peared just to the right of
a cross-spar, and by noticing its change of position, I was enabled to
guess with some exactitude the course we were laying.

For the first two or three hours the star and the mast kept a perfectly
unchangeable position.

I woke up after dozing for some minutes, and taking up my old stand near
the companion-way again took my star observation. But this time the star
had swept right round and was the other side of the mast. We had
changed our course from south-west to north. Just then Hawk came up the
companion-way, no doubt from a bottle-hunt down below.

"It's--Salonika!" said he.

"We've turned almost due north in the last quarter of an hour."

"I know it,--been down to the stokers' bunks--it's Salonika--another new
landing."

"They keep the Xth for making new landings."

And so to the Graeco-Serbian frontier and a fresh series of adventures,
including sickness, life in an Egyptian hospital--and then England.

CHAPTER XXVIII. LOOKING BACK

The queer thing is, that when I look back upon that "Great Failure" it
is not the danger or the importance of the undertaking which is strongly
impressed so much as a jumble of smells and sounds and small things.

It is just these small things which no author can make up in his study
at home.

The glitter of some one carrying an army biscuit-tin along the mule
track; the imprinted tracks of sand-birds by the blue Aegean shore; the
stink of the dead; a dead man's hand sticking up through the sand; the
blankets soaked each morning by the heavy dew; the incessant rattle of a
machine-gun behind Pear-tree Gully; the distant ridges of the Sari Bahir
range shimmering in the heat of noon-day; the angry "buzz" of the green
and black flies disturbed from a jam-pot lid; the grit of sand in the
mouth with every bite of food; the sullen dullness of the overworked,
death-wearied troops; the hoarse dried-up and everlasting question:
"Any water?"; the silence of the Hindus of the Pack-mule Corps; the
"S-s-s-e-e-e-e-o-o-o-op!--Crash!"--of the high explosives bursting in a
bunch of densely solid smoke on the Kislar Dargh, and the slow unfolding
of these masses of smoke and sand in black and khaki rolls; the snort
and stampede of a couple of mules bolting along the beach with their
trappings swinging and rattling under their panting bellies; the steady
burning of the star-lit night skies; the regular morning shelling from
the Turkish batteries on the bre