Yesterday and to-day we have fired, for us, a terrible lot of shells (1,800 shrapnel) but never was shot better spent. We reckon the enemy's casualties between 1,000 and 2,000 mainly caused by our guns playing on the columns which came up trying to improve upon their lodgment in Quinn's Post. Add this to the 3,000 killed, and, say, 12,000 wounded on the 18th instant, and it is clear no troops in the world can stand it very long. But we are literally at the end of our shrapnel; and as to high explosive, according to the standards of the gunners, we have never had any!
Left on a picket boat with Birdie to board my destroyer to an accompaniment of various denominations of projectiles. One or two shells burst hard by just as we were scrambling up her side.
Vice-Admiral Nicholls called after my return. Courtauld Thomson, the Red Cross man, dined; very helpful; very well stocked with comforts and everyone likes him, even the R.A.M.C.
_31st May, 1915. H.M.T. "Arcadian."_ Worked in the forenoon. Gouraud, Girodon and Hunter-Weston lunched and we spent the afternoon at the scheme for our next fight. Each of us agreed that Fortune had not been over kind. By one month's hard, close hammering we had at last made the tough _moral_ of the Turks more pliant, when lo and behold, in broad daylight, thousands of their common soldiery see with their own eyes two great battleships sink beneath the waves and all the others make an exit more dramatic than dignified. Most of the Armada of store ships had already cleared out and now the last of the battleships has offed it over the offing; a move which the whole of the German Grand Fleet could not have forced them to make! What better pick-me-up could Providence have provided for the badly-shaken Turks? No more inquisitive cruisers ready to let fly a salvo at anything that stirs. No more searchlights by night; no more big explosives flying from the Aegean into the Dardanelles!
_1st June, 1915. Imbros._ Came ashore and stuck up my 80-lb. tent in the middle of a sandbank whereon some sanguine Greek agriculturalist has been trying to plant wheat.
We shall live the simple life; the same life, in fact, as the men, but are glad to be off the ship and able to stretch our legs.