ead Turks, swollen, fly-blown and stinking in
the broiling sun. We hurried on past the Turkish bivouacs--many of the
relics had been picked up by the British Tommies since last I saw the
place: the tobacco had all gone--many of the shirts and overcoats which
had been lying about had disappeared--the place had been thoroughly
ransacked. We trudged past the wooden cross of our dead comrade and we
were silent.

Indeed, throughout those first three days--Saturday, Sunday and
Monday--when the British and Turks grappled to and fro and flung
shrapnel at each other incessantly; when the fighting line swayed
and bent, sometimes pushing back the Turks, sometimes bending in the
British; when the fate of the whole undertaking still hung in the
balance; when what became a semi-failure might have been a staggering
success: in those days the death-silence fell upon us all.

No one whistled those rag-time tunes; no one tried to make jokes, except
the very timid, and they giggled nervously at their own.

No one spoke unless it was quite necessary. Each man you passed asked
you the vital question: "Any water?"

For a moment as he asks his eyes glitter with a gleam of hope--when you
shake your head he simply trudges on over the rocks and scrub with the
same fatigued and sullen dullness which we all suffered.

Often you asked the same question yourself with parched and burning
lips.

One after another we came upon the wounded. Here a man dragging a
broken leg along with him. Here a man holding his fractured fore-arm and
running towards us. Sometimes the pitiful cry, faint and full of agony:
"Stretchers! Stretcher-bearers!" away in some densely overgrown defile
swept with bullets and shrapnel.

And so at last all my squads had turned back with stretchers loaded with
men and pieces of men. I went on alone--a lonely figure wandering about
the mountains, looking and listening for the wounded.

I came now upon a party of Engineers at work making a road. They were
working with pick-axe and spade--clearing away bush and rocks.

"Any water?" they asked.

I shook my head.

"Any wounded?" I said.

"Some down there, they say," said a red-faced man.

"Damn rotten job that," muttered another, as I went on.

"Better keep well over in the bushes," shouted the red-faced man.
"They've got this bit of light-coloured ground marked--you're almost
sure ter git plugged."

"Thanks!" I called back, and broke off to my left among the sage and
t