“Now, get aboard, Rupert,” said Monty.

“You first,” corrected I.  “I’m going to be last off to-night.”

“As your senior officer, I order you to go first.”

“As the only combatant officer on the beach,” I retorted, “I’m O.C. 
Troops.  You’re simply attached to me for rations and discipline. 
Kindly embark.”

Monty muttered something about “upstart impudence,” and obeyed the O.C.  Troops, who thereupon boarded the rocking lighter, and exchanged with one step the fatal Peninsula for the safety of the seas.

On the Redbreast we leaned upon the rail, looking back.  The boat began to steam away, and Monty, knowing with whom the thoughts of both of us lay, said quietly: 

“‘Tell England—­’ You must write a book and tell ’em, Rupert, about the dead schoolboys of your generation—­

’Tell England, ye who pass this monument,
We died for her, and here we rest content.’”

Unable to conquer a slight warming of the eyes at these words, I watched the Peninsula pass.  All that I could see of it in the moonlight was the white surf on the beach, the slope of Hunter Weston Hill, and the outline of Achi Baba, rising behind like a monument.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE END OF RUPERT’S STORY

Sec.1

Let Monty have the last word, for he spoke it well.  He spoke it a few days ago, in the late autumn of 1918, that is to say, as the war breaks up, and nearly three years after we slipped away in the moonlight from W Beach.

In those intervening years the game losers of Gallipoli had avenged themselves at Bagdad, Jerusalem, and Aleppo.  In every field the Turkish Armies had been destroyed:  and now the forts of the Dardanelles were to be surrendered, and the Narrows thrown open to the Allies.  One wished that the dead on Gallipoli might be awakened, if only for a minute, at the sound of the old language spoken among the graves, to see the khaki ashore again, and British ships sailing in triumph up the Straits.

Many of the old Colonel’s visions of the emancipation of the Arab world, and the control of the junction of the continents, had thus been realised.  And a nobler crusade than that which he saw in the Dardanelles campaign had been fought and won by the army which entered Jerusalem.  And, note it well, the men who won these victories were in great part the men who escaped from Suvla and Helles.  For, like the Suvla Army, the whole Helles Army escaped.  And the Turk was a fool to let them go.

But, before I give you Monty’s last word, let me tell you where I am at this moment.  It is early evening, and I am writing these closing lines, in which I bid you farewell, sitting on the floor of my kennel-like dug-out in a Belgian trench.  There is a most glorious bombardment going on overhead.  It has thundered over our trench for days and nights on to the German lines, which to-morrow, when we go over the top, we shall capture, as surely as we captured the one I am sitting in now.  Yes, Turkey is out of the game; Bulgaria is out of it; Austria is crying for quarter; and Germany is disintegrating before our advance.