is not the danger or the importance of the undertaking which is
strongly impressed so much as a jumble of smells and sounds and small
things.

It is just these small things which no author can make up in his study
at home.

The glitter of some one carrying an army biscuit-tin along the mule
track; the imprinted tracks of sand-birds by the blue Aegean shore;
the stink of the dead; a dead man's hand sticking up through the sand;
the blankets soaked each morning by the heavy dew; the incessant
rattle of a machine-gun behind Pear-tree Gully; the distant ridges of
the Sari Bahir range shimmering in the heat of noon-day; the angry
"buzz" of the green and black flies disturbed from a jam-pot lid; the
grit of sand in the mouth with every bite of food; the sullen dullness
of the overworked, death-wearied troops; the hoarse dried-up and
everlasting question: "Any water?"; the silence of the Hindus of the
Pack-mule Corps; the "S-s-s-e-e-e-e-o-o-o-op!--Crash!"--of the high
explosives bursting in a bunch of densely solid smoke on the Kislar
Dargh, and the slow unfolding of these masses of smoke and sand in
black and khaki rolls; the snort and stampede of a couple of mules
bolting along the beach with their trappings swinging and rattling
under their panting bellies; the steady burning of the star-lit night
skies; the regular morning shelling from the Turkish batteries on the
break of dawn over the gloom-shrouded hills; the far-away call of some
wounded man for "Stretchers! Stretchers!"; the naked white men
splashing and swimming in the bay; the swoop of a couple of skinny
vultures over the burning white sand of the Salt Lake bed to the
stinking and decomposing body of a shrapnel-slaughtered mule hidden in
the willow-thickets at the bottom of Chocolate Hill; a torn and