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Updated: May 22, 2025
That was the joy of dressing up in the true tropical kit worn at Mudros; brown brogue shoes; pale brown stockings, turned down at the calves; khaki drill shorts, displaying bare knees; khaki shirts open at the throats, and with sleeves rolled up above white elbows; our topees, and no more. And, since we were sure we looked very nice, we decided to walk abroad among men.
Can its plaintive harmonies still be heard, or did they perish with him when he fell just ten days later? At dawn on the 1st July we sighted Lemnos island. Soon we were lying in Mudros Bay among over 120 ships, British and French of all sizes and types, from battleships to submarines, and from great ocean liners to trawlers, all safely at anchor in this wonderful natural harbour.
This demonstrated the fact that the Dardanelles could never be opened by sea power alone, and, accordingly, amphibious operations became necessary. An expeditionary force was assembled in Egypt, and Mudros was selected as the advanced base. On April 25, landings were effected on the extreme point of the Gallipoli Peninsula.
The motor-launch beat away from the Rangoon. Monty, standing in the stern, lit a pipe, and stared over the match-flame at the empty troopship. Jimmy Doon, sitting in the bows, surveyed the hill-locked harbour, and said to me: "Well, there's one comfort: we shan't be killed on Gallipoli." "Why not?" "Because we shall certainly die at Mudros."
The Battalion had been very successful in the preliminary rounds and had reached the final by the time of the evacuation. The team which they had to meet in the deciding round represented the Anson Battalion of the Royal Naval Division, and it was decided to play the tie while we were at Mudros.
The nurses were in many cases volunteers who had seen service in Mudros, and these had just got the Royal Red Cross Medal, equivalent to a D.S.O. Very pleased they were with it, and greatly they deserved it. Their quarters were divided by thin mud walls into narrow compartments, and they found the lack of sound-deadening properties trying.
But he agrees that, in practice, the move has now become imperative; the animals are dying; the men are overcrowded, whilst Mudros is impossible as a base. My cable, therefore, may stand. I made them carry out a little attack on a row of windmills, and really, they did not show much more imagination over the business than did Don Quixote in a similar encounter. But the men are superb specimens.
The fresh arrivals on the troopships brought with them like a breeze from the homeland that atmosphere of glowing optimism which prevailed in England in the early August days. The same news came from the opposite direction. For the streams of wounded, who in the weeks following the Suvla invasion poured into our Mudros hospitals, told us that the Turk was fairly on the run.
Breeding grounds in the surrounding camps, in the horse lines, the bullock lines and native villages were numerous. They were nothing like the flies at Mudros when the whole roof of a tent at night might be uniformly black with them, and eating was in the nature of a free fight. A couple of hundred or so to each tent was perhaps the average, but they made rest a matter of difficulty.
Until now the big ocean going ships have anchored close up to Helles or Anzac; in future Mudros will be the only possible harbour for these priceless floating depots. Imbros, here, lies quite open to submarine attacks, and in a northerly gale, becomes a mere roadstead.
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