"She's off!" he said. The book was full of marks. In methodical sailor
fashion he had been crossing them off since the war began: British and
German--Blucher, Scharnhorst, Irresistible, Goliath, and the rest--
millions of dollars and hundreds of men at a stroke.

"Where's it going to end?" he demanded. "There's seven hundred good men
gone, maybe--how many did the Triumph carry? And we think it's good
news! If a man should invent something that would kill a hundred
thousand men at once, he'd be a great man... Now, what is that?"

The English were hanging on to Sedd ul Bahr--they might try to make
another Gibraltar of it. Their aeroplanes came up every day. There was
a French-man with a long tail--he only came to the edge of the camp, and
as soon as the batteries opened up turned back, but the Englishman
didn't stop for anything. He dropped a bomb or two every time he
passed--one man must have been square under one, for they found pieces
of him, but never did find his head. It wasn't so much the bomb that
did the damage; it was the stones blown out by the explosion. If you
were standing anywhere within sixty feet when it went off, you were
likely to be killed. The captain had had trenches dug all over camp
into which they could jump--had one for himself just outside the tent.
All you hoped for when one of those fellows was overhead and the
shrapnel chasing after him was that the next one would take him fair and
square and bring him down. Yet that fellow took his life in his hands
every time he flew over. "He's fighting for his country, too!" the
captain sighed.

It was our first duty to present ourselves to the commandant of the
peninsular forces, Field-Marshal Liman von Sanders--Liman Pasha, as he