more often.

The military Medical Officer in this country is as considerable a personage as the medicine-man amongst the American Indians. In a land where the rainfall is not worth mentioning, and the sun is hot, and the natural drainage poor, and sanitation little considered by the natives, he is a man whose word in camp is law. He speaks almost daily, through camp orders or through pamphlets of his own compiling, imperative words of warning, and in the daily camp inspection the Commandant is his mere satellite. "Avoid," says he (in effect) in his fifth philippic against dirt, "the incontinent consumption of fruit unpeeled and raw or unwashed vegetables. Therefrom proceed dysentery, enteritis, Mediterranean fever, parasitic diseases, and all manner of Egyptian scourges. Would you fly the plagues of Egypt, abhor the Arab hawker and the native beer-shop." Certain quarters are hygienically declared "out of bounds." They include "all liquor-shops and cafés, except those specified hereafter ..."; the village of Abbassieh; the village adjoining the Tombs of the Caliphs (the most squalid in Cairo). It is for other reasons than hygienic that the gardens of the Sultan's palace at Koubbeh and the Egyptian State-railways are placed out of bounds too.

Men scarcely need go to Cairo for the satisfaction of their most fastidious wants. The regimental institute receives camp-rent from grocer, haberdasher, keeper of restaurants, vendor of rifle-covers, barber, boot-repairer, tailor, and proprietor of the wet-canteen.

We get precious and intermittent mails from Australia. Their delivery is somewhat irregular. That is no fault of our friends. What may be the fault of our friends is an ultimate scarcity of letters. One has read of the ecstasies of satisfied longing with which the exile in Labrador reads his half-yearly home mail. If friends in Australia knew fully the elation their gentle missives inspire here, they would write with what might become for them a monotonous regularity. The man who gets a fair budget on mail-day hankers after no leave that night.

Sabbath morning in the Egyptian desert breaks calm; there is no before-breakfast parade. The sergeants set the example of lying a little after waking, as at home. Through the tent door, as you lie, you can see the sun rise over the undulating field of sand. The long stone Arab prison, standing away towards the sun in sombre isolation, is sharply defined against the ruddy east. The sand billows redden, easily taking the glow of the dawn; and the hills of rock in the south, which look down over Cairo, catch the level rays until their rich brown burns. A fresh breeze from the heart of the desert, pure as the morning wind of the ocean, rustles the fly and invites you out, until you can lie no longer. Throwing on your great-coat, you saunter with a towel, professedly making for the shower-baths, but careless of the time you take to get there, so gentle is the morning and so mysteriously rich the glory of Heliopolis, glittering like the morning star, and so spacious the rosy heaven reflecting the sun-laved sand.

You dawdle over dressing in a way that is civilian. By the time these unregimental preliminaries to breakfast are over, the mess is calling; and thereafter is basking in the sun beneath the wall of the mess-hut with the pipes gently steaming, reading over the morning war-news. The news is cried about the camp on Sunday more clamorously than on any other day: Friday is the Mohammedan Sabbath. Sunday brings forth special editions of the dailies, and all the weeklies beside. The soldier is the slave of habit, and the Sunday morning is instinctively unsullied. Even horse-play is more or less disused. The men are content to bask and smoke.

At 9.15 the "Fall-in" sounds for parade for Divine service. Columns from all quarters converge quietly on a point where the Chaplain's desk and tiny organ rest in the sand. By 9.30 the units have massed in a square surrounding them and are standing silently at ease. The Chaplain-Colonel whirrs up in his car. He salutes the Commandant and announces the Psalm. Thousands of throats burst into harmonious praise, and the voice of the little organ, its leading chord once given, is lost in the lusty concert. The lesson is read; the solemn prayers for men on the Field of Battle are offered: no less solemn is the petition for Homes left behind; the full-throated responses are offered. The Commandant resumes momentary authority. He commands them to sit down; they are in number about five thousand. The Chaplain bares his head, steps upon his dais, and reclining upon the sands of Egypt the men listen to the Gospel, much as the Israelites may have heard the Word of God from the bearded patriarch—even upon these very sands.

At no stage in the worship of the God of Battles is the authority of military rank suppressed. The parade which is assembled to worship Him that maketh wars to cease is never permitted to be unmindful of a Major. One despises proverbial philosophy in general, but herein the reader may see, if he will, a kind of comment on the truism that Heaven helps those that help themselves. Colonels and Majors are part of the means whereby we hope to win. The persistence of military rank throughout Divine worship is the implicit registering of a pledge to do our part. There is nothing in us of the unthinking optimist who says it will all come out well and that we cannot choose but win....

As the Chaplain offers prayer a regiment of Egyptian Lancers gallops past with polished accoutrements and glittering lance-heads for a field-day in the desert. Bowed heads are raised, and suppressed comments of admiration go round, and the parson says Amen alone.

Section B.—CAIRO

CHAPTER I

ON LEAVE IN CAIRO

It is not so long ago as to render it untrue now that Dean Stanley said, looking down from the Citadel: "Cairo is not the ghost of the dead Egyptian Empire, nor anything like it."

The interval elapsed since that reflection was uttered has, indeed, only deepened its truth. Cairo is becoming more modern every season. The "booming" of Cairo as a winter resort for Europeans was begun at the opening of the Canal by the Khedive Ismail. His ambition was the transforming of Cairo into a kind of Paris of Africa. The effort has not died with him. It has persisted with the official-set and their visitors. The result now is that in half an hour's ride you may pass from those monuments of antiquity, the Sphinx and the Pyramid of Cheops, in a modern tram-car, along a route which is neither ancient nor modern, into a city which blends in a most amazing fashion Europe of to-day with Egypt of a very long time past. There are wheels within wheels: at the foot of the Great Pyramid are crowded shanties and taverns such as you might enter in a poorer Melbourne Street or on a new-found gold-field; and the intensity of the contradiction in Cairo itself baffles description.

Cairo has been so accurately portrayed in every aspect with the pen that it seems presumptuous to attempt to reproduce even impressions, much less relate facts. One prefers, of course, if he does attempt to do either, to give impressions rather than facts. Any guide-book will give you facts. And the reader who demands a sort of Foster-Frazer tabulation of facts is analogous to those unhappy readers of romance who rank incident above characterisation.

What one feels he must say, chiefly, is that it is the living rather than the dead in Cairo that attract most strongly. You go to the Museum or stand beside the sarcophagus of the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid once, and again; not because it is conventionally fitting, but because that conventional appropriateness rests upon a broad and deep psychology: these places have their hold upon you. But incomparably stronger is that which draws you times without number to the bazaars. "Fool!" says Teufelsdröckh. "Why journeyest thou wearisomely, in thy antiquarian fervour, to gaze on the stone Pyramids of Geeza, or the clay ones of Sacchara? These stand there, as I can tell thee, idle and inert, looking over the desert, foolishly enough, for the last three thousand years...."

A half-day in the bazaars I would not exchange for a whole wilderness of Sphinxes. You may go twice and thrice before the Sphinx, but there comes a time when there is no place for you but the ebb and flow of the human tide in the narrow streets; when you spend all your leave there, and are content to commend the venerable dead and their mausolea to the Keeper of Personality for ever.

I dare not enter on the multiplicity of the charm of the bazaars: more accurately, I cannot. The dazzling incongruity of vendors and of wares under the over-meeting structures multiplies multiplicity. They move and cry up and down classified bazaars. A vociferous Arab hawks a cow for sale through the boot-bazaar; the delicious Arabian perfumes of the picturesque scent bazaar are fouled by a crier of insanitary food; Jews, French, Italians, Tunisians, Greeks, and Spaniards jostle each other through the alleys of the tent bazaar, braziers' bazaar, bazaar of the weavers, book bazaar—bazaar of any commodity or industry you care to name; and the proprietors and artificers squat on their tiny floors, maybe four feet square. In the busy forenoon, looking up the Mooski, it is as though the wizard had been there: almost you look for the djin to materialise. Rich colour is splashed over the stalls and the throng; there is music in the jingle of wares and the hum of voices; and the sober and graceful mosque, its rich colour gently mellowed by centuries of exposure, lifts a minaret above the animation. If this is the complexity of the broad view, what contrasts are thrust at you from the detail of men and things, as you saunter through!

Here in the Mooski is the micro-Cairo—Cairo bodied forth in little, except for the intruding official set and the unrestrained quarter of the brothels. But less truthfully might you set out to picture the real Cairo with the former than without the latter. Any account which passes without note the incessant trade—in the high-noon as under the garish night-lights—driven by the women of Cairo will altogether misrepresent the city. It is with a hideous propriety that she should stand partly on the site of Old Babylon. She is a city which, in perhaps her most representative quarter, lives in and for lasciviousness. The details of that trade in its thoroughgoing haunts are no more to be described than looked upon. There is no shame; sexual transactions are conducted as openly and on as regular and well-established a footing of bargaining and market values as the sale of food and drink. Meat and drink, indeed, they must furnish to much of the population, and its alimentary properties are to be seen at every corner and in every gutter in hideousness of feature and disease unutterable. Not Paris, nor Constantinople, approaches in shamelessness the conduct of venereal industry in Cairo. All the pollution of the East would seem to drain into their foul pool. That which is nameless is not viewless. I speak that I do know and testify that I have seen. The phrase, the act, every imagination of the heart of man (and of woman), is impregnated with the filth of hell.

The official set you will see disporting itself on the piazza at Shepheard's or the Continental every afternoon. The official set is also the fashionable set, and it or its sojourning friends—or both—make up the monied set. I had no opportunity of going to a race-meeting at Gezireh; but it should come near to holding its own in "tone" with the great race-day at Caulfield.

Shepheard's is an habitual rendezvous of British officers at any time. The officers of the permanent army at Cairo assemble there, and the general orders are posted in the entrance-hall as regularly as at the Kasr-el-Nil Barracks. It is at Shepheard's that officers most do congregate. According to a sort of tacit agreement—extended later into an inescapable routine order—none lower in rank than a Subaltern enters there.

Otherwise, everywhere is the soldier; there is nothing he does not see. Everything is so utterly new that a day in Cairo is a continual voyage of discovery; and if he does no more than perambulate without an objective, it is doubtful if he has not the best of it. Fools and blind there are who look on everything from a gharry, fast-trotting. God help them! How can such a visitor hope to know the full charm of manner and voice and attire of the vendor of sherbet or sweet Nile-water if he move behind a pair of fast-trotting greys? How may he hope to know the inner beauties of a thoroughgoing bargaining-bout between two Arabs, when he catches only a fragment of dialogue and gesture in whisking past? What does he know of the beggars at the city gate in the old wall?—except how to evade them. Little he sees of the delicate tracery of the mosque; no time to wander over ancient Arab houses with their deserted harems, floor and walls in choice mosaic, rich stained windows, with all the symbolism of the manner of living disposed about the apartment. It is denied to him to poke about the native bakeries, to converse with salesmen, to look in on the Schools chanting Al Koran, to watch the manual weavers, tent-makers, and artificers of garments and ornaments. One cannot too much insist that it is a sad waste of opportunity to go otherwise than slowly and afoot, and innocent of "programmes," "schemes," agenda—even of set routes.

The alleged romance of Cairo is alleged only. Cairo is intensely matter-of-fact. In Carlyle's study of Mahomet you read: "This night the watchman on the streets of Cairo, when he cries 'Who goes?' will hear from the passenger, along with his answer, 'There is no God but God.'—'Allah akbar, Islam,' sounds through the souls, and whole daily existence, of these dusky millions."

This is romance read into Cairo by Carlyle. The watchman gets far other rejoinders to his cry this night—answers the more hideous for Carlyle's other-worldly supposition. Romance is gone out of Cairo, except in a distorted mental construction of the city. Cairo is not romantic; it is picturesque, and picturesque beyond description.

Alfresco cafés are ubiquitous. Their frequency and pleasantness suggest that the heat of Australia would justify their establishment there in very large numbers. Chairs and tables extend on to the footpaths. The people of all nations lounge there in their fez caps, drinking much, talking more, gambling most of all. Young men from the University abound; much resemble, in their speech and manner, the young men of any other University. They deal in witty criticism of the passengers, but show a readiness in repartee with them of which only an Arab undergraduate is capable.

The gambling of the cafés is merely symbolic of the spirit of gambling which pervades the city. It is incipient in the Arab salesman's love of bargaining for its own sake. The commercial dealings of Egypt, wholesale and retail alike, are said to want fixity in a marked degree. Downright British merchants go so far as to call it by harder names than the "spirit of gambling." The guides are willing to bet you anything on the smallest provocation. Lottery tickets are hawked about the streets like sweetmeats; there are stalls which sell nothing but lottery tickets, and thrive upon the sale.

You will see much, sitting in these cafés at your ease. Absinthe and coffee are the drinks. Coffee prevails, served black in tiny china cups, with a glass of cold water. It is a delicious beverage: the coffee fiend is not uncommon. Cigarettes are the habitual smoke in the streets. At the cafés you call for a hubble-bubble. They stand by the score in long racks. The more genteel (and hygienic) customers carry their own mouth-pieces, but it is not reckoned a sporting practice.

You cannot sit five minutes before the vendors beset you with edibles, curios, prawns, oranges, sheep's trotters, cakes, and post-cards. The boys who would polish your boots are the most noisome. The military camps in the dusty desert have created an industry amongst them. A dozen will follow you a mile through the streets. If you stop, your leg is pulled in all directions, and nothing but the half-playful exercise of your cane upon the sea of ragged backs saves you from falling in.

The streets swarm with guides, who apparently believe either that you are inevitably bound for the Pyramids or incapable of walking through the bazaars unpiloted. And a guide would spoil any bazaar, though at the Pyramids he may be useful. If you suggest you are your own guide, the dog suggests an assistant. They are subtle and hard to be rid of, and frequently abusive when you are frank. The hawkers and solicitors of the streets of Cairo have acquired English oaths, parrot-wise. The smallest boy has got this parasitic obscenity with a facility that beats any Australian newsboy in a canter.

There is a frequent electric tramway service in Cairo. It is very convenient and very dirty, and moderately slow, and most informally conducted. The spirit of bargaining has infected even the collector of fares. Journeying is informal in other ways; only in theory is it forbidden (in French, Arabic, Greek, and English) to ride on the footboard. You ride where you can. Many soldiers you will see squatting on the roofs. And if the regulations about riding on footboards were enforced the hawkers of meats and drinks and curios would not plague you with their constant solicitation. The boot-boys carry on their trade furtively between the seats: often they ride a mile, working hard at a half-dozen boots. The conductor objects only to the extent of a facetious cuff, which he is the last to expect to take effect. Both motorman and conductor raise the voice in song: an incongruous practice to the earnest-working Briton. But the Cairene Arab who takes life seriously is far to seek. There is nothing here of the struggling earnestness of spirit of the old Bedouin Arabs to whom Mahomet preached. The Cairene is a carnal creature, flippant and voluptuous, with more than a touch of the Parisian. You'll find him asleep at his shop-door at ten in the morning, and gambling earlier still. Well-defined articulation is unknown amongst the Arabs here, except in anger and in fight. They do not open their teeth either to speak or to sing. The sense of effort is everywhere wanting—in their slouching gait, their intonation; their very writing drags and trails itself along. But what are you due to expect in a country where the heat blisters most of the year; where change of temperature and of physical outlook are foreign—a country of perennially wrinkled skins, where a rousing thunder-storm is unknown, and where the physical outlook varies only between the limits of sand and rock? The call for comment would arise if physical inertia were other than the rule. And of the Anglo-Egyptian, what may you expect?...

One has not seen Cairo unless he has wandered both by day and by night. So, he knows at least two different worlds. To analyse the contrast would take long. It is hard to know which part of a day charms you the most. The afternoon is not as the morning; the night is far removed from either. Go deeper, and you may get more subtle divisions of twelve hours' wandering than these; with accuracy of discrimination you may even raise seven Dantean circles in your day's progress. The safe course, then, is to "make a day of it." Tramp it, after an early breakfast, over the desert to the car, and plod back past the guard after midnight. You'll turn in exhausted, but the richer in your experience (at the expense of a few piastres) by far more than any gold can buy.

CHAPTER II

THE MOOSKI

The camp at Tel-el-Kebir is a good camp, as camp sites go. None the less exhilarating for that is the prospect of leave in Cairo. After retiring, you spend most of the night before you go in planning the most judicious economy of the few hours you will have in the great city. And so you wake up short of sleep—for the train leaves soon after sunrise—and curse yourself for an incontinent fool, no better than some mercurial youngster who cannot sleep for thinking of the party on the next day.

But the journey revives you. How deliciously it revives you!—and how generously! as you skim across that green delta, sleeping under the dew, with the mist-wreaths winding about the quiet palm-fronds. The sweet-water canal runs silently beside you all the way between its clover-grown tow-paths, without a ripple. The buffalo stand motionless in the lush berseem. The Egyptian State railways are the smoothest in the world. Two hours' swift gliding through these early-morning haunts of quietness retrieves your loss of sleep, and would reinforce you for a day in any city.

As you approach Cairo you find the delta has wakened. The mists have departed, disclosing the acres of colour in the blossom of the crops. The road beside the Canal is peopled. The fellaheen and his family are moving along to work on donkey and buffalo and camel. The women in their black robes and yashmaks are moving to the dipping-places in the Canal, pitcher on head, walking with a grace and erectness that does you good to look on. Some are already drawing, knee-deep in the cool water; or emerging, and showing to the world, below the freely raised robe, that of whose outline they have no call to be ashamed. Some of the labourers are already at work, hoeing in squads under an overseer or guiding the primitive Vergilian plough behind its yoke of oxen. The blindfold yak has started his weary, interminable round at the water-wheel. The camels are looping along with their burdens of fruit and berseem, and the tiny donkeys amble under their disproportionate loads, sweeping the ground; they are hardly to be seen; in the distance they show merely a jogging hillock of green. By nine o'clock, as you race through the outskirts of Cairo, you see an occasional waiting man asleep full-stretch on the sod; the hour is early for sleeping. On the suburban roads are moving towards the centre venerable sheikhs, squat on the haunches of their well-groomed donkeys; merchants lying back in their elaborate gharries; gabbling peasants driving their little company of beasts; English and French officials, carefully dressed, smoking the morning cigarette.

Shortly the Pyramids emerge on the eastern sky-line, and over the thickening house-tops rises the splendid relief of the Makattam Hills, with the stately citadel perched on the fringe, looking down on the City under its soaring minarets.

You had formed plans for the economy of the day; they are all dissipated when you step from the train and realise yourself within a mile of the bazaars. Their call is irresistible. The Pyramids, the mosques, the museum—all can wait, to be visited if there is time for it. You enter a gharry and alight at the mouth of the Mooski. It is palpably a mouth to that seething network, as plainly defined (as you gaze up Mooski Street from the Square) as the entrance to an industrial exhibition.

There is a crowd of men in the early stages of Mooski Street, whose business, day and night, is to conduct. They lurk privily for the innocent, like the wicked men in the Book of Psalms. The guides have come so much into disrepute that they mostly hasten to tell you they are not guides. "What are you, then?"—"I am student, sair"; or "I am agent, sair"; or "I am your friend; I do not wish for money." You'll meet such self-abnegation nowhere on earth as in the Mooski. Those who do own to being guides will never name a price. "How much do you want?"—"I leave that to you, sair. If you are pleased, you give me what you think." ... This is all very subtle: the man who is agent will get his commission and tender for baksheesh for having put you in the way of purchase (whereas he is in league with the rogue who fleeces you in the sale). The student shows no sort of ideal scholastic contempt for lucre; it's of degrees of gullibility that he's chiefly a student—and an astute one, gathering where he has not strawed. The man who is your friend and wouldn't think of money turns out a mere liar, downright—who does care, greatly. These are the subtlest ways of approaching you and broaching the subject of a tour. The rascal may simply fall into step and ask the time of day and proceed to talk of the weather—merely glad of your company—and abruptly close the half-mile walk with a demand for cash, like any guide requisitioned. In short, it's to be doubted whether in any city men live on their wits more artfully and unscrupulously than in the Cairene bazaars.

As a practice, it's wise to decline all offers to accompany—as a practice; but first time through it's wise to accept. No one can hope to unravel the tangle of the Mooski geography unaided or by chance. The labyrinth of overshadowed alleys is as confusing as the network of saps near the firing-line. Take a guide at your first going. If he does no more than show "the bright points" in an experience of the bazaars, he has earned his exorbitant fee. After that, refuse him, which you will never do without harsh discourtesy. A mere "No, thank you," is as nothing. "Yallah minhenna"—or its equivalent—uttered in your most quarrelsome manner, is the least of which he will begin to take notice.

The best beginning is through the narrow doorway off Mooski Street into the spice bazaar. Of so unpretentious a doorway you never would suspect the purpose without a guide, and that's the first argument for tolerating him. Can such a needle's-eye lead to anything worth entering? You arrive in an area where the air is voluptuous with the scent of all the spices of the East—something more delicious than even the scent bazaar, and less enervating. All the purchasers are women, moving round behind their yashmaks. They boil and beat the spices to grow fat, and to be fat is a national feminine aspiration. The boys are pounding the wares in large stone mortars, crushing out the sweetness, which pervades like an incense.

Appropriately enough, it is but a step into the scent bazaar proper, and many of the purchasers there are (inappropriately) men. That the men should wear and hanker after perfumes to this degree is one phase of Egyptian degeneracy. The vendors squat in their narrow cubicles lined with shelf upon shelf of gaily-coloured phials. They invite you to sit down. Coffee is called for, and whilst that is preparing you must taste the sweets of their wares on your tunic-sleeve. Bottle by bottle comes down; he shakes them and rubs the stopper across your forearm: attar of roses, jasmine, violet, orange-blossom, banana, and the rest of them, until you are fairly stupid with the medley of sweet fumes. You saunter off rubbing your sleeve upon your breeches, and wondering what your comrades in arms will say if they catch you wearing the odours of the lord of the harem. You have a tiny flask of attar of roses upon you to send home to its appropriate wearer.

You move on to the tarbush bazaar; Tunis bazaar, where the fine Tunisian scarves of the guides are sold; slipper bazaar, showing piles of the red canoe-shoe of the Soudanese hotel-waiter, and of the yellow heelless slipper of the lounging Egyptian; blue bazaar, where the women buy their dress-stuffs—their gaudy prints and silks, all the rough material for their garments. No Australian flapper can hold a candle to them in their excited keenness of selection; and there is the added excitement of bargaining. The feminine vanities of adornment are deep and confirmed in Cairo. To see the Cairene aristocrats purchasing dress-material, go to Stein's or Roberts's, Hughes's or Philips's or Senouadi's, or to any of the other big houses, in the middle afternoon. It's there, and not at any vulgar promenading (for they all drive), that you see the fine women of Cairo. Mostly French they are, and beautiful indeed, dressed as aptly and with as much artistry as in Alexandria; and that is saying the last word. There you will see a galaxy of beauty—not in any facetious or popular sense, but actually. It's a privilege to stand an hour in any such house and watch the procession: a privilege that does you good. The Frenchwomen of Cairo perform very naturally and capably the duty of matching their beauty. They have an unerring æsthetic sense, and evidently realise well enough that to dress well and harmoniously is a form of art almost as pure as the painting of pictures.

But we were in the Mooski, where the art is not so purely practised. The Egyptian women do not dress beautifully nor harmoniously. They dress with extreme ugliness; their colours outrage the sense at every turn. Only the extreme beauty of their features and clarity of complexion save them from repulsiveness. The glaring fabrics of the blue bazaar express well the Egyptian feminine taste in colour.

The book bazaar leads up towards the Mosque al Azhar. The books are all hand-made. Here is the paradise of the librarian who wails for the elimination of machine-made rubbish of the modern Press. At any such work the Egyptian mechanic excels in patience and thoroughness. Making books by hand is, in fact, an ideal form of labour for him, as is hand-weaving, which still prevails, and the designing and chiselling of the silver and brass work. Al Koran is here in all stages of production; and with propriety there is a lecture-hall in the midst of the book bazaar, which is, so to speak, "within" the Al Azhar University close by. A lecture is being delivered. The speaker squats on a tall stool and delivers himself with vigour to the audience seated on the mat-strewn floor. Well dressed and well featured they are, jotting notes rather more industriously than in most Colonial halls of learning, or listening with an intensity that is almost pained.

The Moslem University in the Mosque al Azhar has a fine old front designed with a grace and finished in a mellowness of colour that any Oxonian College might respect. You show a proper respect—whether you will or no—by donning the capacious slippers over your boots, as in visiting any other mosque, and enter the outer court, filled with the junior students. The hum and clatter rises to a mild roar. All are seated in circular groups, usually about a loud and gesticulating teacher; and where there is no teacher the students are swaying gently in a rhythmic accompaniment to the drone with which Al Koran is being got by heart. There is no concerted recitation or repetition: every man for himself. That, perhaps, helps to visualise the swaying mass of students and to conceive the babel of sound. There is no roof above that tarbushed throng. This is the preparatory school. The University proper, beyond the partition, containing the adult students, alone is roofed. Here they are all conning in the winter sunshine. Little attention is given to visitors; most students are droning with closed eyes, presumably to avert distraction. Few are aware of your presence. That consciousness is betrayed chiefly by a furtively whispered "Baksheesh!"—the national watchword of Egypt—uttered with a strange incongruity in a temple of learning—a temple literally.

Beyond, in the adult schools, you will hear no mention of baksheesh, except from the high-priest of the Temple, the sheikh of the University, who demands it with dignity, as due in the nature of a temple-offering, but appropriated (you know) by himself and for his own purposes. Any knowledge of a British University renders this place interesting indeed by sheer virtue of comparison. The Koran is the only textbook—of literature, of history, of ethics, and philosophy in general: a wonderful book, indeed, and a reverend. What English book will submit successfully to such a test?...

Here is the same droning by heart and the same rhythmic, absorbed accompaniment, but in a less degree. The lecturer is more frequent and more animated in gesture and more loud and dogmatic in utterance. Declamation of the most vigorous kind is the method with him, and rapt attention with the undergraduates. The lecturers are invariably past middle age, and with flowing beards, and as venerable in feature as the Jerusalem doctors. The groups of students are small—as a rule, four or five. Yet the teachers speak as loud as to an audience of two hundred. The method here is that of the University semina: that is to say, small, and seemingly select, groups of students; frequent, almost incessant, interrogation by the student; and discussion that is very free and well sustained. The class-rooms, defined by low partitions, go by race, each with its national lecturers.

Within the building are the tombs of former sheikhs, enclosed and looked upon with reverence. These approximate to tablets to pious founders. The sheikh will tell you that, as he puts it, the Sultan pays for the education of all students: he is their patron. That is to say, in plain English, the University is State-controlled and State-supported. Moreover, the students sleep there. You may see their bedding piled on rafters. It is laid in the floor of the lecture-room at night.

When you have delivered over baksheesh to the sheikh and to the conductor and to the attendants who remove your slippers at exit, you move down to the brass and silver bazaar. Here is some of the most characteristic work you'll see in Egypt. Every vessel, every bowl and tray and pot, is Egyptian in shape or chiselled design, or both. As soon as you enter you are offered tea, and the bargaining begins, although Prix Fixé is the ubiquitous sign. It is in the fixed-price shops that the best bargains are struck, which is at one with the prevailing Egyptian disregard for truth. The best brass bazaars have their own workshops attached. Labour is obviously cheap—cheap in any case, but especially cheap when you consider that at least half the workers in brass and silver are the merest boys. Whatever may be the Egyptian judgment in colour, the Egyptian instinct for form is sound; for these boys of eight and ten execute elaborate and responsible work in design. They are entrusted with "big jobs," and they do them well. There is almost no sketching-out of the design for chisel work; the youngster takes his tool and eats-out the design without preliminaries. And much of it makes exacting demands upon the sense of symmetry. This is one of the most striking evidences of the popular artistic sense. The national handwriting is full of grace; the national music is of highly developed rhythm; and the national feeling for form and symmetry is unimpeachable.

You need more self-control in these enchanting places than the confirmed drinker in the neighbourhood of a pub. Unless you restrain yourself with an iron self-discipline, you'll exhaust all your feloose. The event rarely shows you to emerge with more than your railway-fare back to camp. But under your arm are treasures that are priceless—except in the eyes of the salesman. You trek to the post office and send off to Australia wares that are a joy for ever. And there you find on the same errand officers and privates and Sisters. There is a satisfied air about them, as of a good deed done and money well spent, as who should say: "I may squander time, and sometimes I squander money and energy in this Land; but in this box is that which will endure when peace has descended, and purses are tattered, and Egypt is a memory at the Antipodes."

BOOK II

GALLIPOLI

CHAPTER I

THE JOURNEY

We were given twelve hours to collect bag and baggage and clear out from Abbassieh. It was a night of alarms and excursions. In the midst of it all came a home-mail. That was one of many occasions on which one in His Majesty's service is forced to postpone the luxury of perusal. Sometimes a mail will come in and be distributed just before the "Fall-in" is blown. This means carrying about the budget unopened and burning a hole in the pocket for a half-day—and more. In this case the mail was read in the train next morning. We were out of camp at sunrise, with the waggons ahead. By eight o'clock we had taken leave of this fair-foul, repulsive yet fascinating city, and were sweeping across the waving rice-fields of the delta towards the city of Alexandria.

We arrived about mid-day. The urgency of the summons had justified the inference that we should embark directly. Not so. We entered what was technically known as a rest camp at Gabbari. Rest camps had been established at various points about the city to accommodate temporarily the British and French expeditions then arriving daily en route to the Dardanelles. The time was not yet ripe for a landing. Here was the opportunity to stretch the legs—of both men and horses, and of the mules from Spain.

At no stage even of the classical occupation of Egypt—or thereafter—could the inner harbour of Alexandria have given more vividly the impression of the imminence of war. It was crammed with transports, ranged in long lines, with here and there a battle-cruiser between. As many as could come alongside the Quay at one time were busily disembarking troops (mostly French), which streamed down the gangways in their picturesque uniforms and moved off in column through the city to the camps on the outskirts. The moral effect of such processions upon the Egyptians could hardly be over-estimated. Long queues of Arab scows ranged along the railway wharf, taking ammunition and moving off to the troopships. Day and night the harbour was dotted with launches tearing from transport to transport bearing officers of the General Staff. As for the city—the streets, the restaurants, the theatres and music-halls, fairly teemed with soldiers; and civilian traffic constantly gave way before the gharries of officers—and of men.

Many French were in our camp. There was something admirable in them, hard to define. There was a sober, almost pathetic, restraint amongst them—beside the Australians, which was as much as to suggest that what they had seen and known through their proximity to the War in Europe had had its effect. It could hardly be temperamental in the vivacious French. They were not maudlin; and on rare occasions, infected by the effervescing spirits of the Australians, would come into the mess-hut at night and dance or chant the Marseillaise in unison with the melody of a French accordion. But in general they seemed too much impressed with the nature and the possibilities of their mission for jollification. They showed a simple and honest affection amongst themselves. The Australians may—and do—have it, but it is concealed under their knack of mutual banter and of argument. The French love each other and do not shame to show it. Riding in the car a man would fling his arm about his friend; in the streets they would link arms to stroll. Very pathetic and very sincere and affectionate are the French fighters.

The evenings off duty were precious and well earned and well spent. Little can be seen of the city at night, except its people. The best way of seeing them as they are is to take two boon companions from the camp, ride to town, and instal yourselves in an Egyptian café for the night, containing none but Egyptians, except yourselves; invite three neighbours to join you in coffee and a hubble-bubble. They'll talk English and are glad of your company. At the cost of a few piastres (a pipe costs one, and lasts two hours, and a cup of coffee a half) you have their conversation and the finest of smokes and cup after cup of the best Mocha. This is no mean entertainment.

This kind of thing developed into a nocturnal habit, until the Italian opera-season opened at the Alhambra. We sat with the gods for five piastres ("a bob"). The gods were worth that in themselves to sit amongst. The gallery is always interesting, even in Australia; but where the gods are French, Russian, Italian, English, Jewish, Greek, and Egyptian, the intervals become almost as interesting as the acts, and there is little temptation to saunter out between them....

But all theatres and all cafés were for us cut short abruptly by the order to embark.

The refugee camp at Alexandria made its contribution. One had been galled daily by the sight of strong men trapesing to and from the city or lounging in the quarters provided by a benevolent Government. This resentment was in a sense illogical: they had their wives and their babies, and were no more due to fight than many strong Britishers bound to remain at home. But the notion of refugee-men constantly got dissociated from that of their dependents. It was chiefly the thought of virile idleness under Government almsgiving that troubled you. Eventually it troubled them too; for they enlisted almost in a body and went to Cairo for training. The Government undertook to look after the women.

We found them fellow-passengers on our trooper. They were mostly young, all from Jaffa, in Palestine. Seemingly they marry young and are fathers at twenty. They brought three hundred mules with them, and were called the Zion Mule Transport Company. It is a curious name. They were there to carry water and food to the firing-line.

Their wives and mothers incontinently came to the wharf to see them leave. Poor fellows! Poor women! They wailed as the women of Israel wail in Scripture, as only Israelitish women can wail. The Egyptian police kept them back with a simulated harshness, and supported them from falling. Many were physically helpless. Their men broke into a melancholy chant as we moved off, and sustained it, as the ship passed out over the laughing water, until we reached the outer-harbour. They got frolicsome soon, and forgot their women's weeping. We stood steadily out into the rich blue Mediterranean. The Zionites fell to the care of their beasts. By the time the level western rays burned on the blue we had the geography of the ship, and had ceased speculation as to the geography of our destination—except in its detail. We knew we should run up through the Sporades: it was enough for us that we were about to enter the Eastern theatre of war. That was an absorbing prospect. To enter the field of this War at any point was a prospect to set you aglow. But the East had become the cynosure of all eyes. No one thought much about the sporadic duelling in the frozen West. The world's interest in the game was centred about the Black Sea entrance. It was the Sick Man of Europe in his stronghold that should be watched: is he to persist in his noisome existence, or is the community of Europe to be cleansed of him for ever?

But before reaching the zone in which an attempt was being made to decide that we were to thread a course through the magical Archipelago. All the next day we looked out on the beauty of the water, unbroken to the horizon. The men of Zion did their work and we took charge of their fatigues. They cleaned the ship, fed and watered their mules, and resumed their military training on the boat-deck. The initiative of the Australian soldier is amazing. Abstractly it is so; but put him beside a mob from Jaffa (or, better, put him over them) and he is a masterful fellow. The Jews leap to his command. Our fellows found a zest in providing that not one unit in the mass should by strategy succeed in loafing. Diamond cut diamond in every corner of the holds and the alley-ways. The language of the Australian soldier in repose is vigorous; put him in charge of fatigue and his lips are touched as with a live-coal—but from elsewhere than off the altar. He is commonly charged with poverty in his range of oaths. Never believe it. The boss and his fatigue were mutually unintelligible—verbally, that is. But actually, there was no shadow of misunderstanding. Oaths aptly ripped out are universally intelligible, and oaths here were supplemented with gesture. There was no injustice done. The Australian is no bully.

The Jerusalem brigade, though young men, were adults, but adults strangely childish in their play and conversation. It was with the eagerness of a child rather than with the earnestness of a man that they attacked their drill. They knew nothing of military discipline, even less of military drill. Their sergeant-major made one son of Israel a prisoner for insubordination. He blubbered like a child. Great tears coursed down as he was led oft to the "clink." The door closed after him protesting and entreating. This is at one with the abandoned wailing of their women.

Drill must be difficult for them. The instruction was administered in English; The men, who speak nothing but an admixture of Russian, Hebrew, German, and Arabic, understood not a word of command or explanation. They learned by association purely. They made feverish and exaggerated efforts, and really did well. But of the stability and deliberative coolness of a learning-man they had not a trace. This childish method of attack never will make fighters. But they are not to fight. They are to draw food and water. As a matter of form they are issued with rifles—Mausers taken from the Turks on the Canal.

At evening of the second day out we got abreast of Rhodes, with Karpathos on the port-bow. Rhodes stood afar off: would we had come nearer! The long darkening streak of Karpathos was our real introduction to the Archipelago. All night we ploughed through the maze of islands. "Not bad for the old man," said the second-mate next day; "he's never been here before, and kept going through a muddy night." The night had been starless. And when morning broke we lay off Chios, with a horrible tempest brewing in the north.

A storm was gathering up in the black bosom of Chios. Here were no smiling wine-clad slopes, no fair Horatian landscape. All that seemed somehow past. A battle-cruiser lay half a mile ahead. She had been expecting us, together with two other transports and a hospital-ship in our wake. A black and snaky destroyer bore down from far ahead, belched past us, turned in her own length abreast of the transports, flashed a Morse message to the cruiser across the darkening water, and we gathered round her. She called up each in turn by semaphore: "Destroyer will escort you westward"; and left us.

The journey began again. There was not a breath of wind; no beam of sunlight. The water was sullen. The islands were black masses, ill-defined and forbidding. This introduction to the theatre of war was apt. We were bearing up into the heart of the Sporades in an atmosphere surcharged and menacing. No storm came. It was the worse for that. Gone were the golden "isles that crown the Ægean deep" beloved of Byron. Long strata of smoke from the ships of war lay low over the water, transecting their shapes.

After lunch the sun shone out. In the middle afternoon we came west of Skyros, and left our transports there. They were French: Skyros is the French base. At the end of the lovely island we turned east and set our course for Lemnos. It was ten before the lights of Lemnos twinkled through the blackness. At 10.30 we dropped anchor in the outer harbour of Mudros Bay. The light on the northern horn turned and flashed—turned and flashed upon us. Inside the boom a cruiser played her searchlight, sweeping the zone of entrance. A French submarine stole under our bows and cried "All's well," and we turned in to sleep.

We were up before the dawn to verify the conjectures as to land and water hazarded in the darkness and the cruiser's pencil of light. At sunrise we moved in through the boom. Here were the signs of war indeed: a hundred and fifty transports lying at their moorings; a dozen cruisers before; the tents of the Allies clothing the green slopes.

Lemnos is beautiful. The harbour is long and winds amongst the uplands. We were anchored beside an islet, flecked with the colour of wild-flowers blooming as prodigally as the Greeks said they did when they sailed these seas. The slopes about the shore were clothed with crops and vines. Behind were grey hills of granite.

In Mudros we lay a week, waiting, waiting. Let the spot be lovely as you will, waiting is not good with the sound of the guns coming down on the wind day and night. Our fifth morning on Lemnos was the Sabbath. We woke to the soft boom of naval guns. Lemnos is a goodish sail from the straits. The "boom, boom," was a low, soft growl, felt rather than heard. The day before, at sundown, the first trooper of the fleet had gone out, with band playing, to the cheering of the cruisers. The Army and Navy have always in this campaign, shown themselves happily complementary. A seaplane escorted them out aloft, two cruisers below. Great was the rejoicing at the beginning of the exodus.

Next morning we left the mules of Zion and transferred to a store-ship. She lay two days. We solaced ourselves with bathing in the clear bay from the ship's side, and basking nude, with our pipes, afterwards in the pleasant heat of the spring sun; with visits to the shore, where we wandered into the Greek Church, in size and magnificence of decoration out of all consonance with its neighbouring villages, and where the wine of Lemnos might be drunk for a penny a glass; with bargaining at the boats that drew alongside from the shore, as at Aden, filled with nuts, figs, dates, Egyptian delight—all the old stock, except Greeks, who manned them here. The dwellers on Lemnos are all Greeks.... Would we never move?

On the seventh day at noon the naval cutter ran alongside. In half an hour we were moving through the boom. As soon as we had cleared the south-east corner of the island, Imbros stood out to port, and Tenedos, our destination, lay dead ahead, under the mountains of Turkey in Asia. A fresh breeze blew out of the Dardanelles, thunder-laden with the roar of the guns, and every heave of our bow brought it down more clear. Before sundown we were abreast of Tenedos and had sighted the aeroplane station and had seen five of the great amphibious planes come to earth. As we swung round to a view of the straits' mouth, every eye was strained for the visible signs of what we had been hearing so long. The straits lay murky under the smoke of three days' firing. The first flash was sighted—with what a quickening of the pulse! In three minutes we had the lay of the discharges and the bursts. An attempt was made to muster a fall-in aft for the first issue of tobacco ration. Not a man moved! The attempt was postponed until we should have seen enough of these epoch-making flashes. "We can get tobacco at home—without paying for it; you don't see cruisers spitting shrapnel every day at Port Philip!" At length two ranks got formed-up—one for cigarettes (appropriately, the rear), the front rank for those who smoked pipes. Oh, degenerates!—the rear was half as long again! Two ounces of medium-Capstan per man—in tins; four packets of cigarettes: that was our momentous first issue.

The bombardment went on, ten miles off. No one wanted tea. At 7.30 the Major half-ordered a concert aft. Everyone went. It was really a good concert, almost free of martial songs. But here and there you'd find a man sneak off to the bows to watch the line of spurting flame in the north; and many an auditor, looking absently at the singer, knew as little of the theme as of the havoc those shells were working in the night.

We lay three days at Tenedos: so near and yet so far from the forts of the Dardanelles. We could see two in ruins on the toe of Gallipoli, and one tottering down the heights of the Asiatic shore at the entrance to the straits. But the straits ran at a right-angle with the shore under which we lay. We could see the bombarding fleet lying off the mouth. We could see them fire, but no result. What more tantalising?

We lay alongside Headquarters ship, loaded with the Directing Staff. H.Q. moved up and down, at safe distances, between us and the firing-line. We were one of an enormously large waiting fleet of transports and storeships. The impression of war was vivid: here was this waiting fleet, and tearing up and down the coast were destroyers and cruisers without number, and aloft, the whirring seaplanes.

Our moving-in orders came at three on an afternoon. This was the heart-shaking move; for we were to sail up, beyond the mouth, to an anchorage off the Anzac position. We were to see in detail everything that we had, for the last three days, seen as an indistinct whole. We were to pass immediately behind the firing-line, to test the speculations we had been making day and night upon what was in progress, upon the geography of the fighting zone, upon the operations within the mouth. Every yard was a step farther in our voyage of discovery.

The demolitions became plain. The ports on the water's edge had toppled over "in a confused welter of ruin." Such wall as still stood gaped with ghastly vents. These had been the first to come under fire, and the cruisers had done their work with a thoroughness that agreed well with the traditional deliberation of the British Navy. And thorough work was in progress.

Far up the straits' entrance lay the black lines of gunboats. We moved up the coast past an ill-starred village: the guns were at her from the open sea. By sundown we had passed from this scene of action to another, at —— Beach, where the Australians had landed. The heights above —— Beach were the scene of an engagement far more fierce than any we had seen below. The Turks were strongly posted in the shrubs of the Crest. Our batteries were hardly advanced beyond the beach, and were getting it hot. Night was coming on. A biting wind was blowing off the land, bringing down a bitter rain from the hills of the interior. It was almost too cold to stand in our bows and watch: what for those poor devils juggling shell at the batteries and falling under the rain of fire? After dark there was an hour's lull. At nine o'clock began a two hours' engagement hot enough to make any fighter on shore oblivious of the temperature. Towards midnight the firing ceased and the rain and the wind abated.

CHAPTER II

GLIMPSES OF ANZAC

I

It's the monotony that kills; not hard work, nor hard fare. We have now been disembarked on the Peninsula rather longer than three months. But there has been little change in our way of living. Every day there is the same work on the same beach, shelled by the same guns, manned by the same Turks—presumably the same; for we never seem to knock-out those furtive and deadly batteries that enfilade the Cove Beach and maim or kill—or both—almost daily. Every morning we look out on the same stretch of the lovely Ægean, with the same two islands standing over in the west.

Yet neither the islands nor the sea are the same any two successive days. The temper of the Ægean, at this time, changes more suddenly and frequently than ever does the Pacific. That delicious Mediterranean colour, of which we used to read sceptically, and which we half disbelieved in J.M. Turner's pictures, changes in the quality of its hue almost hourly. And every morning the islands of the west take on fresh colour and are trailed by fresh shapes of mist. The atmosphere deludes, in the matter of distance, as though pranking for the love of deception. To-day Imbros stands right over-against you; you see the detail of the fleet in the harbour, and the striated heights of rocky Samothrace reveal the small ravines; to-morrow in the early-morning light—but more often towards evening—Imbros lies mysteriously afar off like an isle of the blest, a delicate vapour-shape reposing on the placid sea.

Nor is there monotony in either weather or temperature. This is the late October. Late October synchronises with late autumn. Yet it is a halting and irregular advance the late autumn is making. Changes in temperature are as incalculable as at Melbourne, in certain seasons. Fierce, biting, raw days alternate with the comfortableness of the mild late-summer. To-day to bathe is as much as your life is worth (shrapnel disregarded); to-morrow, in the gentle air, you may splash and gloat an hour, and desire more. And you prolong the joy by washing many garments.

The Ægean autumn has yet shown little bitterness. Here on Anzac we have suffered the tail-end of one or two autumn storms, and have had two fierce and downright gales blow up. The wind came in the night with a suddenness that found most unprepared. There was little rain; insufficient to allay the maelstroms of choking dust that whirled over our ploughed and powdered ridges. In half an hour many of us were homeless, crouching about with our bundled bed-clothes, trespassing tyrannically upon the confined space of the more stout dug-outs of our friends: a sore tax upon true friendship. Men lay on their backs and held down their roofs by mere weight of body, until overpowered. Spectral figures in the driving atmosphere collided and wrangled and swore and blasphemed. The sea roared over the shingle with a violence that made even revilings inaudible. It was a night for Lear to be out. Men had, for weeks, in spare time, been formally preparing dug-outs against the approach of winter, but they were unprepared for weather of such violence. And if this is a taste of the quality of winter storms, the warning comes timely.

For the morning showed a sorry beach. Barges had been torn adrift from moorings and trawlers, and hurled ashore. Some were empty; some were filled with supplies; all were battered; some disabled; some utterly broken. One was filled with rum. Never before, on active service, had such a chance of unlimited spirits offered. Many jars had been spirited away when the time of unlading came. There were riotous faces and super-merriment on the beach that morning; and by mid-day the "clink" was overflowing. Far more serious was the state of the landing-piers. There were—there had been—three. One stood intact; the landward half of the second was clean gone; of the third there was no trace, except in a few splintered spars ashore. A collective grin overlooked the beach that morning at the time of rising. The General grinned too—a sort of dogged grin. The remedying began forthwith; so did the bursting of shrapnel over the workmen. This stroke of Allah upon the Unfaithful was not to go unsupplemented. But it was as with the unhappy Armada: the winds of heaven wrought more havoc than the enemy guns. By nightfall the abridged pier was re-united to the shore—and this in spite of a sea that made it impossible for barges to come alongside. For two days the after-wind of the gale kept bread and meat and mails tossing on the face of the waters off Anzac; and we fed on bully-beef and biscuit, and eyed wistfully the mail-trawler pitching there with her precious burden.

The arrival of mails eclipses considerations of life and death—of fighting and the landing of rations. The mail-barge coming in somehow looms larger than a barge of supplies. Mails have been arriving weekly for six months, yet no one is callous to them. Sometimes they come twice in a week; for a fresh mail is despatched from the base post-office in instalments which may spread over three or four landings. The Army Corps Post Office never rests. Most mails are landed between sunset and dawn—generally after midnight. Post-office officials must be there to supervise and check. It's little sleep they get on "mail nights." Incoming mails do not constitute all their cares. Mails outgoing from the firing-line are heavy. And there are the pathetic "returns" to be dealt with, the letters of men who will never read them—letters written before the heavy news had got home. It is a huge bulk of correspondence marked Killed and re-addressed to the place of origin of the fallen. Their comrades keep their newspapers. Usually the parcels of comforts directed to them bring melancholy cheer to their still fighting comrades in arms. What else is to be done with them?

Of incoming mails letters stand inevitably first. They put a man at home for a couple of hours. But so does his local newspaper. Perusing that, he is back at the old matutinal habit of picking at the news over his eggs-and-coffee, racing against the suburban business-train. Intimate associations hang about the reading of the local sheet—domestic and parochial associations almost as powerful as are brought to him by letters. Relatives at home, did they know this fully, would despatch newspapers with a stricter regularity.

And what shall be said of parcels from home? The boarding-school home-hamper is at last superseded. No son away at grammar-school ever pursued his voyage of discovery through tarts, cakes and preserves, sweets, pies and fruit, with the intensity of gloating expectation in which a man on Gallipoli discloses the contents of his "parcel": "'Struth! a noo pipe, Bill!—an' some er the ole terbaccer. Blimey! cigars, too! 'Ave one, before the crowd smells 'em. D——d if there ain't choclut! look 'ere! An' 'ere's some er the dinkum coc'nut ice the tart uster make. Hullo! more socks! Never mind: winter's comin'.—'Ere! 'ow er yer orf fer socks, cobber? Take these—bonzer 'and-knitted. Sling them issue-things inter the sea.... I'm b——d!—soap fer the voy'ge 'ome.... 'Angkerch'fs!—orl right when the —— blizzerds come, an' a chap's snifflin' fer a ——in' week on end.... Writin' paper!—well, that's the straight —— tip! The ——s er bin puttin' it in me letters lately, too. Well, I'll write ter night, on the stren'th of it.... Gawd! 'ere's a shavin'-stick!—'andy, that; I wuz clean run out—usin' carbolic soap, —— it!... Aw, that's a dinkum —— parcel, that is!"

"Bonzer tarts" (and others) may infer that a parcel is as a gift from the gods, and carries more than "its intrinsic worth." Such treasures as the 'and-knitted socks and coc'nut ice bring home rather more near than it ever comes to the man who has no part in the parcel mail.

Mails deserve all the organised care the War-Office can bestow; they make for efficiency.

There is no morning delivery of the daily newspaper at Anzac. But we get the news. At the foot of Headquarters gully is the notice-board. The wireless messages are posted daily. At any hour men are elbowing a way into the perusing circle. There is news of the operations along our own Front and copious messages from the Eiffel Tower of the Russian and Western Fronts. The Melbourne Cup finish was cabled through immediately. The sports foregathered and collected or "shelled out"; there were few men indeed who did not handle their purses round the board that evening. No war news, for months, had been so momentous as this. The associations called up by the news from the Australian Mecca at Flemington, whither the whole continent makes annual pilgrimage, were strong, and homely as well as national. All the detail of the little annual domestic sweeps at the breakfast-table came back with a pathetic nearness. Men were recalled for a while from the land of blood to the office, the bank, the warehouse, the country pub., the shearing-shed, where the Cup bets were wont to be made. Squatters' sons were back at the homestead making the sweeps. The myriad-sided sporting spirit is perhaps stronger than any other Australian national trait. The Defence-Department knew it when they made provision for a cabled despatch of the running.

Three weeks ago began the flight of birds before the Russian winter. They came over thick, in wedge formation, swallowing up, in their hoarse cries, the crack of rifles over the ridges, from which, otherwise, only the roar of a half-gale delivers us, day or night. Over Anzac—which seemed to mark a definite stage in the journey—they showed a curious indecision as to direction. Possibly they were interested in the bird's-eye view of the disposal of forces. They wheeled and re-formed into grotesque figures; men would stop in their work and try to decipher the pattern. "That's a W."—"Yes; and what's that?"—"Oh, that?" (after a crafty pause)—"that's one er them Turkish figgers—'member them in Cairo?"

The flight of birds south is surely the most reliable of all forecasts as to what we may expect in temperatures. Yet the official account, published for the information of troops, of the traditional weather between October and March shows we need expect nothing unreasonably severe before the middle of January; but that then will come heavy snow-storms and thoroughgoing blizzards. Furthermore, men are advised to instruct their sisters to send Cardigans, sweets in plenty, and much tobacco. Amen to this; we shall instruct them faithfully.

Meanwhile the systematic fortification of dug-outs against damp and cold goes on.

We foresee, unhappily, the winter robbing us of the boon of daily bathing. This is a serious matter. The morning splash has come to be indispensable. Daily at 6.30 you have been used to see the bald pate of General Birdwood bobbing beyond the sunken barge in shore, and a host of nudes lining the beach. The host is diminishing to a few isolated fellows who either are fanatics or are come down from the trenches and must clear up a vermin- and dust-infested skin at all costs. Naturally we prefer to bathe at mid-day, rather than at 6.30, when the sun has not got above the precipitous ridges of Sari Bair. But the early morning dip is almost the only safe one. The beach is still enfiladed by Turkish artillery from the right flank. But times are better; formerly both flanks commanded us. The gun on the right continues to harass. He is familiarly known as Beachy Bill. That on the left went by a name intended for the ears of soldiers only. Beachy Bill is, in fact, merely the collective name for a whole battery, capable of throwing over five shell simultaneously. Not infrequently Beachy Bill catches a mid-morning bathing squad. There is ducking and splashing shorewards, and scurrying over the beach to cover by men clad only in the garments Nature gave them. Shrapnel bursting above the water in which you are disporting yourself raises chiefly the question: Will it ever stop? By this you, of course, mean: Will the pellets ever cease to whip the water? The interval between the murderous lightning-burst aloft and the last pellet-swish seems, to the potential victim, everlasting. The suspense always is trying.

The times and the seasons of Beachy Bill are inscrutable. Earlier on, the six o'clock bather was not safe. Now he is almost prepared to bet upon his chances. Possibly an enemy gun is by this time aware that there goes on now less than heretofore of that stealthy night discharge of lighters which used to persist beyond the dawn—until the job was finished.

Wonderful is the march of organisation. It appreciably improves daily, under your eyes—organisation in mule transport to the flanks, in the landing of supplies, in the local distribution of rations; the last phase perhaps most obvious, because it comes home close to the business and bosoms of the troops. Where, a month ago, we languished on tinned beef and biscuit, we now rejoice daily in fresh meat, bread, milk, and (less frequently) fresh vegetables. It all becomes better than one dared to expect: a beef-steak and toast for breakfast, soup for dinner, boiled mutton for tea. This is all incredibly good. Yet the sickness diminishes little. Colic, enteric, dysentery, jaundice, are still painfully prevalent, and our sick are far-flung and thick over Lemnos, Egypt, Malta, and England. So long as flies and the unburied persist, we cannot well be delivered. But the wastage in sick men deported is near to being alarming.

A regimental canteen on Imbros does much to compensate. Unit representatives proceed thence weekly by trawler for stores. One feels almost in the land of the living when, within fifteen miles, lie tinned fruit, butter, coffee, cocoa, tinned sausages, sauces, chutneys, pipes, "Craven" mixture and chocolate. Such a répertoire, combined with a monthly visit from the Paymaster, removes one far from the commissariat hardships of the Crimea.

The visualising of unstinted civilian meals is a prevalent pastime here. Men sit at the mouths of their dug-outs and relate the minutiæ of the first dinner at home. Some men excel in this. They do it with a carnal power of graphic description which makes one fairly pine. I have heard a Colonel-Chaplain talk for two hours of nothing but grub, and at the end convincingly exempt himself from the charge of carnal-mindedness. Truly we are a people whose god is their belly. One never realised, until this period of enforced deprivation, the whole meaning of the classical fable of the Belly and the Members.

Yet in the last analysis (all this talk is largely so much artistry) one is amazingly free from the hankering after creature-comforts. There is a sort of rough philosophy abroad to scorn delights and live laborious days. Those delights embraced by the use of good tobacco and deliverance from vermin at nights are the most desired; both hard to procure. There is somehow a great gulf fixed between the civilian quality of any tobacco and the make-up of the same brand for the Army. (The Arcadia mixture is unvarying, but cannot always be had.) This ought not to be. Once in six months a friend in Australia despatches a parcel of cigars. Therein lies the entrance to a fleeting paradise—fleeting indeed when one's comrades have sniffed or ferreted out the key. After all, the pipe, with reasonably good tobacco, gives the entrée to the paradise farthest removed from that of the fool. One harks back to the words of Lytton: "He who does not smoke tobacco either has never known any great sorrow or has rejected the sweetest consolation under heaven."

Of the plague of nocturnal vermin little needs be said explicitly. The locomotion of the day almost dissipates the evil. It makes night hideous. One needs but think of the ravages open to one boarding-house imp amongst the sheets, to form some crude notion of what havoc may be wrought at night by a vermin whose name is legion. Keating's powder is not "sold by all chemists and storekeepers" on the Peninsula. One would give a week's pay for an effective dose of insectibane.

The tendency is to retire late, and thus abridge the period of persecution. There is the balm of weariness, too, against which no louse is altogether proof. One's friends "drop in" for a yarn and a smoke after tea, and the dreaded hour of turning in is postponed by reminiscent chit-chat and the late preparation of supper. One renews here a surprising bulk of old acquaintance, and the changes are nightly rung upon its personnel. All this makes against the plagues of vermin; and against the monotony that kills, too. Old college chums are dug out, and one talks back and lives a couple of hours in the glory of days that have passed and in the brighter glory of a potential re-entry to the old life. Believe it not that there is no deliverance possible from the hardness of active service, even in its midst. The retrospect, and the prospect, and the ever-present faculty of visualisation, are ministering angels sent to minister.

Rude interruptions come in upon such attempts at self-deliverance. Enemy aircraft make nocturnal bomb-dropping raids and rudely dissipate prospect and retrospect. One harbours a sneaking regard for the pluckily low elevation at which these night flights are made. Happily, they have yet made few casualties.... On a ridge above us stands a factory for the manufacture of bombs and hand grenades. Every night mules are laden there for the trenches. One evening a restive mule, ramping about, thrust his heel through a case of bombs adjacent. They responded with a roar that shook the hill-side. Three other cases were set going. At once the slopes and gullies were peopled by thinly clad figures from the dug-outs rushing to and fro in astonishment. The immediate inference was of enemy missiles: no one suspected our own bomb factory. The most curious conjectures were abroad. One fellow bawled that the Turks had broken our line and were bombing us from the ridge above; another shouted that Zeppelins had crept over; one man cried that the cruiser, at that moment working under her searchlight on enemy positions, had "messed up" the angle of elevation and was pouring high-explosive into us. Shouting and lanterns and the call for stretcher-bearers about the bomb factory soon disclosed the truth. The festive mule, with three companions, had been literally blown to pieces; next morning chunks of mule were lying about our depôt. The worst was that our own men were killed and shattered. This was ghastly. Is it not enough to be laid low by enemy shell?

Yet the work of enemy shell on this beach is peculiarly horrible. Men are struck down suddenly and unmercifully where there is no heat of battle. A man dies more easily in the charge; here he is wounded mortally unloading a barge, mending a pier, drawing water for his unit, directing a mule-convoy. He may even lose a limb or his life off duty—merely returning from a bathe or washing a shirt on the shingle.

One of our men was struck by shrapnel pellet retiring to his dug-out to read his just-delivered mail. He was off duty—was, in fact, far up the ridge above the beach. The wound gaped in his back. There was no stanching it. Every thump of the aorta pumped out his life. Practically he was a dead man when struck; he lived but a few minutes, with his pipe, still steaming, clenched in his teeth. They laid him aside in the hospital. That night we stood about the grave in which he lay beneath his ground-sheet. Over that wind-swept headland the moon shone fitfully through driving cloud. A monitor bombarded offshore. Under her friendly-screaming shell and the singing bullets of the Turk the worn, big-hearted Padré intoned the beautiful Catholic intercession for the soul of the dead, in his cracked voice. At the burial of Sir John Moore was heard the distant and random gun. Here the shell do sometimes burst in the midst of the burial-party. Bearers are laid low. There is indecent running for cover. The grave is hastily filled in by a couple of shovelmen; the hideous desecration is over; and fresh graves are to be dug immediately for stricken members of the party. To die violently and be laid in this shell-swept area is to die lonely indeed. The day is far off (but it will come) when splendid mausolea will be raised over these heroic dead. And one foresees the time when steamers will bear up the Ægean pilgrims come to do honour at the resting-places of friends and kindred, and to move over the charred battle-grounds of Turkey.

There is more than shrapnel to be contended with on the beach, though shrapnel takes far the heaviest toll. Taube flights over the position are frequent by day, and bombs are dropped. The intermittent sobbing shriek of a descending bomb is unmistakable and heart-shaking. You know the direction of shrapnel; you know in which direction the hellish shower will spread; there is time for lightning calculation and action. But a bomb gives little indication of its degree of proximity, and with it there is no "direction" of burst; a circle of death hurtles forth from the missile. No calculation is possible as to a way of escape.

Taube bombs and machine-gun bullets are not the only missiles from above of which it behoves Anzac denizens to beware. Men are struck by pellets and shell-case from the shrapnel discharged at our 'planes from Turkish anti-aircraft guns. Our aircraft is fired at very consistently. There is a temptation to stand gaping there, face to the sky, watching their fortunes. Such temptation comes from below, and should not be yielded to—unless our 'planes are vertically overhead or on our west. If they are circling over the Turkish position, take cover; for "what goes up must come down," according to the formula accompanying a schoolboy trick; and shrapnel discharged at 'planes on your eastern elevation may as well come down on your altruistically-inquisitive head as bury in the earth beside you.

To all such onslaughts from aloft and around most men show an indifference that is fairly consistent. The impression is left with you that there is quite a large number of them who have "come to terms with themselves" on the subject of an eventuality of whatever nature, and this is abundantly clear when you see them after their tragedy has eventuated. There is little visible panic in the victims in any dressing station, little evidence of astonishment, little restlessness. Men lie there quiet under the thrusts and turns of the sword of pain, steadfast in the attitude of no-compromise with suffering. To this exceptions will be found; all men have not reckoned up squarely and accurately beforehand the cost of all emergencies that are possible. But most of them have.

CHAPTER III

GLIMPSES OF ANZAC

II

A whole legion of Gallipoli maps has been published in the Press. They show the landing-places. All Australians know the Anzac positions where their sons and brothers scrambled from the boats, splashed to the fatal sand, and fell forthwith or fixed the steel and charged to conquer or fall above. This spot, where Australians showed the world what manner of man is nurtured beneath the Southern Cross, is fair to look on. We saw it first from the sea, in the full burst of the spring. Literature, ancient and Byronic, glows with the beauties of the Ægean spring. It's all true. Anzac is reckoned a true type of that loveliness. The charge was made up a steep ridged hill opening upon an irregular tableland. Either flank of that hill is gently undulating low country. The thin belt of light sand fronts all. The deep wild-flower colour flung in broad splashes upon the low country of the flanks is foiled by the delicious blue that bathes the sand-strip. When the ancients gave us a picture of all this we questioned it, as perhaps painted inaccurately in the elation of literary composition. That is not a right inference. One attempts to describe it as it appears in 1915; but there is the danger of being disbelieved, because the prodigal flinging of spring colour over the shores of Gallipoli utterly surpasses in richness the colour of Australia. England doubtless shows something far more like it in spring. The colour ashore is a glowing red—acres of poppy waving there upon the green plains. Neither do we know the Ægean blue in Australian waters, somehow. The reader, harassed by the war news from this smiling land, may conceive the incongruity of this fair landscape splashed with colour of another sort—the red dust of a moving troop, the hideous discolour of bursting lyddite, and the grey smudge of shrapnel. A grand range of chalk hills runs south behind the pasture of the right flank. The low shore plain of the left flank is backed by a group of green pinnacles moving north towards the glittering salt-lake. The coast, northerly, sweeps out to the southern horn of Saros Bay—a rough, sheer-rising headland, southern sentinel of the great Saros Cliffs.

Moving inshore to the foot of the Anzac plateau, one gets a delusive impression of Anzac smoothness. Anzac in detail is rough: small gulches, ravines—Arabian wadys—which at once hindered and assisted the aggressors at landing. Leaving behind the beach, with its feverish busyness, the climb up to the trenches begins forthwith. You follow a well-engineered road levelled in the bed of the ravine. In the sides the dug-outs are as thick as dwellings in a Cairene alley—which is saying much. Beaten side-tracks branch off like rivulets which join a mountain torrent. The only haven for mules and horses is the shelter of the banks, which have been half dug out at intervals into an extensive sort of stable. It is the height of the afternoon. There is no wind stirring under the hill. The men off duty are sleeping heavily—have flung themselves down, worn-out, and lie in the thick dust of their shelters, where the flies swarm and the heat reeks. But all are not sleeping. Periodically a regimental office is dug in; the typewriters are noisy: they make a strange dissonance with the hum of bullets above, which does not cease. The post-office lies in a bend of the path. This is dug deep, with sandbag bulwarks. There's no sleeping here. A khaki staff sorts and stamps, in this curious subterranean chamber, amidst a disorder of mail-bags and the fumes of sealing-wax. One hopes, in passing, the shrapnel will spare this sanctuary.... Half a mile up, the road peters out into a rough and dusty track under the hill-crest. It is heavy climbing. One realises fully for the first time what a scaling was here at the first charge. It has been hard work up a beaten road: what for those hampered infantrymen, with their steel-laden rifles and their equipment, and the Turks raining death from their entrenchments aloft? It was seventeen minutes' work for them; we have been panting and scrambling for forty, and are not up yet. Five minutes more brings us to the sentry guarding the entrance to the communication-trench. He sets us on our stooping way. You dare not walk erect. Here the bullets are not "spent," though "spent" bullets can do damage enough. The labour of trench-making must have been enormous. Here is a picked trench five feet deep, and half as wide again as your body, cut out of a soft rock—hundreds of yards of it, half-miles of it. Fifteen minutes looping along brings us to an exit opening on a battery, where two guns are speaking from their pits. In a dug-out beside the pit lies the presiding genius with his ear to a telephone. His lingo is almost unintelligible, except to the initiated. From the observers on our flanks he is transmitting the corrections and directions to his gunners. One man is juggling shell from the rear of the pit; one is laying the gun; the rest are understrappers. The roar of discharge, heard from behind, is not excessive. What comes uppermost is the prolonged whizz and scream of the shell. Artillery work must be far the most interesting. The infantryman, a good deal, aims "in a direction," and hopes for the best. The man at the gun watches each shot, the error is gauged, and he acts accordingly at the next. His is a sort of triumphal progress upon his mark.... Re-entering the trench, we crept to our second line. There were a few scattered marksmen. There is a kind of comfort, even in trenches. The sleeping-places hollowed out under the lee of the wall, a foot from the floor, will keep one more or less dry in rain. There are carnal symbols of creature comfort scattered up and down—blankets, newspapers, tobacco-tins, egg-shells, orange-peel, and the wrappings of Mexican chocolate. But it's harsh enough. From the crackle of musketry and the song of the bullet and the intimate scream of the shell there's little respite.

The labyrinth of trenches becomes very intricate as you approach the front line: saps, communication trenches, tunnels, and galleries, make a maze that requires some initiation to negotiate successfully. In the rear lines the men off duty are resting, as well as may be, plagued as they are with flies, heat and dust. In general they are too far exhausted to care much, so long as they can get their tobacco and a place to lie. They try to lie comfortable in the squalor; try to cook a trifle at their pathetic little hole-in-the-wall fires. The most impressive thing near the first line (there are things more impressive when you get there) is the elaborateness and permanency of the trenches and dug-outs and overhead cover. One might think the beggars are here for a year: which God forbid! The impression of keenness and alertness here is in striking contrast with the easy-going aspect of the "reservists." The men work at frequent intervals, in pairs, one observing with the periscope, the other missing no chances with the rifle. We looked long and earnestly through a periscope. Two things arrest you. The first is the ghastly spectacle of our dead lying beyond the parapet. They have been there since the last charge; that is three weeks ago, and they are black and swollen. They lie in so exposed a place that they dare not be approached. The stink is revolting; putrefying human flesh emits an odour without a parallel. An hour's inhalation was almost overpowering. One asks how our men have breathed it for three and five months. The flies swarm in hosts.

The second thing that arrests you is the amazing proximity of the enemy trenches. You put down the periscope and look furtively through a loophole to verify. The average distance is about fifteen yards. Our conductor smiled at the expression of amazement. "Come along here; they're a bit closer." He took us to a point at which the neutral ground was no more than five yards in width; rifle and bayonet extended from either trench could have met across it. We well believed our men could hear the Turks snore. This is an uncanny proximity. One result is that the bomb is the chief weapon of offence. To shy a bomb effectively over five yards is as good a deed as drink. Bomb wounds are much to be dreaded. The missile does not pierce, it shatters, and there is no choosing where you will have your wound. We laid well to heart the admonition to be momentarily on the look out for bombs.

We worked slowly back along a tortuous route. These are old Turkish trenches. They had been so constructed as to fight in the direction of the sea. When our men took them they had immediately to turn round and build a parapet on the side more remote. They were choked with Turkish dead. To bury them in the open was unthinkable; they had to be thrown into pits excavated in the trench wall, or flung aloft, and buried beneath the new inland parapet. The consequence is that as you make your way along the trench floor you occasionally come into contact with a protruding boot encasing the foot of a Turk. We had more than one such unsavoury encounter. The odour arising from our own dead is not all with which our infantry have to contend. War isn't fun. A good deal of drivel is spoken and written about the ennobling effects of warfare in the field.

The men who have had four months of this are, in great part, pasty-faced ghosts, with nerves on raw edge. What may one expect? Inadequate rest, and that rudely and habitually broken; almost an entire want of exercise—except in the charge; food that is necessarily scanty and ill-nourishing; a perpetual and overpowering stink of the most revolting kind; black swarms of flies that make quiescence impossible—even if enemy shelling and enemy bomb-slinging did not; a nervous strain of suspense or known peril (or both) that never is lifted. Australians have done their part with unequalled magnificence. But they are not gods. Flesh and blood and spirit cannot go on at this indefinitely. God help the Australian infantryman with less than a frame of steel wire, muscles of whipcord, and a heart of fire. The cases are rare, but men have been driven demented in our firing-line, and men who in civil-life were modest, gentle, tender-hearted, and self-effacing, have become bloody-minded, lusting to kill. War is not fun; neither is it ennobling.

It was fighting of another sort when Greeks and Persians traversed this ground. For the Narrows was, more than possibly, the crossing-place of the Hellespont for either host. Anzac or Gaba Tepe would be, almost inevitably, right in the track. Australian trenches perhaps cut across the classic line of march. Who is to say that the site of Xerxes' Headquarters-camp is not at this moment serried with Australian dug-outs? Where he stood to embark, the wireless operator may now be squatting in his sandpit receiving from our cruisers. Certainly every mile over which we are fighting is charged with classical associations.

The new geographical nomenclature stands contrasted with the classical, as do methods of transport and fighting. What does the dust of Persian Generals know of Quinn's Post, Walker's Ridge, or Pope's Hill? Even the Turkish names are despised. We are "naming" our own map as we go on. Pope's Hill is a feature in the landscape considerable enough to have justified a Turkish name before we came here. The map of Gallipoli, as well as that of Western Europe, is in a state of flux. Should Gallipoli be garrisoned, Australian terms, not to be found in the dictionary, will stick; scrubs, creeks, and gullies, dignified with the names of heroes who commanded there, will abound.

It is by way of Shrapnel Gully we regain the beach. The Australian hospital stands on the right extremity—by no means out of danger. A sparse line of stretchers is moving down almost continuously. This is a hospital for mere hasty dressing to enable wounded to go aboard the pinnace to the Hospital ship standing out. Collins Street doctors who have left behind surgeries "replete with every convenience" find themselves in others that are mere hastily run up marquées. Half the attendants hop or limp. They have been peppered. The dentist's outfit is elaborate, and plagued men may have teeth "stopped" or extracted. There is a mechanical department, too, where artificial teeth are repaired—teeth that have been wrecked on the Army biscuit, which is not just angels'-food. Dentists' kit is almost complete; lacks little, in fact, but an electric current.

The beach is animated. There are A.S.C. depôts almost innumerable, wireless stations, ordnance stores, medical supply stores, and what-not. This is not the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war, but the hard facts and hard graft and dirt, sweat and peril, of righteous war. It is by these mundane means the clash of ideals is proceeding, and by which a decision will come....

Only when the masked enemy batteries of the flanks are firing (which is many times in the day) is the beach cleared and quiet. At one stage a couple of Lieutenants-Colonel limited the adminitory patrolling to themselves during fire. They walked up and down unconcernedly with an heroic and nonchalant self-possession, swearing hard at the men who showed themselves. The hidden battery cannot be located. The cruisers are doing their best with searching fire; their bluejackets are climbing the masts to observe; the balloon is aloft; the seaplanes are vigilant; our own outposts never relax. There is no clue. It is concealed with devilish ingenuity. Every day it is costing us dearly.

All's fair in war. Their sniping is awfully successful. They have picked off our officers at a deadly rate. Lance-corporals have become Lieutenants in a single night. Transport of supplies to the flanks is done by mule-carts manned by Sikhs. The route is sniped at close intervals, by night as well as by day, and by machine-gun as well as by the rifle; beside, it is swept by shrapnel. Only under the most urgent necessity are supplies taken to the flanks by day. Then the loss in men and mules is heavier than we can bear. The Turkish sniper is almost unequalled—certainly unexcelled—as an unerring shot. At night the rattle of the mule-carts directs the fire. At certain more exposed intervals of the route the carts move at the gallop, the drivers lying full-stretch in the bottom of the carts and flogging on to safety. Is not this worse than trench-fighting? The Sikhs are doing a deadly dangerous work unflinchingly well.

It was reported unofficially that two Turkish women were captured sniping. Rumours are persistent enough as to the presence of women in and behind the Turkish lines. Our outposts claim to have seen them, and victorious attacking parties that have captured Turkish camps have been said to declare they have found hanging there garments of the most significant lace-frilled sort. The unbelieving diagnose these as the highly-embellished pyjamas of Turkish officers. The whole thing is probably to be disbelieved. The Turk is too seriously busy to be distracted by the blandishments of his women. Harems doubtless are left well at home, to be revelled in when the British have ultimately been driven into the sea.

The men bathe, but often pay too dearly for the bath. The bathing beach is a place notorious for good-humoured but successful "lifting." In the early stages there was mixed bathing of Colonels and lance-corporals, Majors and full privates. The Colonel leaves his boots on the sand; a private is sneaking off—"Hey! those —— boots are mine!" ... All ranks go about ashore dressed alike, with the rank shown symbolically; distinguishing marks of rank become distinguishing marks for sharp-shooters too: you must know a Captain by his bearing rather than his clothes. Curious dialogues arise. The officers are in a garb which differs in many ways from their dress of the promenade at Shepheard's Hotel.

There is little damping of spirits. Most men are happy. Pettiness is snubbed. All are bound by the common danger into the spirit of amity. There is growling day and night—the legitimate growling of the overwrought man, which means nothing. Little outbursts of the liver there are, but of a different quality from those civilian ventings of the spleen.

CHAPTER IV

SIGNALS

The step is a far one from the signal-office of the first month in Anzac to that of December. The first crude centre of intelligence was like a Euclidean point—without magnitude, with position only. It was a mere location from which signals could be despatched, without any of the show of a compartment, and without apparatus. And the wireless station was a hastily scratched hole in the sand, where the operator supported himself on an elbow and received.

Now in December this is all changed. The Army Corps Signal Office is a building, of sandbags and timber and galvanised iron, standing four-square, solid as a blockhouse, protected alike from wind and the entrance of rain and (by its branch-thatched roof) from the hawk-glance of the aircraft observer.

Within there is an incongruous sense of civilisation. The staff is clean, neatly dressed, shaven—in a word, civilianised. The spirit of order presides. Except that the denizens wear a uniform, and that the walls are of sandbag, you might be in a metropolitan telegraphic office. They sit there tap-tap-tapping in their absorbed fashion. The shrapnel screams overhead and bursts to their north. They are too intent to hear it, mostly. All that has disturbed them, in the last month, is the cry of "Taube!" (colloquial Torb!). Anti-aircraft bring them trooping out to squint up at the swift, black, forbidding craft humming raucously across the position. They laugh at shrapnel, under the lee of the protecting ridge: no ridge makes immune from that whirring dove of peace up there!

As you stumble up the Gully at night the illumination of the signal-office gives a touch of the arclight and of city brilliance to the place. The operators, sitting there, as you peer in from the outer darkness, are a part of another world. Those not transmitting or under call sit reading sixpenny editions and smoking cigarettes. They are tapping out no orders from Headquarters. Neither in the words before them nor in the placid tap of the instruments is there any hint of war. They're in London. But that sudden roar as of a locomotive is of no London street traffic; London streets do not roar in a crescendo. This is as of a rushing, mighty wind, rising to the scream of a tornado. Comes the blast of explosion which unsettles them in their seats. The walls of their house quake about them, and the shower of earth and débris descends; the foul stink drives through the dust, and the well-ordered city room is hurried back, in the twinkling of an eye, into the midst of war in the troublous land of Turkey. A six-inch howitzer shell has exploded in the bank over against them—so close that the unuttered thought flies to the possibility of a nearer ultimate burst. The howitzer, searcher out of the protected sites in ravines, under looming hill-crests, is a searcher of hearts too—a disturber of the placid sense of security.

The débris is cleared and the fumes pass, and order returns. The operator goes back to his dot-and-dash monotone, and his neighbour resumes his novel and lights another cigarette. The quiet undertone of conversation revives.

Money is the sinews of war: where, in the anthropomorphic figure, will you place these men of the Army Corps Signal Office? Analytical reader, you may place them at your leisure—if you can. They make vocal (or scriptural) the will of Headquarters. A general order they tap out to the utmost post on the flanks. The flanks flash into them the hourly report of progress. The watch in the trenches is realised, through them, by Headquarters. If the Turk is quiescent, it is the telegraphist here who knows it; if a move is made in the enemy lines—a Turkish mule convoy sighted from the outpost, an enemy bombardment set up—it is flashed through incontinently. These men, who see so little of war—apart from searching howitzer—may, if they choose, visualise the whole outlook along our line. They are to Army Headquarters what the sergeant is to the Captain of infantry: the one may scribble or bawl orders until weary; if the other is not there to distribute and enforce the given word, all will perhaps be in vain.

And Army Corps Signal Office is the link between the Peninsula and General Headquarters stationed in that island lying on the west. Divisions flash in their reports from the flanks to Army Corps; all is transmitted by cable to Imbros. And this is the medium through which G.H.Q. orders materialise. Helles reports here also, by cable, for transmission by cable. Here is the hub of all intelligence relating to the Turkish campaign. For the network of cables centres here: cable from Alexandria to Lemnos, Lemnos to Tenedos, Lemnos to Anzac, Helles to Anzac, Anzac to G.H.Q. on Imbros. Thus there is direct communication between G.H.Q. and the intermediate base in Egypt; cabled dialogues are practicable regarding reinforcements of troops and supplies of equipment and of food. The storeships that dodge submarines from Alexandria lie at Lemnos waiting to disgorge; Anzac requirements are cabled down to them, and they off-load accordingly into the small transports that the Turks shell daily off Anzac. News of mail is flashed up from Alexandria and from Mudros, and the mail despatch from the Peninsula cabled down. No progress in operations is possible apart from this wizard's hut where the signallers sit and tap and smoke and read.

CHAPTER V

THE DESPATCH-RIDERS

But though Army Corps Headquarters is in touch with the flanks by both telephone and telegraph, that is not enough. Either or both may fail. But apart from that, there are some communications which no officer will trust to a wire. And until that is premised one wonders vaguely what is the use for despatch-riders. Almost it would seem that in these days, when so much of the romance of war has departed, telephone and telegraph would do all; indeed, the despatch-rider and his steed would seem among the first of the old usages to vanish before the march of science in the field. But here they are, these lithe, brown fellows with their furrowed bushmen's features—lined, not with years (they average twenty-five) nor with care (they're of a flinging, happy frame), but with the sparse, clear lines of the athlete about the mouth, and about the eyes of the man who has peered into long distances over the interminable plains of Western Queensland. They're horsemen down to the tendons of their heels. You may see them tending their horses at sundown, any day, in mule gully, slinging their saddles across the bar outside their dug-out; and, after, boiling the billy. They're modest, too, like many another good horseman, and will relate the experience of their rides from Suvla only if you press for it. But there is no need for a relation; you may see them ride and sniped most days of the week, if you'll be at the pains to climb the ridge overlooking the level country of the left flank. Before the saps were made their work was no game at horsemanship. But there are intervals where the sap avails them nothing; and here they gallop at the stretch; you may trace their route by the cloud of dust in the wake; and you see them slow suddenly as they get into protected territory. The sniping (they will tell you) is, curiously enough, worst at night; the Turk creeps forth into advanced sniping-positions, and even brings up his machine-gun within striking distance, and directs his aim by the horse's clatter. Despatch-riding, day or night, is known as "the dinkum thing."

CHAPTER VI

THE BLIZZARD

One knows little of the times and the seasons at which the early Gallipoli winter plays its pranks. It is fairly gymnastic in its turns of temperature. Still, we never expected a snow-blizzard in November. For thus spoke the official weather-god (through the Peninsula Press) regarding that fair month: "November generally comes in fine, with a lovely first ten-days or so. It, however, becomes rather sharp at night, and there may be expected a cold snap in the second or third week of the month. This lasts a few days, after which the weather gets fine and warm until the end of the month. November is, in fact, considered by many to be the most glorious month of the year." ...

Thus had it been a month to mark with a white stone. Instead, it marked itself with white stones that were many. The halting autumn was full of vagaries, but there was a persistent bitterness creeping in the wake of the fitful November gales:

And all around me ev'ry bush and tree
Says autumn's here, and winter soon will be—
That snows his soft white silence over all.

We had foreseen the snow-drift no nearer than that.

But on the Sabbath morning of the 28th of November we woke to find a Peninsula of snow, with snow-men bearing snow-rifles walking over the snow-ridges. This was the introduction of most of us to a fall. The nearest we had yet come to the meeting was at the "movies" which had shown Cossacks ploughing through their native drifts for the Front. Here was our first touch with reality in utter cold.

The Australian has a reputation for adaptability of which not even cold can rob him. He moved about like any Esquimau. This was true, literally; for the first time he donned his rabbit-skin jacket and his Balaclava cap and peaked field-service. The resemblance to an Esquimau in his bear-skin coat and hood was remarkable. His curiosity worked complementarily to his adaptability. This was like seeing a new country for the first time. The snow made a new world, and no excess of cold was to keep him from examining and wandering. He sloshed about the gullies scrutinising the flakes as they lodged on his clothes; he climbed the ridges to see something more of the general effect. The Englishman regarded him from the stronghold of his snowy tradition with superior commiseration, as who should say: "This'll make the beggar hop!" The ill-starred Egyptians, never previously out of Lower-Egypt, literally and piteously wailed with the cold. The Australians mostly grinned and sky-larked.

By eight o'clock he was pasting all passers-by from his store of ammunition; and after breakfast was conducting a sort of trench-warfare in the gullies, bombing out the glowing enemy with a new brand of hand-grenade, pure-white.

The wind blew a gale, driving the snow like thick smoke over the turbid Ægean. Like rain it was not: far too thick and cloudy. The towering ridges on our east happily saved us the extreme bitterness of the blast. But it whistled down our sheltered ravines in a gusty fashion.

The trenches had another tale to unfold. For them was no grateful ridge shelter. The freezing gale cut like a frosty knife across the parapet, and drove a jet of ice through the loophole, and whistled ruthlessly down any trench it could enfilade. The "Stand-to" at 5.30 that morning was an experience of Arctic rigour.

No sun relieved the grey, relentless day. The men slopped on through the slush. Never had they conceived anything so cold underfoot. But next morning the ground was frozen hard. Every footprint was filled with ice. Where yesterday we had bogged, we progressed to-day like windmills, with arms spread to keep a balance on the glassy and steep inclining surface. Buckets and pans were frozen over. The bristles of shaving-brushes were congealed into a frozen extension of the handle. It was a valiant man who, having pounded them out into a sort of individuality, ventured to use a razor: the blade seared like a knife of fire.

The sun shone bravely, but could not touch the stubborn ice of the ground. That night was, to denizens of tropical Australia, incredibly frosty. There was no breath of air. The cold bit through six thicknesses of blanket and lay like an encasement of ice about your limbs beneath the covers. Few in Turkey slept two hours that night, and those by no means consecutively.

Next morning the slush oozed out to the sun, and the whole position was as an Australian cow-yard in the winter rains. And that's how the glorious month of November made its adieux to Gallipoli.

Yet it's an ill blizzard that blows nobody good. Recent storms had played Old Harry with the landing of supplies at Anzac. In especial, the water-barge had been cast high and dry on Imbros. Warfare is not easy in a country where every pint of water consumed must be landed under fire. Though summer was past, men must drink; salt bacon, salt "bully," dry biscuit, are thirst-provoking; and beside that "insensible perspiration" of which De Quincey was wont to make so much, there is activity on the Anzac Beach, if not in the trenches: a normal activity intermittently stimulated by the murderous shriek of shell from the flanks.

The reserve-supply of water had been already tapped. For a week we had been on a quarter-ration. This eked out at about half a mug of tea per man per diem. You ate salt beef for the evening meal without tea; went to bed thirsty, dreaming of the rivers of water, woke to a breakfast of salt bacon unmitigated by tea; and entered on a burning day—though it was winter—a day relieved only by the half-pint at lunch, at which you crunched biscuit and jam.

Men were foregoing their precious nightly issue of rum because it wrought a pleasant fire in the veins, and they had already had enough of fire in the veins. Not only were you drought-stricken, but frozen too, and that to a degree from which heating food would have saved you in part. But there was no water for cooking the heating oatmeal waiting to be issued, nor for the heating rice, which could not be boiled in sea-water.

Though the blizzard came in the midst of this drought it changed all that. Rum-jars, buckets, biscuit-tins, water-cans—yea, the very jam-tins—were filled with snow and there was the precious potential water. Parched and frozen throats were slaked, beards shaven, porridge boiled, bacon and beef defied to do their worst. Removed from the fire, it had a dusty smack. But it was water!

CHAPTER VII

EVACUATION

There will be a leavening of Egyptian in the Australian vernacular after peace has broken out. It will persist, and perhaps have a weighty etymological influence—at any rate on the colloquial vocabulary. "Baksheesh" will be a universal term, not confined to sketches of Oriental travel. "Baksheesh" is merely one of the many grafted Arabic terms, but it will be predominant. "Sae'eda" will be the street greeting (varied by the Sikh "Salaam, sahib"). "Feloose kiteer," "mafish," "min fadlak," "taali hina," "etla," and the rest of them, will be household words. Other phrases, not remarkable for delicacy, will prevail in pot-houses and stable talk. Forcible ejection from a company and polite leave-taking will both be covered by an "imshee"; there will be "classy" "imshees" and "imshees" that are undignified.

Such an evacuation as was effected at Anzac was distinctly "classy." When first the notion of evacuation was mooted there was misgiving. We were with our back (so to speak) to the sea, hemmed in in a narrow sector of coast, with no ground whatever to fall back upon. There was no one who did not expect disaster in evacuating a position such as that; the only debate was as to degree. What would it cost us in lives and money? And there was a greater fear unspoken—the hideous reflection that an evacuation would make almost vain the heavy losses of eight months' fighting. Everyone hoped against a giving-up. But soon there was no mistaking the signs of the times—the easing off in the landing of supplies, the preliminary and experimental three days' restraint from fire all along the line, the added restriction upon correspondence—in especial the order to refrain from any reference to the movements of troops either present or prophetic, and either known or surmised; the detailing of inordinately large fatigues to set in order once more the last line of defence.

The most obtuse soon saw his worst fears realised. Notice to quit was, in general, short. On Sunday afternoon, the 12th, the O.C. came panting up the gully. "Fall in the unit at once." They were given an hour and a half's notice to have all ready for transport to the pier. Notice was in many cases far shorter, resolving itself into minutes. But an hour and a half is brief enough. Then there was bustle and feverish stuffing of kit-bags. The dug-out which had been as a home for four months was dismantled and left in dishevelment in a half-hour. It's hard to leave a dug-out—your shelter from shrapnel and the snowy blast and the bitter Turkish frost. It's here that you have smoked the consolatory pipe for so many months—consumed the baksheesh steak and marmalade, read the home letters and the local sheet of home from Australia, played nocturnal poker, yarned with a fellow-townsman, and spread the frugal late supper. It has been home in a sense other than that you ate and slept there; it was home indirectly—by virtue of home mails, home talk, home memories, visualisations nurtured under its shelter in the night watches. Home because it was in Turkey, and that way duty lay.

Now, in a few desecratory minutes, it was rudely stripped, bunks overturned, the larder ratted, the favourite prints brushed from the hessian in the bustle. The vultures from neighbouring dug-outs flocked round for the spoil; the men who yet had no notice to evacuate came for baksheesh. With a swelling heart you disgorged your little stock of luxuries, that you would have taken but had no room for. It breaks your heart to give over to the hands of strangers your meagre library amassed during a quarter's residence, your little table, your baksheesh butter and strawberry jam, potatoes and oatmeal, surplus luxuries in clothing, the vital parts of your bunk, the odds and ends of private cooking utensils that have endeared themselves by long and frequent service at the rising of the sun and at the going down of the same, and late at night. Though the life of a soldier is checkered, without any abiding city, shot with hurried moves by flood and field, yet we had had so many months in Anzac, in the one spot, that we had broken with tradition and had made a sort of home in a sort of settled community. And this was the rude end of all.

We took a hurried snack as the mule-carts were loaded. The cooks made merry (cooks, somehow, always contrive to have a convivial spirit at hand), calling on all and sundry to drink a farewell with them while they scraped and packed their half-cold dixies. Nevertheless—for reasons explicit and subconscious—it was a melancholy toast. We followed the transport to Walker's Pier—taking the sap, though, without exception. This thought was uppermost; "What if Beachy Bill should get us now?" To a man we took all the cover there was. No one, at such close prospect of deliverance for ever from that shell-swept beach, neglected precautions.

Round at Walker's the beach was thickly peopled with units awaiting embarkation. The bustle and shouting were almost stupefying. The unit "pack up" had been this in a small degree. That was bad enough. Here our own little preparation was both magnified and intensified. It was growing dusk. A whole brigade was waiting with all its Cæsarian impedimenta. Impromptu piers had been run out, and were lighted by smoking flares. Pinnaces and barges moved noisily between them. Military landing-officers and naval transport-officers, and middies and skippers of trawlers, bawled orders and queries and responses. On the beach the men lay about on their baggage. Non-commissioned officers marshalled and moved them off. Mule transports threaded a way amongst the litter of men and kit-bags. Officers who knew their time was not yet stood in groups chatting and joking. The men, always free from responsibility, played cards and formed schools of two-up, dipped into their haversacks, and munched and raised to their lips vessels which were not always mess-tins, and did not always contain cold tea only—or even cold tea at all.

We waited. The hour of embarkation was postponed from six to nine. At nine most of the excitement had subsided, and the men lay quiet—except where they revived themselves with a dark issue-liquid. There was melancholy abroad—more than that of weariness in physical exertion. As the hour of embarkation drew on (it was now postponed to ten) its significance came home to their bosoms. The rifles cracked on the ridges, the howitzers spoke, the din of bombs came down the ravine. There were those fellows in the trenches being left to see the last of it, and to get off if they could. Not the most resolute optimist could look towards the bloodless evacuation which the event has shown to an astonished world. Every flash of the guns in the half-moonlight, every rifle fusillade, called up the vision of a last party attempting to leave, and perhaps failing fatally to its last number. "If I could get drunk," said a man wearing his equipment, "I would—blue-blind paralytic. I never felt so like it in my life."

We lay about another hour and a half. Then the order came suddenly to go aboard—so suddenly that the half of the equipment had to be left. The first load was got down; a return was being made for another. "Can't wait," roared the N.T.O.; "leave your stuff or get left. The barge is leaving now. Cast off, for'ard. Go ahead, cox'n." This was not bluff. There was a scramble for the barge. There up in the sap lay the cooks' gear, and half the private kit, to be despoiled (so we said) by some barbarous Turk. "Put that match out. No talking." We puffed out otherwise in silence, into the Ægean darkness. Liberty to talk, to smoke, would have been a boon. There was talking in whispers—worse than nothing. Cigarettes were quenched—and the spirits of that unhappy, close-packed, silent load of silent men. The spent bullets sang overhead in a kind of derision, getting lower and more intimate as we moved on. Soon they were spitting about us and tapping the barge, coming unreasonably near to tapping skulls and chests.

But we got to the side of the darkened transport untouched, after long wandering and hailing of many ships in the darkness. There was complete exhaustion at the end. The men dropped down against their kits and slept fitfully (it was bitterly cold) till the dawn. This was the last look on Gallipoli; it had been a penultimate sight we had of it in the dusk of the previous Sabbath evening, though we knew it not. For a time we could only see the great grey mass flecked with an occasional spurt of flame, where the guns were still belching. Then the glorious sun slowly uprose, and threw up the detail. There were the old and well-remembered and well-trodden heights of Anzac, and lower down we came abreast of all the positions we had known, afar off, and now saw more clearly than ever before. We looked along the deadly Olive Grove. There lay the Beachy Bill battery, which every day had rained screaming hell over the Anzac Beach, and was even now speaking sullenly in the early morning glow.

Achi Baba rose up to the south in a sort of soft splendour; how different from the reality! That rosy tipped mountain, could we have seen its detail, would show looming bastions, high forbidding ridges, and galleries of guns, and rugged ravines that had well-nigh flowed with the blood of our storming parties. Now it stood there, sloping gently down towards Helles, behind the high, quiet headlands and the bays of the coast. Soon we were abreast of Helles, then of the multitude of shipping in the Straits mouth, and so on down behind Imbros and under Tenedos, and away over the freshening sea to Lemnos, a pale cloud, bigger than a man's hand on the starboard bow. And by mid-day we lay in the quiet waters of Mudros Bay, looking over the canvas-clad slopes.