shirts and overcoats which had been lying about had disappeared--the
place had been thoroughly ransacked. We trudged past the wooden cross
of our dead comrade and we were silent.

Indeed, throughout those first three days--Saturday, Sunday and
Monday--when the British and Turks grappled to and fro and flung
shrapnel at each other incessantly; when the fighting line swayed and
bent, sometimes pushing back the Turks, sometimes bending in the
British; when the fate of the whole undertaking still hung in the
balance; when what became a semi-failure might have been a staggering
success: in those days the death-silence fell upon us all.

No one whistled those rag-time tunes; no one tried to make jokes,
except the very timid, and they giggled nervously at their own.

No one spoke unless it was quite necessary. Each man you passed asked
you the vital question: "Any water?"

For a moment as he asks his eyes glitter witha gleam of hope--when you
shake your head he simply trudges on over the rocks and scrub with the
same fatigued and sullen dullness which we all suffered.

Often you asked the same question yourself with parched and burning
lips.

One after another we came upon the wounded. Here a man dragging a
broken leg along with him. Here a man holding his fractured fore-arm
and running towards us. Sometimes the pitiful cry, faint and full of
agony: "Stretchers! Stretcher-bearers!" away in some densely overgrown
defile swept with bullets and shrapnel.