“It’ll be more perfect,” I answered, in a low, hollow voice, “if the war ends us both.  Perhaps it will.  There is time yet.”

At so bitter a sentence Monty gave me a look, and broke through all barriers with a single generous remark.

“Rupert, old chap, the loss of Edgar leaves me numb with pain, but I know I’m not suffering like you.”

A dry sob tore up my frame.

“Oh, I don’t know what I feel,” I gulped, “or what I’ve said.  I think I’ve been a self-centred cad.  I’m—­I’m sorry.”

Monty muttered something gentle, and left me reclining on the Bluff and looking out to sea.  I didn’t turn my head to watch him go.  But I was thinking now less stormily.

Yes, I had been behaving like a fool:  but I had been mad, as though everything had snapped.  To-morrow I would recover my mental balance and resume moral effort.  My last loyalty to Doe should be this:  that I would not let his death destroy his friend’s ideals.  That, as Monty said, would spoil the beauty of it all.  And I, least of any, should spoil it!  But to-night—­just for to-night—­my fretful, contrary mood must play itself out.  To-morrow I would begin again.

So I lay watching the changing lights.  Darkness came close behind the sunset, and there, yonder, Orion hung low in the sky.  I tossed a few stones down the Bluff, but soon it was too dark to see them after they had travelled a little distance.  Overhead the sky deepened to the last blue of night, but along the western horizon it remained a luminous sea-green.  Against this bright afterglow the hills of Imbros stood almost black.  I stared at them.  Then the luminous green turned to the blue of the zenith, and the hills were lost.  And the cold of the Gallipoli night chilled me, as I lay there, too indolent and despairing to seek warmth.

CHAPTER XVI

THE HOURS BEFORE THE END

Sec.1

On the following day we buried Doe at sundown.  In a grave on Hunter Weston Hill, which slopes down to W Beach, he lies with his feet toward the sea.

The same evening the medical orderly abused my confidence and informed the doctor that I was running a high temperature; and the doctor told me to pack up, as he was sending me to hospital.  I refused.

I pointed out to him that if I, as a Company Commander, were to go sick at this juncture of the Gallipoli campaign, I could never again look the men of my company in the face.  I tried to be funny about it.  I asked him if he knew that Suvla had been evacuated; and that the Turks had therefore their whole Suvla army released to attack us on Helles—­to say nothing of unlimited reinforcements pouring through Servia from Germany.  I offered him an even bet that a few days hence we should either be lying dead in the scrub at Helles, or marching wearily to our prison at Constantinople.  How, then, could I desert my men at this perilous moment?  “The Germans are coming, oh dear, oh dear,” I summed up; and then shivered, as I remembered whose merry voice had first chanted those words.