When daylight came, the Orphan found that "W" beach had altered very much since he had been there, six months and a half ago. The cliffs beyond were crowned by a vast number of hospital tents and marquees; where, previously, the horse and mule "lines" had been, tents and marquees, and huge masses of stores, protected by tarpaulins, now occupied these spaces, and the irregular sandy track up the gully to the ridge had become a wide well-made road with well-metalled roads branching away to left and right. Everywhere there were "dug-outs", not open ones as in those early days, but covered with wooden or galvanized-iron roofs, over which at least one protecting layer of sand-bags had been laid. Motor-lorries dashed along the roads continuously, and seemed to have taken the place of horses and mules almost entirely.
Along the face of the steep cliff, on the far side of the gully from where those one-inch Nordenfeldts and maxims had played such havoc among the Lancashire Fusiliers on the day of the landing, a steep road had been cut in the face of it, and the Orphan saw hundreds of "dug-outs" up there.
Fifty yards below him was the beach itself, with its four little piers—No. 1 Pier to his right, with a gap in it made by the first of the south-west gales; beyond it the "Inner Hulk", a sunken steamer with her back broken; and beyond her, at right angles, another sunken steamer, the "Outer Hulk". At his feet was No. 2 Pier, the first pier the Sappers had begun on the 25th April; and beyond this the longer No. 3 Pier, with its end curving towards the "Outer Hulk", so that a small harbour[#] had been formed in which now lay two little "coaster" steamers, several lighters, and a trawler.
[#] This harbour was called Port Talbot after the Captain of the poor old Majestic.
Beyond and to the left, under the high cliff, was No. 4 Pier, more of a mole or jetty than a pier, protected a little from the east by a reef of rocks. It was on this pier that the Orphan, later on, had so much work to do. Farther along still, several lighters had stranded, and one or two were already broken up.
Out towards Tenedos and over against the Asiatic shore the usual trawlers and drifters and a couple of destroyers patrolled for submarines.
But what struck the Orphan most vividly was the emptiness of the Straits between him and the Asiatic shore. In May they had been almost crowded with battleships, transports, hospital ships, ships of all sorts and sizes; now a solitary hospital ship lay off Helles, and only two or three small craft and tugs were anchored inshore.
The Turks fired no shells that morning until the breakfast hour, when two fell among the Sappers' stores and tents, without, however, doing any damage.
After breakfast the Orphan and his stokers had more digging to do, extending the beach party's "dug-outs" at the foot of the low cliff, below the Mess "dug-out", and commencing others. Shells came over every now and then all the morning, but none burst near the Orphan's party. When they knocked off work and started dinner, the Turks over on the Asiatic shore fired many big 6-inch high explosives, which did very little material damage, though they racked his nerves exceedingly.
The Orphan never even pretended that he did not hate those shells; and when, that afternoon, he received orders to take twenty men, embark in a tug, and go down to Rabbit Island to draw coal, he felt extremely pleased to get away from them. Rabbit Island is a tiny little island at the mouth of the Straits, and when he arrived there he found two small monitors with long-range guns busily bombarding the Asiatic guns. The Turks were firing back, and when he went alongside the collier to get his filled coal-bags, one of their wretched shells fell so close to the tug as to splash the bows. The Orphan loaded his coal-bags and started back to "W" beach, realizing that the only thing to do, if he meant to enjoy himself, was simply not to think of shells at all. Of course, in twenty-four hours he had made friends with Richards, that Leading Seaman; and the old man could not help noticing that he flinched whenever a big shell moaned through the air, and burst with its horrid, rending roar. "Look here, sir," he said; "it's just like this: don't you worry about them—it's no use worrying. If you're meant to be killed, killed you will be, wherever you go or whatever you do; so just pay no attention to them."