ils, went up in a
humming, buzzing cloud.

A bit of wood lying near had looked like his rifle from a distance; and
now we saw that, instead of lying on his stomach, he was lying on his
back, and looked as if he had been killed by shrapnel.

"Putrid stink," said I; "come on--let's clear out."

And so our sniper-hunt led to nothing but a dead Turk stewing in the
glaring sunshine. We rejoined the squads. No one had missed us. This
first day was destined to be one of many adventures.

CHAPTER XIII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE WHITE PACK-MULE

That night was dark, with no stars. I didn't know what part of Gallipoli
we were in, and the maps issued were useless.

The first cases had been picked up close to the firing-line, and were
mostly gun-shot wounds, and now--late in the evening--all my squads
having worked four miles to the beach, I was trying to get my own
direction back to the ambulance.

The Turks seldom fired at night, so that it was only the occasional
shot of a British rifle, or the sudden "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!" of a
machine-gun which told me the direction of the firing-line.

I trudged on and on in the dark, stumbling over rocks and slithering
down steep crags, tearing my way through thorns and brambles, and
sometimes rustling among high dry grass.

Queer scents, pepperminty and sage-like smells, came in whiffs. It was
cold. I must have gone several miles along the Kapanja Sirt when I came
to a halt and once more tried to get my bearings. I peered at the gloomy
sky, but there was no star. I listened for the lap-lap of water on the
beach of Suvla Bay, but I must have been too far up the ridges to hear
anything. There was dead silence. When I moved a little green lizard
scutted over a white rock and vanished among the dead scrub.

I was past feeling hungry, although I had eaten one army biscuit in the
early morning and had had nothing since.

It was extraordinarily lonely. You may imagine how queer it was, for
here was I, trying to get back to my ambulance headquarters at night on
the first day of landing--and I was hopelessly lost. It was impossible
to tell where the firing-line began. I reckoned I was outside the
British outposts and not far from the Turkish lines. Once, as I went
blundering along over some rocks, a dark figure bolted out of a bush and
ran away up the ridge in a panic.

"Halt!" I shouted, trying to make believe I was a British armed sentry.
But the figure ran on, and I began to stri