May 12th
It is raining hard this morning, and very cold as well. I visit the Senegalese camp at “V” Beach. They are physically very well built men, well up to the average of 6 feet in height. They are as black as coal, with shiny faces, like niggers on Brighton beach, and very amusing in their manners. At the last battle they charged magnificently with horrible yelling, frightening the poor Turk out of his wits. They are equipped with wide, square-bladed knives about 14 inches long.
Wireless news is now typed and published nearly every day. To-day we hear that the Lusitania has been sunk and that Greece and Italy are likely to come in. An extract from a Turkish paper says that we have been pushed into the sea, and almost in the same paragraph that “the foolish British will persist in attacking.”
We have quite a comfortable little house now at our Supply depot on the beach, made out of boxes with a sail-cloth overhead.
Hardly any firing to-day. Shore batteries remarkably quiet, but Fleet firing intermittently.