a cloak of invisibility, and made one feel
as though he were the blind man in a game of blind-man's-buff, where
every one tapped him in passing, leaving him puzzled and ignorant as to
whither they had gone and from what point they would come next. The
bullets sounded like rustling silk, or like humming-birds on a warm
summer's day, or like the wind as it is imitated on the stage of a
theatre. Any one who has stood behind the scenes when a storm is
progressing on the stage, knows the little wheel wound with silk that
brushes against another piece of silk, and which produces the whistling
effect of the wind. At Velestinos, when the firing was very heavy, it
was exactly as though some one were turning one of these silk wheels, and
so rapidly as to make the whistling continuous.

When this concert opened, the officers shouted out new orders, and each
of the men shoved his sight nearer to the barrel, and when he fired
again, rubbed the butt of his gun snugly against his shoulder. The huge
green blotches on the plain had turned blue, and now we could distinguish
that they moved, and that they were moving steadily forward. Then they
would cease to move, and a little later would be hidden behind great
puffs of white smoke, which were followed by a flash of flame; and still
later there would come a dull report. At the same instant something
would hurl itself jarring through the air above our heads, and by turning
on one elbow we could see a sudden upheaval in the sunny landscape behind
us, a spurt of earth and stones like a miniature geyser, which was filled
with broken branches and tufts of grass and pieces of rock. As the
Turkish aim grew better these volcanoes appeared higher up the hill,
creeping nearer and nearer to the rampart of fresh earth on the second
trench until the shells hammered it at last again and again, sweeping it
away and cutting great gashes in it, through which we saw the figures of
men caught up and hurled to one side, and others flinging themselves face
downward as though they were diving into water; and at the same instant
in our own trench the men would gasp as though they had been struck too,
and then becoming conscious of having done this would turn and smile
sheepishly at each other, and crawl closer into the burrows they had made
in the earth.

[Picture: A mountain battery at Velestinos]

From where we sat on the edge of the trench, with our feet among the
cartridges, we cou