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.