Cape Helles

At Malta some of us spent an evening ashore and sat for a little in a tawdry, riotous little cafe where two poor singing women strove vainly to make themselves heard above the pandemonium of clinked glasses and bawled orders.

There we met many officers newly returned from the landing at Cape Helles, some of them with slightly bodily wounds, but all of them with grievous injuries staring out of their eyes.

Those of them who would speak at all were voluble with anecdotes of horror and blood.

Most of our own party had not yet lost the light-hearted mood in which men went to the war in those days.

At Malta we had heard many tales of the still terrifying ordeal of landing under fire.

But such terrors were not for us.

There was a bright moon, and as we saw the pale cliffs of Cape Helles all, I think, expected each moment a torrent of shells from some obscure quarter.

But instead an unearthly stillness brooded over the two bays, and only a Morse lamp blinking at the sweeper suggested that any living thing was there.

At Malta, some of us spent an evening ashore and sat for a little in a tawdry, riotous little cafe where two poor singing women strove vainly to make themselves heard above the pandemonium of clinked glasses and bawled orders.

There we met many officers newly returned from the landing at Cape Helles, some of them with slightly bodily wounds, but all of them with grievous injuries staring out of their eyes.

Those of them who would speak at all were voluble with anecdotes of horror and blood.

Most of our own party had not yet lost the light-hearted mood in which men went to the war in those days.

At Malta we had heard many tales of the still terrifying ordeal of landing under fire.

But such terrors were not for us.

There was a bright moon, and as we saw the pale cliffs of Cape Helles all, I think, expected each moment a torrent of shells from some obscure quarter.

But instead an unearthly stillness brooded over the two bays, and only a Morse lamp blinking at the sweeper suggested that any living thing was there.

At Malta some of us spent an evening ashore and sat for a little in a tawdry, riotous little cafe where two poor singing women strove vainly to make themselves heard above the pandemonium of clinked glasses and bawled orders.

There we met many officers newly returned from the landing at Cape Helles, some of them with slightly bodily wounds, but all of them with grievous injuries staring out of their eyes.

Those of them who would speak at all were voluble with anecdotes of horror and blood.

Most of our own party had not yet lost the light-hearted mood in which men went to the war in those days.

At Malta we had heard many tales of the still terrifying ordeal of landing under fire.

But such terrors were not for us.

There was a bright moon, and as we saw the pale cliffs of Cape Helles all, I think, expected each moment a torrent of shells from some obscure quarter.

But instead an unearthly stillness brooded over the two bays, and only a Morse lamp blinking at the sweeper suggested that any living thing was there.