From the Seddel Bahr point the coast falls back a little into the shallow arc of a bay barely over a quarter of a mile long if one follows the sandy beach. Around the curve, the ground rises rather steeply, almost exactly in the form of a classic theatre, to which the beach would serve as orchestra and the sea as stage. This little bay, to be renowned as V Beach, ends on the western side in precipitous cliffs, round the foot of which it is possible to clamber over masses of fallen rocks, but no path leads. On the top of the cliff stood one of the most powerful of the entrance forts destroyed by the naval attack on February 19. The beach itself is narrow--about 10 yards across--and was edged by a small but perpendicular bank, not over 4 or 5 feet in height. The slopes of the theatre were at that time covered with grass, to be changed later on for dust and heavy sand. The slope measures about 200 yards from beach to summit. Along the edge of the beach ran an entanglement of the peculiarly strong barbed wire used by the Turks; a second entanglement ran round the curving slope two-thirds of the way up, and a third joined the two at right angles at the eastern end of the bay. The upper part of the semicircle was strongly entrenched and armed with pom-poms, while in the ruins of the old fortress, in the village, and in a shattered barrack on the top of the western summit, machine-guns and a multitude of snipers were concealed. Nature and man’s invention had converted the little bay into a defensive engine of manifold destruction. [Illustration: THE _RIVER CLYDE_, “V” BEACH, AND SEDDEL BAHR, ABOUT TWO MONTHS AFTER LANDING]