I sat outside watching the moon rise and listening to the distant Crack... crack-crack! of rifle and machine-gun fire from over Ari Bumu way. Evidently they were fighting in the trenches we had seen that morning. The orderly who had served us, withdrawn a little way, was standing like a statue in the dusk, hands folded in front of him, saying his last prayer of the evening. Beyond, from a bush-covered tent, came the jingle of a telephone and 'the singsong voice of the young Turkish operator relaying messages in German--"Ja!... Ja!... Kaba Tepe... Ousedom Pasha... Morgen frith... Hier Multepe!... Ja!... Ja!" And to this and the distant rattle of battle we went to sleep. Chapter XII Soghan-Dere And The Flier Of Ak-Bash Next morning, after news had been telephoned in that the submarines had got another battleship, the Majestic, we climbed again into the covered wagon and started for the south front. We drove down to the sea and along the beach road through Maidos--bombarded several weeks before, cross-country from the Aegean, and nothing now but bare, burnt walls--on to Kilid Bahr, jammed with camels and ox-carts and soldiers, and then on toward the end of the peninsula. We were now beyond the Narrows and the Dardanelles. To the left, a bit farther out, were the waters in which the Irresistible, Ocean, and Bouvet were sunk, and even now, off the point, ten or twelve miles away, hung the smoke of sister ships. We drove past the big guns of the forts, past field-guns covering the shore, past masked batteries and search-lights. Beside us, along the shore road, mule trains and ox-carts and camel trains were toiling along in the blaze and dust with provisions and ammunition for the front. Once we passed four soldiers carrying a comrade, badly wounded, on a stretcher padded with leaves. After an hour or so of bumping we turned into a transverse valley, as level almost as if it had been made for a parade-ground. High hills protected it north and south; a little stream ran down the centre--it might have been made for a storage base and camp. More brush-covered tents and arbors for horses were strung along the hillside, one above the other sometimes, in half a dozen terraces. We drove into the valley, got out and followed the orderly to a brush-covered arbor, closed on every side but one, out of which came a well set-up, bronzed, bright-eyed man of fifty or thereabout who welcomed us like long-lost friends. It was Colonel Shukri Bey, commander of the Fifteenth Division. We were the first correspondents who had pushed thus far, and as novel to him apparently as he was charming to us. He invited us into the little arbor; coffee was brought and then tea, and, speaking German to Suydam and French to me, he talked of the war in general and the operations at the end of the peninsula with the greatest good humor and apparent confidence in the ultimate result.