never to be forgotten, for the glassy surface of the Ægean glowed with
phosphorescence, the sky was like a hanging of purple velvet, and the
peak of our foremast seemed almost to graze the stars. Across the
Hellespont, to the southward, the sky was illumined by a ruddy glow--a
village burning, so a sailor told me, on the site of ancient Troy. And
then there came back to me those lines from Agamemnon which I had
learned as a boy:

_"Beside the ruins of Troy they lie buried, those men so beautiful;
there they have their burial-place, hidden in an enemy's land!"_

We got under way at daybreak and, picking our way as cautiously as a
small boy who is trying to get out of the house at night without
awakening his family, we crept warily through the vast mine-field which
was laid across the entrance to the Dardanelles, past Sed-ul-Bahr, whose
sandy beach is littered with the rusting skeletons of both Allied and
Turkish warships and transports; past Kalid Bahr, where the high bluffs
are dotted with the ruins of Turkish forts destroyed by the shell-fire
of the British dreadnaughts on the other side of the peninsula and with
the remains of other forts which were destroyed in the Crusaders' times;
past Chanak, where the steep hill-slopes behind the town were white with
British tents, and so into the safe waters of the Marmora Sea. Though I
was perfectly familiar with the topography of the Gallipoli Peninsula,
as well as with the possibilities of modern naval guns, I was astonished
at the evidences, which we saw along the shore for miles, of the
extraordinary accuracy of the fire of the British fleet. Virtually all
the forts defending the Dardanelles were bombarded by indirect fire,
remember, the whole width of the peninsula separating them from the
fleet. To get a mental picture of the situation you must imagine
warships lying in the East River firing over Manhattan Island in an