I don't want any of your ---- excuses, either. I won't listen to 'em."

"What he say?" the captain asked me. "I not onderstan' hees Engleesh
ver' good."

"No, you wouldn't," I told him. "He's speaking a sort of patois, you
see. He wants to know if you will have the great kindness to drop anchor
alongside him until morning, for it is forbidden to pass through the
mine-fields in the dark, and he hopes that you will have a very pleasant
night."

Five minutes later our anchor had rumbled down off Sed-ul-Bahr, under
the shadow of Cape Helles, the tip of that rock, sun-scorched,
blood-soaked peninsula which was the scene of that most heroic of
military failures--the Gallipoli campaign. Above us, on the bare brown
hillside, was what looked, in the rapidly deepening twilight, like a
patch of driven snow, but upon examining it through my glasses I saw
that it was a field enclosed by a rude wall and planted thickly with
small white wooden crosses, standing row on row. Then I remembered. It
was at the foot of these steep and steel-swept bluffs that the Anzacs
made their immortal landing; it is here, in earth soaked with their own
blood, that they lie sleeping. The crowded dugouts in which they dwelt
have already fallen in; the trenches which they dug and which they held
to the death have crumbled into furrows; their bones lie among the rocks
and bushes at the foot of that dark and ominous hill on whose slopes
they made their supreme sacrifice. Leaning on the rail of the deserted
bridge in the darkness and the silence it seemed as though I could see
their ghosts standing amid the crosses on the hillside staring longingly
across the world toward that sun-baked Karroo of Australia and to the
blue New Zealand mountains which they called "Home." It was a night