Our battle ship pinnaces, that is to say, barges, were launched and sent out to the different transports to take aboard the landing parties. Each man as we stood at parade on the decks before being ordered to the pinnaces had for his supplies as indicated in General Birdwood’s orders, his rifle and bayonet, 150 rounds of ammunition and three days’ rations, which consisted of his water bottle holding a quart of water, furnished by the clear springs of Lemnos Island, a tin of bully-beef to the weight of half a pound, as many biscuits as he could take on, while leaving room for his emergency tin which holds tablets of concentrated beef and cakes of chocolate. Besides in your pocket you had your first-aid kit, a small roll of bandages and a vial of iodine.
Weirdly began our great and deadly adventure on this coveted stretch of the Ægean Sea which if we could conquer made possible the breaking of the historic barrier of the Dardanelles. It was a stretch of coast we were soon to wash with our blood as literally as the Ægean’s waves wash the self-same shore.
The long procession of transports and their grim battleship escorts had stolen up in the night, a widely-spread yet organized, concrete group of slowly-moving, black, gloomy monsters. Every light aboard each ship had been ordered out. Not even the pin-head flame of a cigarette might show on any deck.
The only light we had was the faint green gleam that filtered over the smooth waters from a moon that had begun to wane and had, indeed, at this hour of three in the morning, nearly fallen behind the ragged jaw of the black cliffs.
I can tell you that we most heartily wished this moon in —— well, anywhere than shining just then upon this particular spot of the earth. We little cared for a moon to direct a spotlight on our surprise attack. It looked like an evil moon to us. Or rather, it looked like the evil, watchful eye of our enemy. For all of us knew well enough what was behind those cliffs—about two miles or thereabouts behind. Oh, we knew well enough that there lay the Turks and their big, German-managed guns.
The Turks couldn’t very well hear me talking at from four to five miles, yet such was the consciousness of the danger of our adventure and such the hypnotism of the scene that when I spoke to the comrade next to me, it was in a whisper.
“I wonder,” I said, “what that old green eye of a moon is looking at back of those dark, old cliffs? I wonder if he sees the big guns drowsing and the garrisons asleep or——”
“What he’s seeing,” said the man at my side in a grumble, “is the heathen blighters getting ready to bang hell out of us!”
“Cheerful beggar you are,” I whispered back the more gloomily because I was one of those who had argued and felt certain that we were not to take the Turks by surprise.
And now the men had assembled on the decks as soft-footedly as they might. They had gathered in the darkness into orderly rows like big companies of phantoms. The ships’ crews worked as spectrally and nearly as silently as the lowering of ladders and the launching of the boats would permit. Even the groaning and wrenching of the chains and cables seemed subdued and ghostly. Small steamboats each with a swerving tail made up of barges and small boats panted alongside the transports and battleships. With wonderful precision and swiftness the great ships spawned hundreds on hundreds of smaller craft, thousands on thousands of men, crowding the waters with them for as far as you could make out whichever way you looked in the faint moonlight.