The sun went down, and soon it was very cold in the sweeper: and in each man's heart I think there was a certain chill. There were no more songs, but the men whispered in small groups, or stood silent, shifting uneasily their wearisome packs. For now we were indeed cut on from civilization and committed to the unknown. The transport we had left seemed a very haven of comfort and security; one thought longingly of white tables in the saloon, and the unfriendly linen bags of bully-beef and biscuits we carried were concrete evidence of a new life. The war seemed no longer remote, and each of us realized indignantly that we were personally involved in it. So for a little all these soldiers had a period of serious thought unusual in the soldier's life. But as we neared the Peninsula the excitement and novelty and the prospect of exercising cramped limbs brought back valour and cheerfulness. At Malta we had heard many tales of the still terrifying ordeal of landing under fire. But such terrors were not for us. There was a bright moon, and as we saw the pale cliffs of Cape Helles, all, I think, expected each moment a torrent of shells from some obscure quarter. But instead an unearthly stillness brooded over the two bays, and only a Morse lamp blinking at the sweeper suggested that any living thing was there. And there came over the water a strange musty smell; some said it was the smell of the dead, and some the smell of an incinerator; myself I do not know, but it was the smell of the Peninsula for ever, which no man can forget. We disembarked at a pier of rafts by the _River Clyde_, and stumbled eagerly ashore. And now we were in the very heart of heroic things. Nowhere, I think, was the new soldier plunged so suddenly into the genuine scenes of war as he was at Gallipoli; in France there was a long transition of training-camps and railway trains and billets, and he moved by easy gradations to the firing-line. But here, a few hours after a night in linen sheets, we stood suddenly on the very sand where, but three weeks before, those hideous machine-guns in the cliffs had mown down that astonishing party of April 25. And in that silver stillness it was difficult to believe. We shambled off up the steady slope between two cliffs, marvelling that any men could have prevailed against so perfect a 'field of fire.' By now we were very tired, and it was heavy work labouring through the soft sand. Queer, Moorish-looking figures in white robes peered at us from dark corners, and here and there a man poked a tousled head from a hole in the ground, and blinked upon our progress. Some one remarked that it reminded him of nothing so much as the native camp at Earl's Court on a fine August evening, and that indeed was the effect.