tried bunking there; but it wasn't restful, and before daylight I went
wandering on again. I wanted to locate our advance and get a cup of
coffee.

"I must have gone a couple of miles farther, and it was getting light,
when a most infernal racket broke loose not one hundred yards ahead.
Really, you know, I thought I'd blundered into the midst of a battle.
Then in a minute the noise let up, and the smoke blew away, and there,
squatting behind a machine gun up on the side of a hill, was one lone
Greek soldier. Not another soul in sight, mind you; just this absurd,
dirty, smoke-stained person, calmly feeding another belt of cartridges
into his gun!

"'Hello!' says I. 'What the deuce are you doing here?'--'Holding the
hill, Sir,' says he, in good United States. 'Not all alone?' says I.
He shrugs his shoulders at that. 'The others were killed or hurt,'
says he. 'The Red Cross people took them all away last
night,--Lieutenant, Sergeant, everyone. But our battery must keep the
hill.' 'Where's the rest of the advance, though?' says I. 'I don't
know,' says he. 'And you mean to say,' says I, 'you've been here all
night with the Turkish artillery hammering away at you?' 'They are bad
shots, those Turks, very bad,' says he. 'Also they send infantry to
drive me away, many times. See! There come some more. Down there!
Ah-r-r-r! You will, will you?' And with that he turns loose his big
pepperbox on a squad that had just started to dash out of a ravine and
rush him. They were coming our way on the jump. Scared? Say, if
there'd been anything to have crawled into, I'd have been in it! As
there wasn't, I just flattened myself on the ground and waited until it
was all over.