Reflected in the still water, they gave to the basin the
appearance of a pleasure lake, gay with red and green fairy lamps.
The battleships hid their bellicose features in the darkness, and,
since one or two of them had their bands playing, might have been
pleasure steamers. And from an Indian encampment behind us came a
weird incantation and the steady beat of the tom-tom.

Somehow, in the beauty of the Mudros night, I felt a spring of new
hope in our campaign. We would win in the end. And with this re-born
confidence went nobler resolutions for myself. To-morrow I would
resume moral effort. To-morrow I would begin again.

CHAPTER VIII

THE GREEN ROOM

Sec.1

The story of our two-months' delay at Mudros is largely the story of
Monty's eccentricities. As for Doe and myself, we just watched with
growing pride our knees burning in the sun to a Maori brown. When we
bathed in the bay and saw that, while our bodies as a whole were a
pale English pink, our elbows, knees and necks, that were daily
exposed to the sun, were turning to this beautiful tint, we would
place our limbs side by side to see which of us achieved the greater
depth of colour. For this we drew our pay.

Jimmy Doon received early his orders to join his regiment on the
Peninsula. He left us, declaring that he only contemplated paying a
flying visit to the front, as the very sound of the guns convinced
him that he was a civilian at heart. He would be back soon, he said.

Monty appointed himself Chaplain to No. 16 Stationary Hospital, and
set to work. And during this period at Mudros he was just about as
regrettable and impossible in his behaviour as I have ever known
him. He procured a gramophone, and, touring the tents, in which the
sick men lay, would set the atrocious instrument playing, "Kitty,
Kitty, isn't it a pity in the city you work so hard?" The invalids
loved the jingling refrain, and added to the plagues of Mudros by
roaring its chorus. Then Monty would return in the worst of tempers
to our tent, and, putting the instrument roughly away, sit down and
look miserable. If Doe asked permission to feel his pulse or see his
tongue, he would shut him up with the words, "Oh, stuff!" But once
he laughed sarcastically and burst, with all the Monty enthusiasm
and emphasis, into a diatribe against Broad Churchmanship, the
ignorance of laymen, the timidity of the clergy, wishy-washy
sermons--in short, the criminal lack of dogmatic teaching. Not