Day by day we improved our dug-out, going deeper into the solid rock, and putting up an awning in front made of two army blankets, with a wooden cross-beam roped to an old rusty bayonet driven into the sand. We lived a truly Robinson Crusoe life, with the addition of Turkish high-explosives, and bully-beef-and-biscuit stew. Our dug-out was back to the firing-line, and at night we looked out upon the bay. We lay in our blankets watching the white moonlight on the waves, and the black shadows of our ambulance wagons on the silver sand. It was in this dug-out that Hawk used to cook the most wonderful dishes on a Primus stove. The language was thick and terrible when that stove refused to work, and Hawk would squat there cursing and cleaning it, and sticking bits of wire down the gas-tube. He cooked chocolate-pudding, and rice-and-milk, and arrowroot-blancmange, stewed prunes, fried bread in bacon fat, and many other tasty morsels. “The proof of a good cook,” said Hawk, “is whether he can make a meal worth eating out of PRACtically nothink”--and he could. There were very few wounds now to attend to in the hospital dug-out. Mostly we got men with sandfly-fever and dysentery; men with scabies and lice; men utterly and unspeakably exhausted, with hollow, black-rimmed eyes, cracked lips and foot-sores; men who limped across the sandy bed, dragging their rifles and equipment in their hands; men who were desperately hungry, whose eyes held the glint of sniper-madness; men whose bodies were wasting away, the skin taut and dry like a drum, with every rib showing like the beams of a wreck, or the rafters of an old roof. Always we were in the midst of pain and misery, hunger and death. We do not get much of the rush and glory of battle in the “Linseed Lancers.” We deal with the wreckage thrown up by the tide of battle, and wreckage is always a sad sight--human wreckage most of all. But the bay was always full of interest for me, with its ever-changing colour, and the imprint of the ripples in the gleaming silver-sand. And the silver moonlight silvers the silver-sand, while the skeletons of the Xth sink deeper and deeper, to be rediscovered perhaps at some future geological period, and recognised as a type of primitive man. CHAPTER XXII. DUG-OUT YARNS Oft in the stilly night, By yellow candle-light, With finger in the sand We mapped and planned. “This is the Turkish well, That's where the Captain fell, There's the great Salt Lake bed, Here's where the Munsters led.” Primitive man arose, With prehistoric pose, Like Dug-out Men of old, By signs our thoughts were told.