At about two o’clock in the morning they dropped anchor. Each man stood at parade on the decks, and each was ordered to look to his supplies—a rifle, a bayonet, 150 rounds of ammunition, three days’ rations, a first-aid kit. It was weird contemplating this stretch of the Ægean and that bit of coast so soon to be washed by blood. Captain David Fanlon in his story of _The Big Fight_ says: “The long procession of transports and their grim battleship escorts had stolen up in the night, a widely spread yet organized, concrete group of slowly-moving, black, gloomy monsters. Every light aboard each ship had been ordered out. Not even the pin-head flame of a cigarette might show on any deck. “The only light we had was the faint green gleam that filtered over the smooth waters from a moon that had begun to wane and had, indeed, at this hour of three in the morning, nearly fallen behind the ragged jaw of the black cliffs.” That moon may have been very picturesque, but the men on those boats hated it, feared it, wished it in—any place but in the heaven above them. Its beam might act as a spotlight on the surprise attack. It looked like the evil _eye_ of the _enemy_. “I wonder,” said some one, “what that old green eye of a moon is looking at back of those dark, old cliffs? I wonder if he sees the big guns drowsing and the garrisons asleep or——” “What he’s seeing,” came a grumbling answer, “is the heathen blighters getting ready to bang hell out of us!” THE GREAT ADVENTURE BEGINS “And now the men had assembled on the decks as soft-footedly as they might. They had gathered in the darkness into orderly rows like big companies of phantoms. The ship’s crews worked as spectrally and nearly as silently as the lowering of ladders and the launching of the boats would permit. Small steamboats, each with a swerving tail made up of barges and small boats, panted alongside the transports and battleships. With wonderful precision and swiftness the great ships spawned hundreds on hundreds of smaller craft, thousands on thousands of men, crowding the waters with them for as far as you could make out whichever way you looked in the faint moonlight.” [Illustration: _© New York Herald._ A Night Attack on the Dardanelles British warships bombarding Turkish forts to protect the Allied landing parties. The fire that was returned was both accurate and deadly.] Of a sudden, the moon dipped and blinked out behind the cliffs. There was a sigh of relief. “God bless that damned old moon.” A moment before there had been just enough light to see the battleships coming on slowly in the rear with the obvious purpose of covering the attack. “Then you couldn’t see a blessed thing. The green waters had turned to ink. You only knew your comrades were with you in the same boat by the press of their swaying bodies against your shoulders and your ribs.” They were within two hundred yards of the shore.