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Updated: May 18, 2025
All the while, in the opposite direction, Red War was at its height: the rifle-fire along the quays was terrific, and ambulances were rushing backwards and forwards and relays of Volunteers were issuing from the central depôt to the firing-line.
With the head gone, the whole Kurdish firing-line would begin to be useless. I tried my stammering Turkish, but the men were in no mood to be patient with efforts in that loathly tongue. None of them knew a word in English. I tried French Italian smattering Arabic but they only shook their heads, and began to think nervousness was driving me out of hand.
If this were so, the presence of actual and tangible danger completely obliterated all traces of nerves. He stood up in the firing-line. He drew himself up to the full of his height, and seemed to inhale with pleasure the dangerous air. All the time bullets were humming overhead like swift and malignant insects, or striking the ground with a spatter of brown earth.
"We're trying to get back to the firing-line but we're all lost there's eight of us." "I'm trying to get to the 32nd Field Ambulance d'you know the way?" "Yes; go right ahead there," he pointed, "and keep well down off the hills you'll see the beach when you've gone for a mile or so " "How far is it?" "'Bout four miles;" and then, "Got a match?" "Yes but it's dangerous to light up."
At the nadir of their humiliation they could still sting as that new-come Boer found who, desiring one Englishman to his bag before the end, thrust up his incautious head to see where they were, and got a bullet through it. Some of them said they lost their whole firing-line; others no more than nine killed and sixteen wounded. But what matters it whether they lost one or one million?
We paid no more attention to the firing-line, nor to the mounted Kurds who were drawing the coverts nearer and nearer to us. It was understood that we were to sacrifice ourselves for our friends, and do the utmost damage possible before being overwhelmed. We shook hands solemnly. Two or three men embraced each other.
Bomb-carriers, stretcher-bearers, intent upon their widely divergent duties, followed. The work of salvage and destruction went hand in hand. The battle continued until evening, when we received orders to move up to the firing-line.
And thus, if one would see the whole it must be in bits along the roads, when not on the firing-line. They were sprawling in the fields in the genial afternoon sun, looking as if they had no concern except to rest. Uniforms dusty and faces tanned and bearded told their story of the last month. The duty of a portion of a force is always to wait on what is being done by the others at the front.
The trench which Michael's company were to occupy for the next forty-eight hours was in the first firing-line, and to reach it they had to pass in single file up a mile of communication trenches, from which on all sides, like a vast rabbit warren, there opened out other galleries and passages that led to different parts of this net-work of the lines.
I felt as I had felt when the battalion first marched from Aire towards the firing-line, a kind of keying-up and wild expectation. I'm not used to cities, and lounging about Constantinople had slackened my fibre. Now, as the sharp wind buffeted us, I felt braced to any kind of risk.
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