_April 28._—First chance of scribbling anything for three days. Been through hell—just that. War! It wasn't war; it was just cold-blooded butchery. How the position has been held beats me. But held it has been—and it's going to be held—at a cost! I wonder what the price of crêpe will rise to out in Australia and New Zealand! Here goes for a shy at describing our amusement of the past three days. It was dark when we left the transports off Gaba Tepe and crept in towards the denser blackness that represented the shore. The night—or early morning, rather—was still; everything seemed in our favour; not a sound welled out seaward, not a light twinkled in the murk ahead. Could it be that we had taken the Turks by surprise? Or were they simply lying low and playing a waiting game? Soon we were to know. On—on crept the boats loaded to the gunwales with the citizen soldiers from the Dominions. Every jaw was set hard as agate, every eye was fixed on the forbidding-looking heights now taking form dimly as the east reddened and the sky became shot with lengthening spears of greenish-yellow. Minutes passed—minutes that seemed as hours—while ever shoreward crawled the fleet of boats, and ever plainer and gloomier loomed the frowning cliffs that dominated the Bay of Anzac. Back of the flotilla, away to seaward, lay the British warships, their grey hulls floating ghostlike in the first of the dawn—like couchant lions scenting blood. A sense of protection, modified to some extent by the stretch of intervening water and the ghostliness of their outlines, emanated from those cruisers and battleships squatting like watch-dogs on the chain, alert and eager. Our gaze wandered ever and anon from the forbidding shore ahead to where those uncouth grey hulls broke the sea-line. Would they never give tongue! ... We were close to the land. The _wouff!_ of a gentle surf breaking on a sloping shingle beach, followed by the _soughing_ of the undertow, came plainly to our straining ears. Back of the crescent-shaped strand, now dimly outlined in a flatted monotint of leaden grey, rose the darker, scrub-clothed slope, its breast seamed and gashed by _dongas_ and water-courses, that stretched to the foot of the sheer bluff whose summit cut the sky-line 400 feet above our heads. As the minutes passed the scene changed. Sand and shingle took form and colour in the rapidly growing half-tones. The blackness of the slope beyond merged into a velvet green. The serrated crest of the ridge grew roseate as the first of the sun-rays stretched forth athwart the fields of Troy and touched it with gold-tipped fingers. A newborn day begotten of early summer had sprung from the womb of an Eastern night—a day fraught with much of suffering, much of mutilation and death, but surely a day that shall live in the history of the British Empire so long as that Empire stands....