dria. It was filthy water,
full of dirt, and very brackish to taste. Also it was warm. During the
two months at Suvla Bay I never tasted a drop of cold water--it was
always sickly lukewarm, sun-stewed.

All day long high explosives used to sing and burst--sometimes killing
and wounding men, sometimes blowing up the bully-beef and biscuits,
sometimes falling with a hiss and a column of white spray into the sea.
It was here that the field-telegraph of the Royal Engineers became a
tangled spider's web of wires and cross wires. They added wires and
branch wires every day, and stuck them up on thin poles. Here you could
see the Engineers in shirt and shorts trying to find a disconnection, or
carrying a huge reel of wire. Wooden shanties sprang up where dug-outs
had been a day or so before. Piers began to crawl out into the bay,
adding a leg and trestle and pontoon every hour. Near Kangaroo Beach was
the camp of the Indians, and here you could see the dusky ones
praying on prayer mats and cooking rice and "chupatties" (sort of
oatcake-pancakes).

Here they were laying a light rail from the beach up with trucks for
carrying shells and parts of big guns.

Here was the field post-office with sacks and sacks of letters and
parcels. Some of the parcels were burst and unaddressed; a pair of
socks or a mouldy home-made cake squashed in a cardboard box--sometimes
nothing but the brown paper, card box and string, an empty shell--the
contents having disappeared. What happened to all the parcels which
never got to the Dardanelles no one knows, but those which did arrive
were rifled and lost and stolen. Parcels containing cigarettes had a
way of not getting delivered, and cakes and sweets often fell out
mysteriously on the way from England.

CHAPTER XVI. THE ADVENTURE OF THE LOST SQUADS

Things became jumbled.

The continual working up to the firing-line and the awful labour of
carrying heavy men back to our dressing station: it went on. We got used
to being always tired, and having only an hour or two of sleep. It was
log-heavy, dreamless sleep... sheer nothingness. Just as tired when you
were wakened in the early hours by a sleepy, grumbling guard. And then
going round finding the men and wakening them up and getting them on
parade. Every day the same... late into the night.

Then came the disappearance of a certain section of our ambulance and
the loss of an officer.

This particular young lieutenant was left on Lemn