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Findlay was slightly wounded by shrapnel. He was sent back to Mudros on the Whitby Abbey which had brought him across a few hours before. His first visit to Gallipoli had not been a prolonged one. Throughout the day the enemy sprayed our trenches with occasional bursts of shrapnel.
So we instituted Bomb Schools on the Peninsula and a Training Camp at Mudros to which our weak battalions had regularly to send parties of officers and men who could ill be spared from duty in the trenches. We must therefore also have Rest Camps in name if not in actuality. They were not camps, and were not conspicuously restful, but we knew them officially as Rest Camps.
H.M.S. "Franconia." Mudros Harbour. Stormy weather, and even here, inside Mudros harbour, touch with the shore is cut off. After I was asleep last night, an answer came in from K., straight, strong and to the point.
A cruiser met us in the Grecian Archipelago and conducted us safely into Mudros Harbour on 23rd September. It had got very much colder as we got farther north, and the day before we made Mudros it was absolutely arctic, which was lucky indeed as it made us all take on to the Peninsula much warmer clothes than we would otherwise have done.
On 23rd December we left our camp and tried to board the Prince Abbas, but the storm was too strong and we had to land again. However, we got off next day, reached Mudros Harbour, and changed on to the Scotian on Christmas Day. None of us will forget the kindness with which we were received on the Scotian, and the arrival of a huge mail and plum puddings completed our joy.
Then a sudden and alarming snort from her siren drew cries of "Hooter's gone!" "Down tools, lads!" "Ta-ta, Mudros!" "All aboard for Dixie!" "Hurry up, hurry up, get upon the deck, Find the nearest girl, and put your arms around her neck, For the last boat's leaving for home."
The time was at hand when the ravines and gorges that cracked and spliced the Mudros Hills would roar to the torrents, and the hard, dust-strewn earth would become acres of mud, from which our tent-pegs would be drawn like pins out of butter. We remembered Elijah on Mount Carmel, and looked at the sky for rain. But we looked in alarm and not hope.
With magic sail the Argonauts Stood by to go about; Little they thought that hero band As they made once more for an unknown land In a world of terror and doubt, That here in the wake of the magical bough Should come the all-terrible ironclad now Serenely floating out. Written on Mudros Beach: Oct. 7, 1915. July the twenty-seventh. The deadly silence...
They spoke with ease and grace of Mudros Harbour, of the great April landing at Helles, of the Eski Line, the River Clyde, the Gully Ravine, and Asiatic Annie. We felt very near the trenches, when they thus tossed fabled names about in commonplace conversations. They never used the name "Gallipoli," but always "The Peninsula." We made a mental note of this.
What name?" interrupted the M.L.O. There was war forty miles away, and no time to argue with a young subaltern. "What name, you?" "Ray, sir. East Cheshires." "Rest Camp, Mudros." "But is it for long, sir?" ventured I. "Next, please. What name, padre?" "Monty," answered our friend. "East Cheshires."
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