"Oh! I was just potted in a gully."
Tomlinson laughed.
"Strictly true, but hopelessly inadequate," he said. "It was like this."
"Dry up, Tommy; it's an old story now."
"All the better, like this port."
"Well, bottle it up, then."
"I should like to hear the full story, Mr. Tomlinson," said Mr. Forester. "Frank has told me little more than the bare fact."
"There you are, Frank. You want uncorking. Well, when Frank came back to the peninsula I didn't see him for a while. He was interpreting; a soft job, by all accounts, for the Turkish prisoners are very reticent. But the battery on Sari Bair began to be very troublesome, and our fliers couldn't locate it. Frank offered to have a shot, and crept up the gully one night, in rags borrowed from a prisoner; you wouldn't have known him. He spotted the guns overlaid with scrub near that sepulchre of his, reported next morning, and offered to go up again and set light to the hollow tree, as a beacon for our gunners. If that didn't deserve the D.S.O.--well, I know what Anzac thinks."
"Cut it short, man. I knew the place, and if the Turks had seen me they'd have taken me for a ghost and skedaddled."
"The fellow who potted you didn't take you for a ghost, anyway. He went up, sir, with a lot of pills in his pocket--small incendiary bombs, you know; fired the tree and the brushwood round, and made a fine old blaze, by the light of which somebody gave him two bullets in the arm as he was running down the gully. Our guns got the range in a few minutes--and we've had no more trouble from that particular battery. I tell you, all Anzac was mad with delight, and carried Frank round the camp cheering like----"