Читать книгу By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal онлайн

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The bombardment went on, ten miles off. No one wanted tea. At 7.30 the Major half-ordered a concert aft. Everyone went. It was really a good concert, almost free of martial songs. But here and there you'd find a man sneak off to the bows to watch the line of spurting flame in the north; and many an auditor, looking absently at the singer, knew as little of the theme as of the havoc those shells were working in the night.

We lay three days at Tenedos: so near and yet so far from the forts of the Dardanelles. We could see two in ruins on the toe of Gallipoli, and one tottering down the heights of the Asiatic shore at the entrance to the straits. But the straits ran at a right-angle with the shore under which we lay. We could see the bombarding fleet lying off the mouth. We could see them fire, but no result. What more tantalising?

We lay alongside Headquarters ship, loaded with the Directing Staff. H.Q. moved up and down, at safe distances, between us and the firing-line. We were one of an enormously large waiting fleet of transports and storeships. The impression of war was vivid: here was this waiting fleet, and tearing up and down the coast were destroyers and cruisers without number, and aloft, the whirring seaplanes.