be here"; and between these two moments there _is_ a border land when
the mind runs all about Life's workshop and tries to do one last bit of
stock-taking.

But the process can no more be fixed in the memory than the sequence of
a dream when the dew is off the grass. All I remember is a sort of
wonder:--why these incredible pains to seek out an amphibious battle
ground whereon two sets of people who have no cause of quarrel can blow
one another to atoms? Why are these Straits the cockpit of the world?
What is it all about? What on earth has happened to sanity when the
whale and elephant are locked in mortal combat making between them a
picture which might be painted by one of H.M.'s Commissioners in Lunacy
to decorate an asylum for homicides.

Whizz--flop--bang--what an ass I am to be here. If we keep on another
thirty seconds we are in for a visit to Davy Jones's Locker.

Now above the _Queen Elizabeth_, making slowly backwards and forwards up
in the neck of the Narrows, were other men-o'-war spitting tons of hot
metal at the Turks. The Forts made no reply--or none that we could make
out, either with our ears or with glasses. Perhaps there was an attempt;
if so, it must have been very half-hearted. The enemy's fixed defences
were silenced but the concealed mobile guns from the Peninsula and from
Asia were far too busy and were having it all their own way.

Close to us were steam trawlers and mine-sweepers steaming along with
columns of spray spouting up close by them from falling field gun
shells, with here and there a biggish fellow amongst them, probably a
five or six inch field howitzer. One of them was in the act of catching
a great mine as we drew up level with her. Some 250 yards from us was
the _Inflexible_ slowly coming out of the Straits, her wireless cut away
and a number of shrapnel holes through her tops and crow's nest.
Suddenly, so quickly did we turn that, going at speed, the decks were at
an angle of 45 deg. and several of us (d'Amade for one) narrowly escaped
slipping down the railless decks into the sea. The _Inflexible_ had
signalled us she had struck a mine, and that we must stand by and see
her home to Tenedos. We spun round like a top (escaping thereby a salvo
of four from a field battery) and followed as close as we dared.

My blood ran cold--for sheer deliberate awfulness this beat everything.
We gazed spellbound: no one knew what moment the great ship might not
dive into the depths. The pum