say, 12,000 wounded on
the 18th instant, and it is clear no troops in the world can stand it
very long. But we are literally at the end of our shrapnel; and as to
high explosive, according to the standards of the gunners, we have never
had any!

Left on a picket boat with Birdie to board my destroyer to an
accompaniment of various denominations of projectiles. One or two shells
burst hard by just as we were scrambling up her side.

Vice-Admiral Nicholls called after my return. Courtauld Thomson, the Red
Cross man, dined; very helpful; very well stocked with comforts and
everyone likes him, even the R.A.M.C.

_31st May, 1915. H.M.T. "Arcadian."_ Worked in the forenoon. Gouraud,
Girodon and Hunter-Weston lunched and we spent the afternoon at the
scheme for our next fight. Each of us agreed that Fortune had not been
over kind. By one month's hard, close hammering we had at last made the
tough _moral_ of the Turks more pliant, when lo and behold, in broad
daylight, thousands of their common soldiery see with their own eyes two
great battleships sink beneath the waves and all the others make an exit
more dramatic than dignified. Most of the Armada of store ships had
already cleared out and now the last of the battleships has offed it
over the offing; a move which the whole of the German Grand Fleet could
not have forced them to make! What better pick-me-up could Providence
have provided for the badly-shaken Turks? No more inquisitive cruisers
ready to let fly a salvo at anything that stirs. No more searchlights by
night; no more big explosives flying from the Aegean into the
Dardanelles!

_1st June, 1915. Imbros._ Came ashore and stuck up my 80-lb. tent in the
middle of a sandbank whereon some sanguine Greek agriculturalist has
been trying to plant wheat.

We shall live the simple life; the same life, in fact, as the men, but
are glad to be off the ship and able to stretch our legs.

Hard fighting in the North zone and the South. Both outposts captured by
us on the 29th May at Anzac and on the French right at Helles heavily
attacked. In the North we had to give ground, but not before we had made
the enemy pay ten times its value in killed and wounded. Had we only had
a few spare rounds of shrapnel we need never have gone back. The War
Office have called for a return of my 4.5 howitzer ammunition during the
past fortnight, and I find that, since the 14th May, we have expended
477 shell altogether at Anzac and Helles co