I can tell you that we most heartily wished this moon in ---- well, anywhere than shining just then upon this particular spot of the earth. We little cared for a moon to direct a spotlight on our surprise attack. It looked like an evil moon to us. Or rather, it looked like the evil, watchful eye of our enemy. For all of us knew well enough what was behind those cliffs--about two miles or thereabouts behind. Oh, we knew well enough that there lay the Turks and their big, German-managed guns. The Turks couldn’t very well hear me talking at from four to five miles, yet such was the consciousness of the danger of our adventure and such the hypnotism of the scene that when I spoke to the comrade next to me, it was in a whisper. “I wonder,” I said, “what that old green eye of a moon is looking at back of those dark, old cliffs? I wonder if he sees the big guns drowsing and the garrisons asleep or----” “What he’s seeing,” said the man at my side in a grumble, “is the heathen blighters getting ready to bang hell out of us!” “Cheerful beggar you are,” I whispered back the more gloomily because I was one of those who had argued and felt certain that we were not to take the Turks by surprise. And now the men had assembled on the decks as soft-footedly as they might. They had gathered in the darkness into orderly rows like big companies of phantoms. The ships’ crews worked as spectrally and nearly as silently as the lowering of ladders and the launching of the boats would permit. Even the groaning and wrenching of the chains and cables seemed subdued and ghostly. Small steamboats each with a swerving tail made up of barges and small boats panted alongside the transports and battleships. With wonderful precision and swiftness the great ships spawned hundreds on hundreds of smaller craft, thousands on thousands of men, crowding the waters with them for as far as you could make out whichever way you looked in the faint moonlight. “Fall in Number Nine platoon!” came the growled order. That was my command. I quickly had my men groping down the companion ladder. There were sixty in my special charge. By the time I had them all aboard and had stepped into the barge myself where we huddled with fully two hundred more, the voice of our cocky little midshipman sounded. He sat most correctly erect in the stern, his cap at a jaunty angle, his slender neck in its broad white collar. He was so very young and boyish but he had an alert and business-like eye. “Full up, sir,” he said smartly. God bless and care for that gallant little chap! I can’t help fervently wishing it as the memory of him comes to me now. He was only sixteen--the treble of childhood was still in his voice. But in it as he gave his orders then and afterward as well when frightful peril came, were the steadiness and the coolness of a brave man--the sort of man he must have become if the dandy little youngster had not been destined for death with those many, many others on this April night.