battle was due at Ismail: from Ismail the last act, the toppling down of the Turk forever among the bones of his victims and the ruin of his ally, would have been prepared and assured. There was a desultory fire around Ismail, and the smoke of scrub fires which blazed and smouldered everywhere as far as the eye could see, but no roar and blaze and outcry of a meant attack. The battle hung fire on the left, the hours were passing, the Turks were coming. It was only five o'clock still; we had still seven hours or more. In the centre we had almost succeeded. We could hang on there and try again, there was still time. The chance which had been plainly ours, was still an even chance. It was for the left to seize it for us, the battle waited for the left, the poor, dying Gloucesters and Wellingtons hung on to Chunuk for it, the Gurkhas and English in the trampled cornfields near The Farm died where they lay on the chance of it, the Australians on Abd-el-Rahman held steady in the hope of it, under a fire that filled the air. If, as men say, the souls of a race, all the company of a nation's dead, rally to the living of their people in a time of storm, those fields of hell below Koja Chemen, won by the sweat and blood and dying agony of our thousands, must have answered with a ghostly muster of English souls in the afternoon of that eighth of August. There was the storm, there was the crisis, the one picked hour, to which this death and mangling and dying misery and exultation had led. Then was the hour for a casting off of self, and a setting aside of every pain and longing and sweet affection, a giving up of all that makes a man to be something which makes a race, and a going forward to death resolvedly to help out their brothers high up above in the shell bursts and the blazing gorse. Surely all through the eighth of August our unseen dead were on that field, blowing the horn of Roland, the unheard, unheeded horn, the horn of heroes in the dolorous pass, asking for the little that heroes ask, but asking in vain. If ever the great of England cried from beyond death to the living they cried then. "De ço qui calt. Demuret i unt trop." All through the morning of that day, the Commander-in-Chief, on watch at his central station, had waited with growing anxiety for the advance from the Suvla Beaches. Till the afternoon the critical thrust on Chunuk and the great Turk pressure at Lone Pine made it impossible for him to leave his post to intervene, but, in the afternoon, seeing that neither wireless nor telephone messages could take the place of personal vision and appeal, he took the risk of cutting himself adrift from the main conflict, hurried to Suvla, landed, and found the great battle of the war, that should have brought peace to all that Eastern world, being lost by minutes before his eyes.