The second thing that arrests you is the amazing proximity of the enemy trenches. You put down the periscope and look furtively through a loophole to verify. The average distance is about fifteen yards. Our conductor smiled at the expression of amazement. "Come along here; they're a bit closer." He took us to a point at which the neutral ground was no more than five yards in width; rifle and bayonet extended from either trench could have met across it. We well believed our men could hear the Turks snore. This is an uncanny proximity. One result is that the bomb is the chief weapon of offence. To shy a bomb effectively over five yards is as good a deed as drink. Bomb wounds are much to be dreaded. The missile does not pierce, it shatters, and there is no choosing where you will have your wound. We laid well to heart the admonition to be momentarily on the look out for bombs. We worked slowly back along a tortuous route. These are old Turkish trenches. They had been so constructed as to fight in the direction of the sea. When our men took them they had immediately to turn round and build a parapet on the side more remote. They were choked with Turkish dead. To bury them in the open was unthinkable; they had to be thrown into pits excavated in the trench wall, or flung aloft, and buried beneath the new inland parapet. The consequence is that as you make your way along the trench floor you occasionally come into contact with a protruding boot encasing the foot of a Turk. We had more than one such unsavoury encounter. The odour arising from our own dead is not all with which our infantry have to contend. War isn't fun. A good deal of drivel is spoken and written about the ennobling effects of warfare in the field. The men who have had four months of this are, in great part, pasty-faced ghosts, with nerves on raw edge. What may one expect? Inadequate rest, and that rudely and habitually broken; almost an entire want of exercise--except in the charge; food that is necessarily scanty and ill-nourishing; a perpetual and overpowering stink of the most revolting kind; black swarms of flies that make quiescence impossible--even if enemy shelling and enemy bomb-slinging did not; a nervous strain of suspense or known peril (or both) that never is lifted. Australians have done their part with unequalled magnificence. But they are not gods. Flesh and blood and spirit cannot go on at this indefinitely. God help the Australian infantryman with less than a frame of steel wire, muscles of whipcord, and a heart of fire. The cases are rare, but men have been driven demented in our firing-line, and men who in civil-life were modest, gentle, tender-hearted, and self-effacing, have become bloody-minded, lusting to kill. War is _not_ fun; neither is it ennobling.