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Updated: May 22, 2025
At this time nothing but the best seemed to satisfy the Fates. One day it would be a trusted colour-sergeant, on another a couple of particularly promising young corporals. Only last week the Adjutant athlete, scholar, born soldier, and very lovable schoolboy, all most perfectly blended had fallen mortally wounded, on his morning round of the fire-trenches, by a bullet which came from nowhere.
In the fire-trenches there is no talking save in whispers, but every now and then the almost uncanny silence would be punctuated by the sharp crack of a rifle, the tut-tut-tut of a mitrailleuse, or, from somewhere in the distance, the angry bark of a field-gun. There was a whispered conversation between the officer in command of the trench and my guide. The latter turned to me.
Around me, and in the earth as I was, the dead men, more successful than I, were sleeping dreamlessly. On higher slopes the tired army held the fire-trenches, with its faces and rifles still turned bravely landward and upward. Above them the Turks hung to the extremities of their territory with the same tenacity that we should show in defending Kent or Cornwall.
Time was when the thin, tired breaking line of men who fought the Prussian Guard at Ypres in 1914 and beat them had hard work to find the fire-trenches, let alone the communication ones; when a daily supervision was a nerve-shattering nightly crawl, and dug-outs were shell-holes covered with a leaking mackintosh.
They look like grey beetles in a trap, and are busy with pick and shovel, apparently "improving" the crater and connecting it with their own fire-trenches. They have no sentry out. Dormitat Homerus. M'Snape worms his way back, and reports. Then, in accordance with an oft-rehearsed scheme, the bombing party forms itself into an arc of a circle at a radius of some twenty yards from the stunted bush.
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