We wondered how it was that we were still alive, when so many lay dead. Some were killed on the decks of the transports by shrapnel. Our monitors crept close to the sandy shore, and poured out a deadly brood of Death. The crack and crash was deafening, and it literally shook the air... it quivered like a jelly after each shot. The fighting got more and more inland, and the rattle and crackle fainter and farther away. But we still watched, fascinated. The little groups of men lay in exactly the same positions on the beach. That platoon by the side of Lala Baba lay in a black bunch--stone dead. We could see our artillery teams galloping along like a team of performing fleas, taking up new positions behind Lala Baba. So this is war? Well, it's pretty awful! Wholesale murder... what's it all for? Wonder how long we shall last alive before Mechanical Death blows our brains out, or a leg off... Queer thing, war! Didn't think it was quite like this! So mechanical and senseless. And now came the time for us to land. A lighter came alongside, with a little red-bearded man in command-- “Remind you of any one?” I said to Hawk. “Cap'n Kettle!” “Yes!” He was exactly like Cutcliffe Hyne's famous “Kettle,” except that he smoked a pipe. We huddled into the lighter, and hauled our stores down below. Some of us were “green about the gills,” and some were trying to pretend we didn't care. We watched the boat which landed just before us strike a mine and be blown to pieces. Encouraging sight... At last we reached the tiny cove, and the lighter let down a sort of tail-board on the sand. CHAPTER XI. THE KAPANJA SIRT One had his stomach blown out, and the other his chest blown in. The two bodies lay upon the sand as we stepped down. The metallic rattle of the firing-line sounded far away. We man-handled all our medical equipment and stores from the hold of the lighter to the beach. We had orders to “fall in” the stretcher-bearers, and work in open formation to the firing-line. The Kapanja Sirt runs right along one side of Suvla Bay. It is one wing of that horse-shoe formation of rugged mountains which hems in the Anafarta Ova and the Salt Lake. Our searching zone for wounded lay along this ridge, which rises like the vertebrae of some great antediluvian reptile--dropping sheer down on the Gulf of Saros side, and, in varying slopes, to the plains and the Salt Lake on the other. Here again small things left a vivid impression--the crack of a rifle from the top of the ridge, and a party of British climbing up the rocks and scrub in search of the hidden Turk. The smell of human blood soaking its way into the sand from those two “stiffies” on the beach. The sullen silence, except for the distant crackle and the occasional moan of a shell. The rain which came pelting down in great cold blobs, splashing and soaking our thin drill clothes till we were wet to the skin and shivering with cold.