From the old Turkish well I led my stretcher-squads past the gun of the Field Artillery (mounted quite near our hospital tents) along a track which ran past a patch of dry yellow grass and dead thistles--here among the prickly plants and sage-bushes grew a white flower--pure and sweet-scented--something like a flag--a “holy flower” among the dead and scorched-up yellow ochre blades and the khaki and dull grey-greens of thorns. We went along this track, past the dead sniper which Hawk and I had so carefully stalked. Near by, hidden by bushes and rank willow thickets lay a dozen more dead Turks, swollen, fly-blown and stinking in the broiling sun. We hurried on past the Turkish bivouacs--many of the relics had been picked up by the British Tommies since last I saw the place: the tobacco had all gone--many of the 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 with a 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. And so at last all my squads had turned back with stretchers loaded with men and pieces of men. I went on alone--a lonely figure wandering about the mountains, looking and listening for the wounded. I came now upon a party of Engineers at work making a road. They were working with pick-axe and spade--clearing away bush and rocks. “Any water?” they asked. I shook my head. “Any wounded?” I said. “Some down there, they say,” said a red-faced man. “Damn rotten job that,” muttered another, as I went on. “Better keep well over in the bushes,” shouted the red-faced man. “They've got this bit of light-coloured ground marked--you're almost sure ter git plugged.”