On--on crept the boats loaded to the gunwales with the citizen soldiers from the Dominions. Every jaw was set hard as agate, every eye was fixed on the forbidding-looking heights now taking form dimly as the east reddened and the sky became shot with lengthening spears of greenish-yellow. Minutes passed--minutes that seemed as hours--while ever shoreward crawled the fleet of boats, and even plainer and gloomier loomed the frowning cliffs that dominated the Bay of Anzac. Back of the flotilla, away to seaward, lay the British warships, their gray hulls floating ghostlike in the first of the dawn--like couchant lions scenting blood. A sense of protection, modified to some extent by the stretch of intervening water and the ghostliness of their outlines, emanated from those cruisers and battleships squatting like watch-dogs on the chain, alert and eager. Our gaze wandered ever and anon from the forbidding shore ahead to where those uncouth gray hulls broke the sea-line. Would they never give tongue! ... We were close to the land. The _wouff!_ of a gentle surf breaking on a sloping shingle beach, followed by the _soughing_ of the undertow, came plainly to our straining ears. Back of the crescent-shaped strand, now dimly outlined in a flatted monotint of leaden gray, rose the darker, scrub-clothed slope, its breast seamed and gashed by _dongas_ and water-courses, that stretched to the foot of the sheer bluff whose summit cut the sky-line 400 feet above our heads. As the minutes passed the scene changed. Sand and shingle took form and color in the rapidly growing half-tones. The blackness of the slope beyond merged into a velvet green. The serrated crest of the ridge grew roseate as the first of the sun-rays stretched forth athwart the fields of Troy and touched it with gold-tipped fingers. A new-born day begotten of early summer had sprung from the womb of an Eastern night--a day fraught with much of suffering, much of mutilation and death, but surely a day that shall live in the history of the British Empire so long as that Empire stands.... Was it the surprise we all hoped for, after all?--the surprise that seemed beyond the bounds of possibility. Were there _any_ Turks there waiting to oppose us at all? And if so, where were they hidden? In trenches cut on the beach? In the scrub? Behind the crest of the cliff? God! were they never going to show themselves----?