ngth. With consuming energy, in armies of thousands,
they worked with pick and shovel till every yard of ground commanding a
landing place was trench or rifle pit or gun emplacement. An
impenetrable thicket of barbed wire ran up and down and across the
gullies, stretched to the shore and netted the shallow waters of the
beach itself. Then when all that man could do was done, they awaited
the British attack in full confidence that no army, regiment, or man
could land on that peninsula and live.

"No more extraordinary venture than this British landing on a naked
beach within point-blank range of the most modern firearms can be read
in history or fable. It was a landing of troops upon a foreign shore
thousands of miles from home, hundreds from any naval base. Without
absolute command of the sea, it could not have been so much as thought
of. Men, guns, food, ammunition, even water had to be conveyed in
ships and disembarked under the eyes of a hostile army, warned, armed,
alert, and behind almost impregnable defenses.

"To conceive the preposterous thing was itself a kind of sublime folly;
to accomplish it, simply and plainly stated, a feat divine. Though a
thousand pens in the future essay the task no justice in words can ever
be done to the courage and determination of the men who made good that
landing. Put aside for a moment the indisputable fact that the whole
gigantic undertaking achieved in a sense nothing whatever. View it
only as an exploit, a martial achievement, and it takes rank as the
most amazing feat of arms that the world has ever seen or is likely to
see. That at least remains, and as that, and no less than that, with
the full price of human life and treasure expended, it goes upon the
record, immortal as the soul of man. And nothing could be more fitting
than that an accomplishment which dims the glory of all previous
martial deeds, which marks the highest point of courage and resolution
reached by Britain in all her wars, should have been carried through by
British, Irish, and Colonial troops, representatives of the whole
empire under the guidance and protecting guard, of the British fleet.

"At Lemnos, for the more than Homeric endeavor on Homer's sea, lay an
assemblage of shipping such as no harbor had ever held. Within sight
of Troy they came and went, and in the classic waters ringed round by
classic hills waited for the day, a great armada, line upon line of
black transports, crowded w