Darkness falls, and ammunition and water come up, and the stretcher-bearers hunt for the wounded by the groans, while the Turks search the entire field with shell to kill the supports which are not there. Some of the men in the trench creep out to their front, and are killed there as they fix a wire entanglement. The survivors make ready for the Turk attack, certain soon to come. There is no thought of sleep; it is too cold for sleep; the men shiver as they stare into the night; they take the coats of the dead, and try to get a little warmth. There is no moon and the rain begins. The marl at the bottom of the trench is soon a sticky mud, and the one dry patch is continually being sniped. A few exhausted ones fall not into sleep but into nervous dreams, full of twitches and cries, like dogs' nightmares, and away at sea some ship opens with her great guns at an unseen target up the hill. The terrific crashes shake the air; some one sees a movement in the grass and fires; others start up and fire. The whole irregular line starts up and fires, the machine guns rattle, the officers curse, and the guns behind, expecting an attack, send shells into the woods. Then slowly the fire drops and dies, and stray Turks, creeping up, fling bombs into the trench. This kind of fighting, between isolated bodies of men advancing in a great concerted tactical movement stretching right across the Peninsula, went on throughout the 6th, the 7th and the 8th of May, and ended on the evening of the 8th in a terrific onslaught of the whole line, covered by a great artillery. The final stage of the battle was a sight of stirring and awful beauty. The Allied line went forward steadily behind the moving barrier of the explosions of their shells. Every gun on both sides opened and maintained a fire dreadful to hear and see. Our men were fighting for a little patch of ground vital not so much to the success of the undertaking, the clearing of the Narrows, as to their existence on the Peninsula. In such a battle, each platoon, each section, each private soldier influences the result, and "pays as current coin in that red purchase" as the brigadier. The working parties on the beaches left their work (it is said) to watch and cheer that last advance. It was a day of the unmatchable clear Ægean spring; Samothrace and Euboea were stretched out in the sunset like giants watching the chess, waiting, it seemed, almost like human things, as they had waited for the fall of Troy and the bale-fires of Agamemnon. Those watchers saw the dotted order of our advance stretching across the Peninsula, moving slowly forward, and halting and withering away, among fields of flowers of spring and the young corn that would never come to harvest. They saw the hump of Achi Baba flicker and burn and roll up to heaven in a swathe of blackness, and multitudinous brightness changing the face of the earth, and the dots of our line still coming, still moving forward, and