I went away, and flung myself down on my valise in my flapping tent.  I lay on my back, my hands clasped behind my head, and gazed up into the tent-roof loud with flies.  Suvla had failed!  It was a lie—­an alarmist lie!  Why, only yesterday we had exulted in it as the winning move, declaring that the game was over bar shouting, and regretting that we could not be in at the death.  What was it reminding me of—­this sudden “black-out,” just as the lights had been brightest?  Ah, I had it:  that moment, when, in the flush of winning the Swimming Cup for Bramhall, I learned that I had lost it.  How similar this was!  Then the prize had been a silver cup, which had been fought for by a parcel of schoolboys.  Now the grander trophy was that silver strip of the Dardanelles which men called “the Narrows,” and the combatants were a pack of nations.

Suvla had failed!  Why was I identifying my tiny self with a huge thing like Britain, and feeling that, because she had failed in her great fight for the Dardanelles, so I would fail, and purposely, in my little struggle after moral beauty?  What a fool I was—­but that was how it was working out.  Beauty be hanged!  Monty was badly wrong in proclaiming that nature was chiefly beautiful, and life on the whole was good.  And, if he were wrong, why, then there was no further need to toil after a beauty of character to match the beauty of seas and hills.  Good heavens!  Beauty in the Mudros Hills!  They were but homes of thirsty grass and dying thistles, dust and torturing flies.  These ideals of Monty’s were vapoury.  Why not throw them up—­throw up moral effort?  I would.  There was not more beauty—­

It was at this moment that Monty himself stood in the tent door.

“Down, Rupert?” he asked.  “What’s the matter?”

I looked up into his eyes, and saw in them that inquiring sympathy which could so quickly transfigure him from a lively friend into a gentle priest.

“Oh, nothing,” I said.  I was in no mood just now to tell him anything.  “Bored, that’s all.”

And then I looked round, and noticed that the tent was full of a violet light.  It was as if limelight had been turned on from behind a violet glass.

“Good Lord!” I exclaimed.  “The air’s all coloured!”

“Yes,” said he, “I was coming to tell you to look at the sunset.  It’s bad old Mudros’s one good deed.”

Out to the tent door I went, and looked over the harbour to the western shores.  And there, very rapidly, the ball of the sun was going down behind the hills with an affair of gold and crimson lights, while all the hills were violet.  The colour was so strong that it came out and flushed with violet the black hulls of the ships.  And they, strangely motionless, lay mirrored in a water of white and gold.

“Listen!” said Monty.

For from all the camps the British bugles were singing the sad call of “Retreat”; the French trumpets wailing “Sun-down,” and their rifles firing a rapid fusillade to speed the departing day.  Meanwhile the heat had died into a refreshing coolness; the wind had dropped, leaving the dust undisturbed on the ground; and the flies were roosting in the tops of the tents.