Sec.1

But I must hurry on.  Here am I dawdling over what happened indoors in the minds of two boys, while out of doors nations were battling against nations, and the whole world was in upheaval.  Here am I happily describing so local a thing as the effort of a big-hearted priest to rebuild our spiritual lives on the quiet moments of the Mass and the strange glorious mystery of penance, while the great Division which captured the beaches of Cape Helles had been brought to a standstill by the impregnable hill of Achi Baba, and uncounted troopships like our own were pouring through the Mediterranean to retrieve the fight.

On with the war, then.  One morning I was wakened by much talking and movement all over the boat, and by Doe’s leaping out of his top bunk, kicking me in passing, and disappearing through the cabin door.  Back he came in a minute, crying:  “You must come out and see this lovely, white dream-city.  We’re outside Malta.”

I rushed out to find Valetta, the grand harbour of Malta, on three sides of us.  We were anchored; and the hull of the Rangoon, which looked very huge now, was surrounded by Maltese bumboats.

Shore leave was granted us.  And, ashore, we hurried through the blazing heat to visit the hospitals and learn from the crowds of Gallipoli sick and wounded something about the fighting at Helles.  These cheery patients shocked our optimism by telling us that it was hopeless to expect the capture of the hill of Achi Baba by frontal assault and that any further advance at Cape Helles was scratched off the programme.  The hosts of troops that were passing through Malta must, they surprised us by declaring, be destined for some secret move elsewhere than at Helles, for there was no room for them on the narrow tongue of land beneath Achi Baba.

“We’re wild to know what’s in the wind,” said a sister.  “The stream of transports has never stopped for the last few days.”

That we could well believe.  There were two huge liners crammed with khaki figures in the harbour that morning.

“We are going to win, I imagine?” asked Monty, with a note of doubt.

“O lord, yes,” replied a superbly bonny youngster, without a right arm.  “But I don’t envy you going to the Peninsula.  It’s heat, dust, flies, and dysentery.  And Mudros is ten times worse.”

“What’s Mudros?” asked I.

“Mudros,” broke in Doe, blushing, as he aired his classical learning, “is a harbour in the Isle of Lemnos famous in classical—­”

“Mudros,” interrupted the one-armed man, proud of his experience, “is a harbour in the Island of Lemnos, and the filthiest hole—­”

“Mudros,” continued Doe, refusing to be beaten, “is a harbour in the Isle of Lemnos, which is the island where Jason and the Argonauts landed, and found Hypsipele and the women who had murdered their husbands.  Jupiter hurled Vulcan from Heaven, and he fell upon Lemnos.  And it’s sad to relate that Achilles and Agamemnon had a bit of a dust-up there.”