We dropped down from the headland into V Beach Bay, and, in doing so, passed the limit of the British zone and trespassed upon French territory.  The slope, from the beach upward, was as alive with French and Senegalese as a cloven ant-hill is alive with ants.  The stores of the whole French army seemed accumulated in the neighbourhood.  There was an atmosphere of French excitability, very different from the stillness of the British Zone.  Stepping from the British Zone into the French was like turning suddenly from the quiet of Rotten Row into the bustle of the Boulevard des Italiens.  It was prenez-garde and attention la! depeches-vous and pardon, m’sieu, and sacre nom de dieu! before we got through all these hearty busy-bodies and drew near the hull of the Clyde.

With unwitting reverence we approached.  I’ll swear I was within an ace of removing my hat, and that, had I talked to Doe, I should have spoken in a whisper.  It was like visiting a church.  Look, there by the square doors were the endless marks of machine-gun bullets that had swept the men who tried to leave the boat for the shore.  God! they hadn’t a dog’s chance.  If those bullet indentations meant anything, they meant that the man who left the square door was lucky if he got ashore with less than a dozen bullets in his flesh.

We stepped on to the gangway that led to the nearest of the doors and hurried up to it, catching something of the “Get back—­get back!” sensation of those who had been forced by the bullets to withdraw into the hold.  A huge hold it showed itself to be when we bowed our heads and stepped into it through the square door.  Yes, they could cram battalions here.  What a hive the Clyde was when they hurled it ashore!  And what a swarm of bees it housed!  In this hold, now so silent and empty, what emotions throbbed that day!

“Poor old White!” murmured Doe.  “He got ashore well enough, and wasn’t killed till the fighting on the high ground.  By Jove, Rupert! we’ll search the Peninsula from here to Fusilier Bluff for his grave.  Come on.”

We left the comparative darkness of the hold, and stepped through the square door, that had been so deadly an exit for hundreds, into the bright daylight.  At once there was given us a full view of V Beach, with the sea sparkling as it broke upon the shingle.  The air all about was strangely opalescent.  Seddel Bahr shone in the sun, as only a white Eastern village can.  The hills rising from the beach looked steep and difficult, but sunlit and shimmering.  Everything shimmered as a result of the sudden contrast from the darkness of the hold.  Even so must the scene have flashed upon the eyes of the invaders as they issued from the sides of the Clyde.  For many of them, how quickly the bright light went out!

We had hardly entered the ruined streets of Seddel Bahr before a shell screamed into the village and burst with a deafening explosion in a house, whose walls went up in a volcano of dust and stones.