“I went on to the 42nd Division, and passing the Divisional Headquarters entered a shallow nullah, rather safer than the track; for the whole of the open ground right away from Cape Helles is exposed to shell-fire. The peculiarity of this watercourse is that there is visible water in it--a trickle of filthy greenish water unfit for washing or drinking; but still the men wash where it has settled down in the large holes made by ‘Jack Johnsons’ or ‘Black Marias’ which have pitched in its bed. “One point where the watercourse divides is inevitably called ‘Clapham Junction.’ But Lancashire names have been given to the main trenches and ‘dumps.’ Burnley, Warrington, and Accrington have given names to the narrow clefts which are the homes of the Lancashire men, and a long communication trench, constructed by the Turks with extraordinary ingenuity, has now become Wigan Road. Like all this part of our position, that trench was captured in the fighting of June 4–6, relics of which, in the shape of the dead who cannot be reached for burial, still lie exposed in certain places among our own lines, so keen is the watch of the Turkish sniper. “The 38th Brigade is all Lancastrian too. In its headquarters, General Baldwin was giving a discourse to his officers. A young Captain Chadwick, of the machine-guns, showed the way round the trenches. Through periscopes, or by raising the eyes for a few seconds above the parapet (for I found it hard to judge distances through a periscope), one could see the Turkish black and white sandbags only forty or fifty yards from our front, and follow the long lines and mazes of trenchwork round the base of Achi Baba. Holes through the tops of the periscopes proved the vigilance of the Turkish outlook, and in passing certain points everybody has to run. “The rifle-fire was not very frequent. Shells kept flying over our heads, but only to burst far away upon the wilderness, or on W Beach. Except during an attack, the firing line is not the most dangerous part of the Peninsula. In the midday heat, the men who were not ‘standing to,’ were quietly engaged in cooking or eating their dinner. They cooked on little wood fires lighted in holes scooped out in the trench side, and their tin ‘canteens’ served for cooking pots and plates. “So there these sons of Lancashire stood, almost naked in the blaze of sun, jammed between high walls of white and parching marl; some were cooking, some having their dinner from the pans, some crouching in any corner of shade that could be found, some engaged upon war’s invariable occupation of picking lice off the inside of their clothes. I don’t know what work they had done before--weaving, spinning, mining, smelting, I don’t know what--but they were at an unaccustomed sort of work now, and yet how quickly they have adapted themselves to so strange a life in so strange a land!” [Sidenote: MONOTONOUS FOOD]