During the first half of November there had been occasional heavy showers and some frost. On the 15th-17th a violent storm, accompanied by a deluge of rain, drove the sea higher and higher up the shore, swamping the bivouacs on the beach. In the Gully conditions were even worse. Bales of hay, sacks of bread, drowned mules, were washed down the ravine into the sea. On the night of the 26th a still fiercer storm raged in the peninsula, a storm as disastrous to the combatants as any that ever affected armies in the field. The flood-gates of heaven indeed opened, and at Anzac and Suvla the trenches were quickly waist deep, and the current swept down like a mill-race—kit, equipment, rations, even men, being washed away. In places the trenches filled, and the troops must drown or stand on the top, a sure target for the Turk had he not been in a like predicament. As in a prairie fire or other of Nature’s more appalling manifestations, the beast of prey and its natural victim flee side by side, or cower together, so Briton and Turk regarded one another as fellow-sufferers rather than as implacable enemies. The gale became a hurricane; the crash of thunder, the blinding flashes of lightning, heightened the sense of catastrophe, and the bitter cold made it the more unbearable. Piers and landing-stages were destroyed and the beaches strewn with wreckage. During the 27th the rain came down steadily; then the wind veered to the north and brought snow and cruel blizzards. A hard frost followed, and at Anzac and Suvla men were frozen to death; others lost their limbs—some their reason—and cases of frost-bite were very numerous. In the south the conditions were less disastrous than further north, but the suffering of the troops was intense. Altogether about 10,000 sick had to be removed from the peninsula as an outcome of the four days’ tragedy. When the floods subsided Gully Ravine was a bed of deep mud, and its passage—a vital matter to the Division—could only be accomplished with infinite labour.