would be able to do so, aided as he would be by
the fire from the ships in the harbour--a fire which enfiladed the whole
length of this feature.

As to this morning's hold up, Stopford took it philosophically, which
was well so far as it went, but he seemed hardly to realize that the
Turks have rushed their guns and reinforcements here from a very long
way off whilst he has been creeping along at the rate of a mile a day.
Stopford expected Hammersley would be in to report progress in person;
he will keep me well posted in his news and he understands that the
Welsh Division will be at his disposal to help the 11th Division.

As Stopford could give me no recent news from Mahon I suggested I should
go and find out from him personally how matters then stood. Stopford
said it was a good idea but that he himself thought it better not to
leave his Headquarters where messages kept coming in. I agreed and
started with George Brodrick to scale the hill.

About half a mile up we struck a crowd of the Irish Pioneer Regiment
(Granard's) filling their water bottles at a well marked on the map as
Charak Cheshme. In their company we now made our way Northwards along a
path through fairly thick scrub as high as a man's waist. We were moving
parallel to, and about 300 yards below, the crestline of the ridge. When
we had gone another mile a spattering of "overs" began to fall around
like the first heavy drops of a thunderstorm. So wrapped in cotton wool
is a now-a-days Commander-in-Chief that this was the first musketry fire
I could claim to have come under since the beginning of the war. To sit
in a trench and hear flights of bullets flop into the sandbag parapet,
or pass harmlessly overhead, is hardly to be under fire. An irregular
stream of Irishmen were walking up the path along with us; one of them
was hit just ahead of me. He caught it in the thigh and stretcher men
whipped him off in a jiffy. At last we got to a spot some 2-1/2 miles
from Suvla and had not yet been able to find Mahon. So I sat down behind
a stone, somewhere about the letter "K" of Kiretch Tepe Sirt, and sent
young Brodrick to espy the land. He found that we had pulled up within a
couple of hundred yards of the Brigade Headquarters, where portions of
the 30th, 31st and 34th Brigades (sounds very formidable but only five
Battalions) were holding a spur and preparing to make an attack. General
Mahon was actually in the Brigade Headquarters (a tiny ditch which only
h