_May 20._—Quiet morning. No enemy artillery fire and only a little of our own. Later some shelling by both sides. Worked at erecting overhead cover on the support trenches at "Quinn's"—originally the fire trenches, the outcome of the line of holes dug after the landing. Funny kind of job: every time you showed a hand above the parapet the Turks had a shot at it. From 6.30 till about 7.30 all firing ceased on both sides. It was the first time we had experienced absolute quiet since our arrival here, and the sensation was a strange one. It was still stranger to hear the song of the lark; I reckon the birds sized it up as the end of the Great War, for they seemed to all slip out of their dug-outs at once. Heard it was a truce to allow the Turks to bring in their wounded. When the firing began again it was something to listen to! Big guns and little guns, they all seemed to be working overtime. They kept it up most of the night, too. _May 21._—On overhead cover same as yesterday. Fairly quiet all round. More rumours! Another truce talked of. Heard that quite a lot of prisoners surrendered to-day. Orders sent round that everything possible was to be done to encourage enemy to desert. Which reminds me—— A few nights ago three Turks were captured by a patrol and brought into camp. They said in broken English that they'd been trying to surrender. They were taken down to headquarters to be questioned, and later on sent back to our camp, the O.C. receiving orders to feed them up well, then give the beggars a chance to escape. The idea was that they would return to their own lines, tell their chums of the fine time they'd had in our camp, and thus cause a lot of deserting from the enemy. Nothing of this was to be said to them, of course. Well, we took our prisoners down to the cook's quarters and gave them the time of their lives. They ate about a tin of jam each, ditto of condensed milk, showed a marked appreciation for the army biscuits, and (they couldn't have been true believers—or else they were just as much in the dark as ourselves regarding the contents) tackled the bully beef with gusto, finishing up with Woodbine cigarettes. They weren't game to sample the rum, however, but it wasn't wasted. When they were full up to the back teeth we asked them if they knew where there was any firewood to be got, as most of the big stuff had been cut out of the "Gully." Yes, they did know of some, but to get it they would have to crawl up close to their own lines. Things couldn't be better, we thought; they were told to clear out and get some. Away they went, up a deep nullah that bisected our lines—and returned a couple of hours later loaded up with brushwood like walking Christmas Trees! At their own request we led them back to the cookhouse, saw them started on a fresh supply of jam and condensed milk, and gave the thing up as a bad job. Catch them letting their mates into the secret of all those good things!