“I know it,--been down to the stokers' bunks--it's Salonika--another new landing.” “They keep the Xth for making new landings.” And so to the Graeco-Serbian frontier and a fresh series of adventures, including sickness, life in an Egyptian hospital--and then England. CHAPTER XXVIII. LOOKING BACK The queer thing is, that when I look back upon that “Great Failure” it is not the danger or the importance of the undertaking which is strongly impressed so much as a jumble of smells and sounds and small things. It is just these small things which no author can make up in his study at home. The glitter of some one carrying an army biscuit-tin along the mule track; the imprinted tracks of sand-birds by the blue Aegean shore; the stink of the dead; a dead man's hand sticking up through the sand; the blankets soaked each morning by the heavy dew; the incessant rattle of a machine-gun behind Pear-tree Gully; the distant ridges of the Sari Bahir range shimmering in the heat of noon-day; the angry “buzz” of the green and black flies disturbed from a jam-pot lid; the grit of sand in the mouth with every bite of food; the sullen dullness of the overworked, death-wearied troops; the hoarse dried-up and everlasting question: “Any water?”; the silence of the Hindus of the Pack-mule Corps; the “S-s-s-e-e-e-e-o-o-o-op!--Crash!”--of the high explosives bursting in a bunch of densely solid smoke on the Kislar Dargh, and the slow unfolding of these masses of smoke and sand in black and khaki rolls; the snort and stampede of a couple of mules bolting along the beach with their trappings swinging and rattling under their panting bellies; the steady burning of the star-lit night skies; the regular morning shelling from the Turkish batteries on the break of dawn over the gloom-shrouded hills; the far-away call of some wounded man for “Stretchers! Stretchers!”; the naked white men splashing and swimming in the bay; the swoop of a couple of skinny vultures over the burning white sand of the Salt Lake bed to the stinking and decomposing body of a shrapnel-slaughtered mule hidden in the willow-thickets at the bottom of Chocolate Hill; a torn and bullet-pierced French warplane stranded on the other side of Lala Baba--lying over at an angle like a wounded white seabird; the rush for the little figure bringing in “the mails” in a sack over his shoulder; the smell of iodine and iodoform round the hospital-tents; the long wobbling moan of the Turkish long-distance shells, and the harmless “Z-z-z-eee-e-e-o-ooop!” of their “dud” shells which buried themselves so often in the sand without exploding; the tattered, begrimed and sunken-eyed appearance of men who had been in the trenches for three weeks at a stretch; the bristling unshaven chins, and the craving desire for “woodbines”; the ingrained stale blood on my hands and arms from those fearful gaping wounds, and the red-brown blood-stain patches on my khaki drill clothes; the pestering curse of