At the advanced base in Mudros harbour (the third vital point in the expedition at this time), an important change in command was effected in the middle of this month. Throughout the first weeks of fighting and organisation, this base was left destitute of an Inspector-General of Communications. The heavy and complicated work involved, especially in the transhipment of all drafts and supplies and ammunition from the ordinary transports to trawlers and small craft after the danger of submarines was reported, fell upon the Principal Naval Transport Officer (Admiral Phillimore) and the Quartermaster-General (Brigadier-General S. H. Winter). In June, Major-General Wallace was appointed to the office, but his long experience as an executive officer in India had not specially qualified him for a peculiarly difficult piece of administrative work, and complaints arose of the confusion and delay on board the s.s. _Aragon_, assigned to him as headquarters. Hitherto this liner (hired at great cost from the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company) had served as offices for the Principal Naval Transport Officer, and as the General Post Office. The new Staff of enormous size was now added, and the ship also became a kind of clearing-house or depôt for officers passing to and fro. She acquired an evil name owing to frequent loss of parcels from home for officers and men upon the Peninsula. Unhappily, there was no question about the losses; but this unpardonable crime against the fighting men, who were literally dying for want of variety and small pleasures in food, may have been committed at other points of the postal service. More definite, though less serious, was the charge of luxury on board. Certainly, to any one coming fresh from the dug-outs, dust storms, monotonous rations, and perpetual risks of the Peninsula, the _Aragon_ was like an Enchanted Isle. All who have campaigned in a desert land know the first physical delight of getting on board a well-equipped vessel--the plenty and variety of food, the clean cooking, the iced drinks, tablecloths for dinner, sheets in the bunks, a good chance of washing, and baths. To the campaigning soldier, those are comforts beyond the dreams of luxury, but in ordinary life the most ascetic of saints does not renounce them all as necessarily sinful. Perhaps it was the arbitrary exclusion of many passing officers from the delights of a real dinner and other pleasurable contrasts to life at the front which made the _Aragon_ a byword, as though she were “a sink of iniquity”; and from the same contrasts arose the report that at the end of the campaign she was discovered to be aground upon empty bottles, as upon a coral reef. This appears unlikely, since the harbour took battleships with ease, to say nothing of the _Aquitania_ and the largest liners afloat.[140]