A walk up Gully Ravine and the Mule Trench to the front line in the afternoon of January 8 provided new and strange sensations. Practically all the fighting troops were in or close up to the firing-line, the support and reserve lines and the usually crowded billets at Geoghegan’s Bluff, the Eski lines, and similar spots being completely deserted. One could walk half a mile without meeting anything other than one of the limbers told off to trundle up and down the tracks in order to give the enemy the impression that traffic was still normal. [Sidenote: _The Last to Leave Gallipoli_] Late at night the troops began to leave the firing-line. When they had passed, the men in the second line filed out, and after them followed the small parties—each of one officer and four men—of the East Lancashire R.A.M.C. to pick up stragglers and assist any sick or injured. Last of all came the handful of sappers who had charge of the closing of the gaps in the entanglements of Gully Ravine. In places the enemy trenches were only fifteen yards from the British line, and it seemed too much to expect that the Turks should remain in ignorance of the complete departure of the opposing army. The night was pitch dark. The men moved along the communication ways and passed through the gaps with a seeming deliberation and slowness that was most irritating to the more imaginative, whose nerves were on edge. There is some comfort in a crowd, though it may be more liable to panic. The handful of R.A.M.C. and R.E. who toiled in the rear were dominated by one thought—how many hours or minutes would go by before the Turk would discover that the British trenches had been deserted, and that he would simply have to follow swiftly to cut off all stragglers and perhaps capture or destroy the greater part of the retreating army? These were the most trying hours that the Lancashire men had ever known. “If ever man knew terror, I knew it that night,” said one of the officers, and the others admitted that his experience was theirs no less. It cost them a real effort to appear calm and collected, and to talk to their men in tones of apparent unconcern. No sound pierced the stillness of the night save the occasional crack of a Turkish rifle, or of one of the fixed rifles left in the trenches, and now and then the bursting of a shell on one of the southern beaches.