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. BOOK III BACK TO EGYPT CHAPTER I LEMNOS After many delays we landed, and after many wanderings arrived at a camping-ground, and went supperless and tentless to bed--too tired to remark, rolled in our blankets, either drenching dew or stony ground, but not so weary as to be unconscious of the absence of shell. Our Last Post for many months had been sounded by bursting shell (for many a man it had been Last Post indeed); the massed buglers of the battalions seemed now a voice from the land of spirits. There were men (they are to be believed) literally wakened by the stillness in the night, restless through the sudden deprivation of the midnight shriek from the flank and of our own roar of discharge from above. For the nocturnal crack and whistle of bullets, here was the distraction of utter quietness. For a week it was disconcerting.