A GREY DAY IN GALLIPOLI
As I look westward towards the grey Ægean Sea, generally peaceful, deep blue and ofttimes appearing golden-hued by the mystic hand of sunset, but now flecked with ripples of white like a distant hill-side strewn with new-shorn lambs, and hurried on by the murmurings of the grey sea’s bride, the grey cloud-bearing Mother Wind, as she splashes the foreshore of this grey land with fleecy fringes of her mate, and makes her way over the grey hills, through rugged landslip or tangled, stunted, unfriendly evergreens, grey phantoms flit to and fro, passing with a careless nod, as it were, the little grey homes of those whose thoughts so seldom had time to feast on aught but the bright days before the Peril came; but who now, with a foretaste of hell in their souls, need only such a day as this to make them feel the presence of the grey world’s messenger whose name is Loneliness. Loneliness garbed in a mantle of merging grey sea and grey sky, trimmed with the spires and turrets of grey and seemingly unsouled ships, whose presence in the blue and gold days was as that of old friends well met, but which now seem to be ragged rents in the solemn dress of Loneliness, reminding one of a derelict’s slovenly covering held together over a hopeless breast by an old gold brooch—perhaps the gift of a mother or handed down from bygone ages. Loneliness comes not to all of us garbed in this fashion. To others, who look eastward, she comes dressed in the sombre clothes of the grey hill-side, and with yearning eyes beckons them on to the chances of the blue and gold life in Constantinople; or, perchance, if their luck is that of many another good soldier, to that other grey life forever with the grey seas, grey skies and grey forgetfulness on these ghostly, forsaken grey shores of Gallipoli.
N. Ash,11th A.A.S.C.