each of the men shoved his sight nearer to the barrel, and when he
fired again, rubbed the butt of his gun snugly against his shoulder.
The huge green blotches on the plain had turned blue, and now we
could distinguish that they moved, and that they were moving steadily
forward. Then they would cease to move, and a little later would be
hidden behind great puffs of white smoke, which were followed by a
flash of flame; and still later there would come a dull report. At
the same instant something would hurl itself jarring through the air
above our heads, and by turning on one elbow we could see a sudden
upheaval in the sunny landscape behind us, a spurt of earth and
stones like a miniature geyser, which was filled with broken branches
and tufts of grass and pieces of rock. As the Turkish aim grew
better these volcanoes appeared higher up the hill, creeping nearer
and nearer to the rampart of fresh earth on the second trench until
the shells hammered it at last again and again, sweeping it away and
cutting great gashes in it, through which we saw the figures of men
caught up and hurled to one side, and others flinging themselves face
downward as though they were diving into water; and at the same
instant in our own trench the men would gasp as though they had been
struck too, and then becoming conscious of having done this would
turn and smile sheepishly at each other, and crawl closer into the
burrows they had made in the earth.

From where we sat on the edge of the trench, with our feet among the
cartridges, we could, by leaning forward, look over the piled-up
earth into the plain below, and soon, without any aid from field-
glasses, we saw the blocks of blue break up into groups of men.
These men came across the ploughed fields in long, widely opened
lines, walking easily and leisurely, as though they were playing golf
or sowing seed in the furrows.