as
pretty unhealthy, for it was practically always whipped by shrapnel and
you went in at the risk of your life. Some of the best swimmers used
to say it was all right so long as you dived whenever you heard the
screech of a shell--that the shrapnel pellets did not penetrate the
water more than a few inches. Most men did without either of this
choice of baths, and used a scraper. It was evidenced on the Peninsula
that one of the greatest of civilizers is a razor. By necessity few
could shave, and you soon could not recognize the face of your best
chum as it hid itself beneath a growth of some reddish fungus. Really
handsome features were quite blotted out, and it is now evident to me
why, in civilized life, we all so gladly go through the conventional
daily torture of face-scraping.

_Thirst_ is not a thing to joke about, however, and there were times
when the allowance of water was not enough to wash down a half-dozen
bites, and the food would stick in one's throat.

There was generally enough food but mighty little variety except just
before the evacuation when stores had to be eaten to save them being
taken away or destroyed. It is all very well to say a man will eat
anything when he is hungry, but you can get so tired of bully-beef and
biscuits and marmalade-jam that your stomach simply will not digest it.
Machonochie's, which was a sort of canned Irish stew, wasn't bad, but
there wasn't always more than enough of that to supply the
quartermasters. Still there were some great chefs on the Peninsula,
men who had got their training as cooks in shearers' camps, where
anything badly cooked would be thrown at their heads. It was
marvellous how some of them could disguise a bully-beef stew, and I
have been told of men coming to blows over the merits of their
respective "company cooks."

There were more flies on the Peninsula than there was sand on the
shore, and they fought us persistently for every atom of food. Getting
a meal was a hard day's work, for all the time you had to fight away
the swarms, and no matter how quick you were with your fork, you rarely
got a mouthful that hadn't been well walked over, and it didn't do to
think where those flies might have been walking just previously. No
army ever had a better directed sanitary department, but, no matter how
clean we kept our trenches, the Turks just "loved" dirt and
"worshipped" flies, and their trenches were only ten yards away in one
place, and in