Very soon it was quite dark.  Then everything lit up:  first, the camps on the hills, their innumerable hurricane-lamps resembling the lights of great cities; then, the vessels in the bay—­and, in the quiet of the windless evening, their bells, telling the hour, came clearly over the water.  The long hulls of the hospital ships marked themselves off by rows of green lights and large, luminous red crosses.  Reflected in the still water, they gave to the basin the appearance of a pleasure lake, gay with red and green fairy lamps.  The battleships hid their bellicose features in the darkness, and, since one or two of them had their bands playing, might have been pleasure steamers.  And from an Indian encampment behind us came a weird incantation and the steady beat of the tom-tom.

Somehow, in the beauty of the Mudros night, I felt a spring of new hope in our campaign.  We would win in the end.  And with this re-born confidence went nobler resolutions for myself.  To-morrow I would resume moral effort.  To-morrow I would begin again.

CHAPTER VIII

THE GREEN ROOM

Sec.1

The story of our two-months’ delay at Mudros is largely the story of Monty’s eccentricities.  As for Doe and myself, we just watched with growing pride our knees burning in the sun to a Maori brown.  When we bathed in the bay and saw that, while our bodies as a whole were a pale English pink, our elbows, knees and necks, that were daily exposed to the sun, were turning to this beautiful tint, we would place our limbs side by side to see which of us achieved the greater depth of colour.  For this we drew our pay.

Jimmy Doon received early his orders to join his regiment on the Peninsula.  He left us, declaring that he only contemplated paying a flying visit to the front, as the very sound of the guns convinced him that he was a civilian at heart.  He would be back soon, he said.

Monty appointed himself Chaplain to No. 16 Stationary Hospital, and set to work.  And during this period at Mudros he was just about as regrettable and impossible in his behaviour as I have ever known him.  He procured a gramophone, and, touring the tents, in which the sick men lay, would set the atrocious instrument playing, “Kitty, Kitty, isn’t it a pity in the city you work so hard?” The invalids loved the jingling refrain, and added to the plagues of Mudros by roaring its chorus.  Then Monty would return in the worst of tempers to our tent, and, putting the instrument roughly away, sit down and look miserable.  If Doe asked permission to feel his pulse or see his tongue, he would shut him up with the words, “Oh, stuff!” But once he laughed sarcastically and burst, with all the Monty enthusiasm and emphasis, into a diatribe against Broad Churchmanship, the ignorance of laymen, the timidity of the clergy, wishy-washy sermons—­in short, the criminal lack of dogmatic teaching.  Not seeing any connexion between dogmatic teaching and a gramophone, Doe looked so amazed that Monty laughed, and grumbled: