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and other military engineers' stores. That night we steamed off into the blackness of the Mediterranean Ocean for a secret destination. By my army compass our course was north westerly, and I concluded that we were bound for the Dardanelles, where a combined British and French fleet of warships had been making unsuccessful attempts to force the straits without Army help.
The "Derfflinger" was a modern German Nordeutscher Lloyd liner that had been trading out to the Far East. At the outbreak of war the Royal Navy had captured her, homeward bound, in the Red Sea and brought her around to Alexandria. The crew were interned, her valuable cargo removed and she was converted into a bare troopship by ripping out most of her cabins and screwing up hammock hooks all over the stripped areas.
The next morning, in bright sunshine, we were entering the Aegean Sea and passing between the Cyclades and Dodecanese islands in a choppy sea beaten up by the Meltemita (the strong north wind). The lighthouses on these islands were out of action and some of the islands, according to the latest Admiralty Navigation Instructions, were well away from the positions shown on the chart our ship was using; which made the passage rather a hazardous one. The following day we crept through the boom-protected narrow entrance of Mudros Bay on the southern side of the Greek Island of Lemnos, some seventy miles south-west of the Gallipoli Peninsular, on which we were told we should be making a landing as a diversion for main landings by the British 29th Division at Cape Hellas, and by a French Senegalese Brigade on the Asiatic shore a few miles north of the site of ancient Troy. The bay was already nearly full of British and French warships and transports, and a scene of great activity.
The 29th was probably the finest British Army Division of all time, comprising as it did, of senior regular-army battalions of several famous regiments that had been on foreign service in distant colonies and outposts of the Empire when the war started. I was amazed at the perfection of the training and the discipline of these well-seasoned units.