It was about the end of the first half of November that it became known in Constantinople that everything was not well with Wrangel; and soon rumours of his having been overwhelmed in his positions guarding the Crimea began to circulate in the British messes on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus.

Then things came with a rush. We awoke one morning to find a few bedraggled ships casting anchor just below our windows, in the Moda roadstead, and to witness a long procession of misery as others in similar plight came limping and staggering down the straits, out of the Euxine mists.

This was the beginning of a time of sadness indescribable. Between eighty and a hundred ships, great and small, made up the total of Wrangel's argosy of suffering. Upon their iron decks-welling up and overflowing from below were packed and herded more than a hundred thousand souls. Some of the ships-large-sized vessels of the Volunteer Fleet -carried between eight and ten thousand people apiece. The smallest, an open lightship, held over six hundred. The evacuation from Sevastopol had been quite orderly, that from Theodosia less so; but as almost everybody who wished

to leave had been taken off, the overcrowding was appalling.

From the very outset there had not been sufficient provisions to go round, and several ships had left the Crimea with their bunkers practically empty, and been picked up, as they drifted helplessly in the Black Sea, by Allied warships.

It was a never-to-be-forgotten sight that one looked out upon from Moda. The deck of every ship was hidden by the mass of humanity piled upon it. For the most part they were civilians, in the case of the earliest arrivals— old men, women, and children. Snatched from their homes, in which until quite recently they had lived in fancied security, they had had time to bring away with them only a bundle of clothing or a roll of bedding.

Yet the condition of the civilian ships was not so bad as that of the military transports. Farther from the shore, on the outer edge of this ragamuffin fleet, were about a dozen large trampish steamers. Rusted and unkempt, they had a look about them as of famished, mangy wolves. On them were the khaki-clad soldiery. One says "on" advisedly, for the men were heaped in a sort of uneasy mound upon the decks, up to the very

shrouds. You realised with a shock, as the morning light grew clearer, that what had appeared at first to be piled-up superstructure was in reality a solid mass of men. There they stood in the biting cold, gazing dumbly shorewards, so tightly wedged as to be unable to move. For over forty-eight hours they had stood thus, clustering like frozen swarms of bees.

These were men who had

just come from a veritable hell on earth-rent by highexplosives, gassed, machinegunned-betrayed, too, by prematurely ice-bound rivers and the colder treason of their comrades. But they were soldiers still. Amid them, on the forecastle, one saw the field-guns they had saved from the clutches of the Bolsheviks, and each man held on grimly to his rifle and bandolier. The soldier's heart went out to them.

France, having championed Wrangel in his prosperity, was not going to let him down in his adversity. She undertook the looking-after of this homeless floating nation; and at the foremast of every ship the tricolour flew. But Britain only held aloof officially-or, if Britain held aloof, the British did not. A little headquarters mess at Moda, one of the messes of a Division that kept the line at Second Ypres, and for long months afterwards bore the heat and burden of the day in Macedonia, called a meeting of its members on the first night

of the arrival of the ships, in the bleak little messroom of what in pre-war days had been the "Moda Palace Hotel." (Grandiloquent name, typical of both Turk and Greek!) The meeting decreed that British officers were not going to stand idly by while women and children-yes, and the soldiers of a former ally-starved and perished at their door. It was patent, too, to everybody that the work of succour would require all the help available. France, for all her generous impulses, would find that she had undertaken a task temporarily beyond her local powers.

It was decided to run а soup-kitchen, on the lines of what had been done in France and Belgium immediately after the Armistice. All available stoves and field-cookers were to be got down the next morning to the little pier at Moda, supplies were to be procured from the R.A.S.C., friends in the Navy were to be asked to provide water transport. Everybody present at the meeting agreed to put up so many days' pay to get the affair started, and before morning a large sum of money had been assured, together with promises of help from every other mess within call. The devoted co-operation of the rank and file was certain.

The help came only just in time. In some cases it came, alas! too late. Even when it was at its height, whole shiploads of men had to go for days unfed. It was not pleas

If the British soldier were to take stock of what he has been called upon to do what he has done even since the Armistice, what a survey he could make! Before the War, indeed, his ordinary duties took him to many and varied parts of the globe. But of interference in the affairs of the Continent of Europe, of Asia Minor, Russia in Asia, or those Balkan regions to which one never really applies the term Europe, there was none. Leaving out of the picture his achievements in the War, he has penetrated into Russia on three sides; he has tried to "stop the rot" (where the rot would not be stopped) at Murmansk and Archangel, in Georgia and in Armenia. He has been at Baku, Batoum, and Tiflis; in Persia north and south; at Constantinople and Smyrna, Sofia and Belgrade; beyond Scutari to Afioom Kara-hissar, Konia, Eskishehr, Angora. He has returned to tread, in Mesopotamia, deserts which he had already watered with his blood. In all these places he has sought to keep the peace that his efforts had won for humanity, and in his own lovable, inimitable, undefeated way he has "carried on with imperturbable aplomb, the only limit to his scope being that imposed by policy. Politicians

soldier never did. When commitments were made, he was the thing imperilled: when, having been hurriedly made, they were as hurriedly abandoned, it was all the same to him, and left him smiling.

Yes, it has all been very wonderful; and perhaps it is well that now and then we should pause a little to dwell on what has happened. Think what we would have said in the pre-war years if we had been told that our military forces were to include an Army of the Rhine and an Army of the Black Sea "! Think, too, what we would have said of it in the spring of 1918!

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Many readers of Maga' will remember the great fire of Salonika, and how the British soldier rose to his full height on that occasion. He has been doing much the same sort of work among the Russian ships in Moda Bay.

Very early on the morning following the meeting in the mess a squad of voluntary cooks and helpers, with limbered waggons piled with stoves, camp - kettles, and rations, might have been seen moving down to the little pier at Moda. It was raining, the kindling wood was wet, and the fires took long to start. But in a few hours hot steaming soup was ready for two thousand men, and a naval launch (originally built for chasing submarines), under the charge of an officer who had served

throughout the war on a destroyer in the North Sea, was loading it on board to carry to one of the ships.

The work grew rapidly in scope, and certainly it was worth the doing. It was taken up in high quarters. Funds were started, and advices from England brought assurances of powerful support. But the first beginning was made by the little British mess at Moda.

On those crowded iron decks the refugees-all sorts and conditions were marshalled into queues and fed. A pitiable sight it was to see how Hunger -as great a leveller as Death -had brought all to the one state. Ladies in ermine-lined cloaks formed up with beshawled peasant women; greyheaded men took their turn with beardless youths. There was no scrambling, no impatience; there were even cheers and laughter; and when despair was visible it was that dumb despair that seems almost to eliminate facial expression, and that is so peculiarly Russian.

There were many sorely wounded in some of the ships, and in many cases they had to remain for days untended. The condition of the great spectrallooking transports will not bear description. In the passenger steamers, however, things were not altogether bad. The Reschid Pasha ("Wretched Pasha "to the British soldier) was one of

those to receive hot soup and bread for the grown-ups, and tinned milk for the children, and she did not do so badly. True, the decks were crowded with soldiers and civilians, with scarcely room to move, but as far as possible the cabins had been set aside for the women and children. The big saloon presented a spectacle not easily to be forgotten. Groups of families had pegged out claims in every corner of it. There they sat or crouched, forming little circles, bivouacking amid their poor possessions, with very little food or drink; and after dusk had fallen they would light a candle here and there and talk in undertones. One could just make out on one of the walls a map of the island of Jamaica, and the ship's notices of former days: "First Class Smoking Room," "Lounge," "Bath Room," &c., were all in English. She had not always been the Wretched Pasha.

With what a will everybody worked to relieve the misery! Sometimes, as a vent to the feelings, summary justice would be meted out to rascally and rapacious bumboatmen-their boats ordered to lay-to, and their stocks impounded and passed up to the crowded decks above, together with the diamond rings, gold watches, sables, &c., which they had extorted as the price of a loaf of bread.1 There are always scoundrels seeking for an oppor