Warwickshire Regiment, was aboard. As soon as our battalion had detrained, I hid behind some boxes on the pier; and when the last of the men were walking up the gangplank. I joined them. A steward handed each man a ticket, bearing the number of his berth. I received one with the rest. Since I was in uniform, the steward had no way of telling whether or not I belonged to the Newfoundlanders.

All that day the Megantic stayed in port, waiting for darkness to begin the voyage. In the afternoon, we pulled out into the stream; and at sunset began threading our way between buoys, down the tortuous channel to the open sea. A couple of wicked-looking destroyers escorted us out of Devonport; but as soon as we had cleared the harbor, they steamed up and shot ahead of us. The next morning they had disappeared. The first night out I ate nothing, but the next day I managed to secure a ticket to the dining-room. With two battalions on board, there was no room on the Megantic for drills; the only work we had was boat drill once a day. Each man was assigned his place in the lifeboats. At the stern of the ship a big 4.7 gun was mounted; and at various other points were placed five or six machine guns, in preparation for a possible submarine attack. In addition, we depended for escape on our speed of twenty-three to twenty-five knots.

During the boat drills, I stayed below with the Warwickshire Regiment, or, as we called them, the Warwicks. This regiment was formed of men of the regular army, who had been all through the first gruelling part of the campaign, beginning with the retreat from Mons, to the battle of the Marne. They were the remnants of "French's contemptible little army." Every one of them had been wounded so seriously as to be unable to return to the front. Ordinarily they would have been discharged, but they were men whose whole lives had been spent in the army. Few of them were under forty, so they were now being sent to Khartum in the Sudan, for garrison duty. At night, I came on deck. In the submarine area ships showed no lights, so I could go around without fear of discovery. The only people I had to avoid were the officers, and the caste system of the army kept them to their own part of the ship. The men I knew would sooner cut their tongues out than inform on me.

Just before sunset of the third night out, because we passed several ships, we knew we were approaching land. At nine o'clock, we were directly opposite the Rock of Gibraltar. After we had left Gibraltar behind, all precautions were doubled; we were now in the zone of submarine operations. Ordinarily we steamed along at eighteen or nineteen knots; but the night before we fetched Malta, we zigzagged through the darkness, with engines throbbing at top speed, until the entire ship quivered and shook, and every bolt groaned in protest. With nearly three thousand lives in his care, our captain ran no risks. But the night passed without incident. The next day, at noon, we were safe in one of the fortified harbors of Malta.

After we left Malta, since I knew I could not then be sent back to England, I reported myself to the adjutant. He and the colonel were in the orderly room, as the office of a regiment is called. The sergeant-major in charge of the orderly room had been taken ill two or three days before, and the other men had been swamped by the extra rush of clerical work, incident on the departure of a regiment for the front. Perhaps this had a good deal to do with the lenient treatment I received. The adjutant came to the point at once. That is a characteristic of adjutants.

"Gallishaw," he said, "do you want to come to work here?"

"Yes, sir," I answered.

"All right," he said; "you're posted to B Company."

That night, it appeared in orders that "Lance-Corporal Gallishaw has embarked with the battalion, and is posted to B Company for pay." The only comment the colonel made on the affair was to say to the adjutant, "I've often heard of men leaving a ship when she is going on active service, but I've never heard of men stowing away to get there." Thus I went to work in the orderly room; and in the orderly room I stayed until we arrived at Alexandria, Egypt, and entrained for Cairo. At Heliopolis, on the desert near Cairo, we went into camp. There I joined my company and drilled with it, and bade good-by to the orderly room and all its works.

Scene at Lancashire Landing, Cape HellesToList

We stayed in Egypt only ten days or so to get accustomed to the heat, and to change our heavy uniforms and hats for the light-weight duck uniforms and sun helmets, suitable for the climate on the Peninsula of Gallipoli. The heat at Heliopolis was too intense to permit of our drilling very much. In the very early morning, before the sun was really strong, we marched out a mile across the desert, skirmished about for an hour or so, and returned to camp for breakfast. The rest of the day we were free. Ordinarily we spent the morning sweltering in our marquees, saying unprintable and uncomplimentary things about the Egyptian weather. In the late afternoon and evening, we went to Cairo. About a mile from where we were camped, a street car line ran into the city. To get to it we generally rode across the desert on donkeys. Every afternoon, as soon as we had finished dinner, little native boys pestered us to hire donkeys. They were the same boys who poked their heads into our marquees each morning and implored us to buy papers. We needed no reveille in Egypt. The thing that woke us was a native yelling "Eengaleesh paper, veera good; veera good, veera nice; fifty thousand Eengaleesh killed in the Dardanelle; veera good, veera nice."

About a quarter of a mile across the desert from us was a camp for convalescent Australians and New Zealanders. As soon as the Australians found that we were colonials like themselves, they opened their hearts to us in the breezy way that is characteristically Australian. There is a Canadian hospital unit in Cairo. One medical school from Ontario enlisted almost en masse. Professors and pupils carry on work and lectures in Egypt just as they did in Canada. It was not an uncommon thing to see on a Cairo street a group composed of an Australian, a New Zealander, a Canadian, and a Newfoundlander. And once we managed to rake up a South African. The clean-cut, alert-looking, bronzed Australians, who impressed you as having been raised far from cities, made a tremendous hit with the Newfoundlanders. One chap who was returning home minus a leg, gave us a young wallaby that he had brought with him from Australia. One of our boys had a small donkey, not much larger than a collie dog, that he bought from a native for a few shillings. The men vied with each other in feeding the animals. Some fellows took the kangaroo one evening, and he acquired a taste for beer. The donkey's taste for the same beverage was already well developed. After that, the two were the center of convivial gatherings. The wallaby got drunk faster, but the donkey generally got away with more beer. When we were certain we were to go to the front, a meeting was held in our marquee. It was unanimously decided