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.