The morning wore on.  There was bustling in the communication trenches, pack-mules bringing up ammunition, and men shouldering cases of bombs.  At ten o’clock the C.O. came round the line.  Now that the imminence of the attack had made unpleasantly real his duty of sending us over the top, he had grown quite fatherly.  “Don’t get killed,” he said.  “I can’t spare any of you—­battalion dam-depleted already....  Is there anything you wish to ask, my boy?”

“Yes, sir.  I want to know what time it begins, and what exactly it’s all about.”

“At two o’clock,” he replied.  “The mine goes up then.  But what it’s all about I know no more than you do.  Personally, I think it is to cover some operations at Suvla.  The Staff is obviously so dam-anxious to let the Turk know we’re going to attack, that I’m sure this is a diversion intended to keep the Turk’s Helles army occupied, and prevent it reinforcing Suvla.  Go and have a look from the Bluff out to sea, and observe how well the show is being advertised.  There may be reason for this ostentation, but it’s dam-awkward for my lads, who’ll have to run up against a well-prepared enemy.”

“But s’posing it means they’re going to evacuate Suvla, and leave us to our fate, what’ll be our position on Helles then, sir?”

“Well, we shall be like the rearguard that covered the retreat at Mons—­heroes, but mostly dead ones.”

“Good Lord!” thought I, as the C.O. turned away.  “We shall be lonely on Helles to-night if we hear that the Suvla Army has left for England.”

I went, as he suggested, to glance at the preparations on the sea.  I saw a string of devilish monitors, solemnly taking up their position between Imbros and our eastern coast.  Destroyers lay round the Peninsula like a chain of black rulers.  A great airship was sailing towards us.  From Imbros and Tenedos aeroplanes were rising high in the sky.

The Turk, wide awake to these preliminaries, was firing shrapnel at the aircraft overhead, and hurling towards the destroyers his high-explosive shells, which tossed up water-spouts in the sea.  The whizz-bang gun spat continuously.

“You won’t spit after to-night,” I mused, “if Doe reaches you.”

And, from all I knew of Doe and his passion for the heroic, I felt assured that he would never stay in the crater like a diffident batsman in his block.  He would reach the opposite crease, or be run out.

“He’ll get there.  He’ll get there,” I told myself persistently.

Sec.7

The attack having been postponed till two o’clock, Monty held an open-air Communion Service in Trolley Ravine.  The C.O., myself, and a few others stole half an hour to attend it.  This day was the last Sunday in Advent, and a morning peace, such as reminded us of English Sundays, brooded over Gallipoli.  Save for the distant and intermittent firing of the Turk, everything was very still, and Monty had no