Two or three have said to me: "They ought not to have been exhausted; none of them had marched five miles." It is difficult to answer such critics patiently, doubly difficult to persuade them, without showing them the five miles. There comes into my mind, as I write, the image of some hills in the west of Ireland, a graceful and austere range, not difficult to climb, seemingly, and not unlike these Gallipoli hills, in their look of lying down at rest. The way to those hills is over some miles of scattered limestone blocks, with gaps between them full of scrub, gorse, heather, dwarf-ash and little hill-thorn, and the traveller proceeds, as the Devil went through Athlone, "in standing lepps." This journey to the hills is the likest journey (known to me) to that of the assaulting columns. Like the Devil in Athlone the assaulting columns had often to advance "in standing lepps," but to them the standing lepp came as a solace, a rare, strange and blessed respite, from forcing through scrub by main strength, or scaling a crag of rotten sandstone, in pitch darkness, in the presence of an enemy. For an armed force to advance a mile an hour by day over such a country is not only good going, but a great achievement; to advance four miles in a night over such a country, fighting literally all the way, often hand to hand, and to feel the enemy's resistance stiffening and his reserves arriving, as the strength fails and the ascent steepens, and yet to make an effort at the end, is a thing unknown in the history of war. And this first fourteen hours of exhausting physical labour was but the beginning. The troops, as they very well knew, were to have two or three days more of the same toil before the battle could be ended, one way or the other. So after struggling for fourteen hours with every muscle in their bodies, over crags and down gullies in the never-ceasing peril of death, they halted in the blaze of noon and drew their breath. In the evening, as they hoped, the men from Suvla would join hands and go on to victory with them; they had fought the first stage of the battle, the next stage was to be decisive. The heat of this noon of August 7th on those sandy hills was a scarcely bearable torment.