tle red-bearded man in command--

"Remind you of any one?" I said to Hawk.

"Cap'n Kettle!"

"Yes!"

He was exactly like Cutcliffe Hyne's famous "Kettle," except that he
smoked a pipe. We huddled into the lighter, and hauled our stores down
below. Some of us were "green about the gills," and some were trying to
pretend we didn't care.

We watched the boat which landed just before us strike a mine and be
blown to pieces. Encouraging sight... At last we reached the tiny cove,
and the lighter let down a sort of tail-board on the sand.

CHAPTER XI. THE KAPANJA SIRT

One had his stomach blown out, and the other his chest blown in. The two
bodies lay upon the sand as we stepped down.

The metallic rattle of the firing-line sounded far away. We man-handled
all our medical equipment and stores from the hold of the lighter to the
beach.

We had orders to "fall in" the stretcher-bearers, and work in open
formation to the firing-line.

The Kapanja Sirt runs right along one side of Suvla Bay. It is one
wing of that horse-shoe formation of rugged mountains which hems in the
Anafarta Ova and the Salt Lake.

Our searching zone for wounded lay along this ridge, which rises like
the vertebrae of some great antediluvian reptile--dropping sheer down
on the Gulf of Saros side, and, in varying slopes, to the plains and the
Salt Lake on the other.

Here again small things left a vivid impression--the crack of a rifle
from the top of the ridge, and a party of British climbing up the rocks
and scrub in search of the hidden Turk.

The smell of human blood soaking its way into the sand from those two
"stiffies" on the beach. The sullen silence, except for the distant
crackle and the occasional moan of a shell. The rain which came pelting
down in great cold blobs, splashing and soaking our thin drill clothes
till we were wet to the skin and shivering with cold.

We were all thinking: "Who will be the first to get plugged?" We moved
slowly along the ridge, searching every bush and rock for signs of
wounded men.

We wondered what the first case would be--and which squad would come
across it.

I worked up and down the line of squads trying to keep them in touch
with each other. We were carrying stretchers, haversacks, iron rations,
medical haversacks, medical water-bottles, our own private water-bottles
(filled on Lemnos Island), and three "monkey-boxes" or field medical
companions.

Those we had left on the beach wer