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This, while they shuffled toward it, grew higher and broader, until they lay prone in the very door of the hill, a large, square-cut portal, deeply overhung by the edge of the clay-pit, and flanked with what seemed a bulkhead of sand-bags piled in orderly tiers.
Pressure sores and perforating ulcer of the foot are the most important trophic phenomena. Apart from the medical treatment, measures must be taken to prevent deformity, especially when the legs are affected. The bedclothes are supported by a cage, and the foot maintained at right angles to the leg by sand-bags or splints.
After some weeks of successful nibbling, which exasperated the Turks into a vast, useless expenditure of ammunition, the infantry firmly established themselves along the coast to a point just south of Gaza, beyond which it was not expedient to go. Here they proceeded to make homes for themselves by digging holes in the face of the cliffs and lining them with sand-bags.
They required one million sand-bags and fifty thousand gabions. Of engineer materials, fourteen thousand tons were sent. The engineers executed fifty miles of trenches, using eighty thousand gabions, sixty thousand fascines, and one million sand-bags. Of subsistence, fuel, and forage, five hundred thousand tons were sent. Of clothing, camp-equipage, and harness, twelve thousand tons.
Stransky trudged on past the sentry, across a road and up three series of steps of a garden terrace, through a breach in a breastwork of sand-bags, and was again at home the only home he knew among the comrades of his company. Most of them had fallen asleep on the ground after finishing their rations, logs of men in animal exhaustion.
Outside, for protection, it was boarded up, packed tightly in sand-bags; inside, it had been swept of broken glass, and the paintings, tapestries, and the carved images on the altars had been removed.
Down this trench the wounded were passed, and a fresh working party relieved the cramped and tired batch who had commenced the work. In the main trench men had been hard at work filling sand-bags, and now these were passed out, dragged along from man to man, and piled up on the parapet, doubling the security of the workers and allowing them the greater freedom of rising to their knees to dig.
The convex field stood bare, except for a few overthrown scarecrows in naked yellow or dusty blue, and for a jagged strip of earthwork torn from the crest, over which the Black Dog thrust his round muzzle. In a truce of empty silence, the defenders slept by turns among the sand-bags. The day came, and dragged by without incident.
The third one burst and I fell down and crawled under some ropes and lay flat against some sand-bags, trembling all over and feeling as though I was going to choke. I waited for a long time, but nothing happened, so I got up and looked round. Lucky escape for us! There's a terrific hole by the Red Cross and another one behind the bath-house. The third's in the next field. Only two men hit.
Elizabeth-Jane produced a line of chain-shot and sand-bags, he reddened in angry shame for her, and, peremptorily saying, "Never mind I'll finish it," dismissed her there and then. Her considerate disposition became a pitfall to her now. She was, it must be admitted, sometimes provokingly and unnecessarily willing to saddle herself with manual labours.
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