ve
service. To break a rule that week carried with it the suspicion of
cowardice. This was the more remarkable because many of the men were
fishermen, trappers, hunters, and lumbermen who until their enlistment
had said "Sir" to no man, and who gloried in the reputation given them
by one inspecting officer as "the most undisciplined lot he had ever
seen." From the day the Canadians left Salisbury Plain to take their
places in the trenches in Flanders the Newfoundlanders were obsessed by
one idea: they had to get to the front.

[Sidenote: Troop-ships in Mudros Harbor.]

So it was with eleven hundred of such eager spirits that I lined up, on
a Sunday evening early in August, 1915, on the deck of the troop-ship in
Mudros Harbor, which is the center of the historic island of Lemnos,
about fifty miles from Gallipoli. Around us lay all sorts of ships, from
ocean leviathans to tiny launches and rowboats. There were
gray-and-black-painted troopers, their rails lined with soldiers;
immense four-funneled men-of-war; and brightly lighted, white hospital
ships, with their red crosses outlined in electric lights. The landing
officer left us in a little motor-boat. We watched him glide slowly
shoreward, where we could faintly discern through the dusk the white of
the tents that were the headquarters for the people at Lemnos; to the
right of the tents we could see the hospital for wounded Australians and
New-Zealanders. A French battleship dipped its flag as it passed, and
our boys sang "The Marseillaise."

[Sidenote: The Iron Ration.]

A mail that had come that day was being sorted. While we waited, each
man was served with his "iron ration." This consisted of a one-pound
tin of pressed corned beef--the much-hated and much-maligned "bully
beef"--a bag of biscuits, and a small tin that held two tubes of Oxo,
with tea and sugar in specially constructed air- and damp-proof
envelopes. This was an emergency ration, to be kept in case of direst
need, and to be used only to ward off actual starvation. After that we
were given our ammunition, two hundred and fifty rounds to each man.

[Sidenote: The solitary letter home.]

But what brought home to me most the seriousness of our venture was the
solitary sheet of letter paper, with its envelope, that was given to
every man to be used for a parting letter home. For some poor chaps it
was indeed the last letter. Then we went over the side and aboard the
destroyer that was to take us to Su