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ak of dawn over the gloom-shrouded hills; the far-away call of some wounded man for "Stretchers! Stretchers!"; the naked white men splashing and swimming in the bay; the swoop of a couple of skinny vultures over the burning white sand of the Salt Lake bed to the stinking and decomposing body of a shrapnel-slaughtered mule hidden in the willow-thickets at the bottom of Chocolate Hill; a torn and bullet-pierced French warplane stranded on the other side of Lala Baba--lying over at an angle like a wounded white seabird; the rush for the little figure bringing in "the mails" in a sack over his shoulder; the smell of iodine and iodoform round the hospital-tents; the long wobbling moan of the Turkish long-distance shells, and the harmless "Z-z-z-eee-e-e-o-ooop!" of their "dud" shells which buried themselves so often in the sand without exploding; the tattered, begrimed and sunken-eyed appearance of men who had been in the trenches for three weeks at a stretch; the bristling unshaven chins, and the craving desire for "woodbines"; the ingrained stale blood on my hands and arms from those fearful gaping wounds, and the red-brown blood-stain patches on my khaki drill clothes; the pestering curse of those damnable Suvla Bay flies and the lice with which every officer and man swarmed. The awful--cut-off, Robinson Crusoe feeling--no letters from home, no newspapers, no books... sand, biscuits and flies; flies, bully and sand... Stay-at-home critics and prophets of war cannot strike just that tiny spark of reality which makes the whole thing "live." However many diagrams and wonderful ideas these remarkable amateur experts publish they won't "go down" with the man who has humped his pack and has "been out." Mention the word "Blighty" or "Tickler's plum-and-apple," "Kangaroo Beach" or "Jhill-o! Johnnie!" or "Up yer go--an' the best o' luck!" to any man of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force and in each case you will have touched upon a vividly imprinted impresssion of the Dardanelles. There was adventure wild and queer enough in the Dardanelles campaign to fill a volume of Turkish Nights' Entertainments, but the people at home know nothing of it. This is the very type of adventure and incident which would have aroused a war-sickened people; which would have rekindled war-weary enthusiasm and patriotism in the land. Maybe most of these accounts of marvellous escapes and 'cute encounters, secret scoutings and extraordina
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