The years pile up, and zero after zero day is added for ever to his primitive calendar, and not one of them is thrust from his reverent memory; but at each anniversary he wakes and says, 'This is the 3rd of February, or the 1st of July,' and thinks of old companions who went down on that day; and though he has seen glorious successes since, he will ever think with a special tenderness of the black early failures when he first saw battle and his friends going under. And if in any place where soldiers gather and tell old tales, there are two men who can say to each other, 'I, too, was at Helles on such a date,' there is a great bond between them. On one of these days we sat under the olive-tree and waited. Up the hill one of that long series of heroic, costly semi-successes was going through. We were in reserve. We had done six turns in the trenches without doing an attack. When we came out we were very ready to attack, very sure of ourselves. Now we were not so sure of ourselves; we were waiting, and there was a terrible noise. Very early the guns had begun, and everywhere, from the Straits to the sea, were the loud barkings of the French 'seventy-fives,' thinly assisted by the British artillery, which was scanty, and had almost no ammunition. But the big ships came out from Imbros and stood off and swelled the chorus, dropping their huge shells on the very peak of the little sugar-loaf that tops Achi Baba, and covering his western slopes with monstrous eruptions of black and yellow.