re the horrors of the trenches can be
forgotten and war-jangled nerves re-attuned in a placid atmosphere of
peace and innocent recreation--not to mention baths and long cool
drinks. Nothing could be more unlike this ideal than the reality of a
Rest Camp on the Peninsula. We used often to exercise our imaginations
in seeking the reason for christening these delectable abiding places
Rest Camps. Was it in a fine spirit of official irony, or on the _lucus
a non lucendo_ principle, or was it in respectful but rather slavish
imitation of the organisation of the Expeditionary Force in France? They
had Bomb Schools, Training Camps, Rest Camps and all sorts of luxuries.
We on Gallipoli must therefore have the same. So we instituted Bomb
Schools on the Peninsula and a Training Camp at Mudros to which our weak
battalions had regularly to send parties of officers and men who could
ill be spared from duty in the trenches. We must therefore also have
Rest Camps in name if not in actuality. They were not camps, and were
not conspicuously restful, but we knew them officially as Rest Camps. At
the time of which we are writing they were sometimes referred to as
Rest Trenches. This was, if anything, less appropriate. In no military
sense could they be regarded as trenches.

Having explained what a Rest Camp was not, let us now attempt to convey
some idea of what it was by describing the fairly typical example in
which we found ourselves planted. Imagine then, a bare expanse of clayey
soil from which all signs of vegetation--if there ever was any--have
been obliterated. The surface is trodden fairly hard and is powdered
with a thin layer of heavy dust, which the slightest shower of rain
converts into mud tenacious as tar. The "Camp" is bounded on the North
(_i.e._ the extremity nearest the enemy) by the remains of a ragged
hedge, in the thickest clumps of which an intrepid explorer may discover
a few dusty, juiceless, brambles. The previous tenants have been
superficial in their methods of tidying up their lines, for the hedge
also shelters a miscellaneous assortment of discarded clothing, empty
meat and jam-tins and all the odd items of rubbish which, in a well
disciplined unit, disappear in the incinerator. South of the hedge the
ground falls with a very gradual slope for perhaps 200 yards, to the dry
bed of a ditch or streamlet just beyond which a row of trees serves to
conceal partially the dug-outs in which our Divisional Staff have t