East was a vapour bath. What a
climate for a white man to make war in! And yet everywhere in this
city of Alexander and Athanasius, British and Australian soldiers
sauntered on foot or drove government waggons through the streets.
Sick and wounded, too, roamed abroad in their blue hospital
uniforms. Only too pleased to display before three eager novices
their superior acquaintance with Gallipoli, they told us the story
we had heard at Malta: the Helles army, firmly stopped by the hill
of Achi Baba, was melting away in the atrocious heat; but some
startling new venture was expected, for the forty quays of
Alexandria had been scarcely sufficient to cater for the troops and
stores that had put in there; and all the hospitals in Egypt had
been emptied to admit twenty thousand casualties.

We hired a buggy, and drove back through the same odorous street to
the dockyard, and, having given the thief of an Arab driver a third
of his demands, went straight to our cabins to rinse our mouths out.

Next day at sundown, the siren boomed good-bye. Perhaps there was a
military reason for it, but we always left these ports at sunset. It
was sunset, as we steamed out of Malta; and now, with the sky
flushed and the air rose-tinted, we began to slip gently out of the
harbour, amid cheers and handwavings from every ship that we passed.
We were picking our course between the ships, when Monty plucked my
sleeve, and, pointing to a home-bound liner, murmured:

"Beauty, Rupert."

I looked, and saw what he meant. For in the big liner's bows two
tiny English children clad in white, a little boy and girl, waved
mechanically under the instructions of their sweet-faced English
mother, who, though a young one, looked with a mother's eyes at our
yellow rows of helmeted lads, and waved the more energetically (I
doubt not) as she strove to keep back her tears. In the sad eyes of
that youthful mother I saw looking out at us the maternal love of
her sex for all the sons of woman. She was the last Englishwoman
that many of these boys ever saw.

As we drew near the entrance of the harbour, a cheery Englishman was
swept past in a white-sailed craft, and called out, as the wind bore
him away: "Good-bye, lads. Do your duty, lads. Give 'em hell ev'ry
time." Almost the next minute he was a white speck among the
shipping of the harbour, and we were out in the open sea.

Sec.3

The _Rangoon_ had taken aboard at Alexandria a number of new
officers who