an aeroplane strumming
in the distance, and was drowsily wondering whether or not it was fancy,
when a crash echoed up the valley. We both hurried out. It was sunup,
a delicious morning, and far up against the southern sky the little
speck was sailing back toward the west. There was a flash of silver just
under the flier--it was an English biplane--and a moment later another
crash farther away. Neither did any damage. A few minutes later we
were looking at the remains of the bomb and propeller-like wings, whose
whirling, as it falls, opens a valve that permits it to explode on
striking its mark. Until it had fallen a certain number of metres, we
were told, mere striking the ground would not explode it--a device to
protect the airman in case of accident to his machine or if he is forced
to make a quick landing. In the fresh, still morning, with the camp
just waking up and the curious Turkish currycombs clinking away over by
the tethered horses, our aerial visitor added only a pleasant excitement
to this life in the open, and we went on with our dressing with great
satisfaction, little dreaming how soon we were to look at one of those
little flying specks quite differently.

We breakfasted with the colonel in his arbor on bread and ripe olives
and tea, and walked with him round the camp, through a hospital and into
an old farmhouse yard, where the gunsmiths were going over stacks of
captured guns and the damaged rifles of the wounded, while the bees left
behind in some clumsy old box hives buzzed away as of yore. Wiser than
men, the colonel observed. There were English Enfields and French
rifles of the early nineties, and a mitrailleuse to which the Turks had
fitted a new wooden base. There were rifles with smashed barrels, with
stocks bored through by bullets, clean-cut holes that must have gone on
through the men who held them--live men like ourselves; quick choking
instants of terror the ghosts of ---- which we were poking and peering
into there in the warm sunshine!

We said good-by to the colonel, for our passes took us but to the
valley, and he had stretched a point in sending us down the plateau the
evening before, and I bumped back to Kilid Bahr. We did not want to
leave this part of the world without a sight of Troy, and as we had duly
presented ourselves in Gallipoli, and were now by way of coming from it
rather than Constantinople, and the Turkish official to whom the orderly
took us wrote, without q