e, and left me reclining on the Bluff
and looking out to sea. I didn't turn my head to watch him go. But I
was thinking now less stormily.

Yes, I had been behaving like a fool: but I had been mad, as though
everything had snapped. To-morrow I would recover my mental balance
and resume moral effort. My last loyalty to Doe should be this: that
I would not let his death destroy his friend's ideals. That, as
Monty said, would spoil the beauty of it all. And I, least of any,
should spoil it! But to-night--just for to-night--my fretful,
contrary mood must play itself out. To-morrow I would begin again.

So I lay watching the changing lights. Darkness came close behind
the sunset, and there, yonder, Orion hung low in the sky. I tossed a
few stones down the Bluff, but soon it was too dark to see them
after they had travelled a little distance. Overhead the sky
deepened to the last blue of night, but along the western horizon it
remained a luminous sea-green. Against this bright afterglow the
hills of Imbros stood almost black. I stared at them. Then the
luminous green turned to the blue of the zenith, and the hills were
lost. And the cold of the Gallipoli night chilled me, as I lay
there, too indolent and despairing to seek warmth.

CHAPTER XVI

THE HOURS BEFORE THE END

Sec.1

On the following day we buried Doe at sundown. In a grave on Hunter
Weston Hill, which slopes down to W Beach, he lies with his feet
toward the sea.

The same evening the medical orderly abused my confidence and
informed the doctor that I was running a high temperature; and the
doctor told me to pack up, as he was sending me to hospital. I
refused.

I pointed out to him that if I, as a Company Commander, were to go
sick at this juncture of the Gallipoli campaign, I could never again
look the men of my company in the face. I tried to be funny about
it. I asked him if he knew that Suvla had been evacuated; and that
the Turks had therefore their whole Suvla army released to attack us
on Helles--to say nothing of unlimited reinforcements pouring
through Servia from Germany. I offered him an even bet that a few
days hence we should either be lying dead in the scrub at Helles, or
marching wearily to our prison at Constantinople. How, then, could I
desert my men at this perilous moment? "The Germans are coming, oh
dear, oh dear," I summed up; and then shivered, as I remembered
whose merry voice had first chanted those words.

All this I e