Large, clumsy, winged things, which some said were locusts, fell into the trench, and for a few hours strove vainly to leap out again till they were trampled to death; they had the colour of ivory, and shone with bright tints in the sun like shot silk. The men found tortoises derelict in near shell-holes, and set them to walk in the trench, and they too wandered sadly about till they disappeared, no man knew where. The flies were not yet at full strength, but they were very bad; and all day we wrestled with thirst. He was a lucky man who could sleep in the daylight hours, and when the cool evening came, beckoning him to sleep, he must rise and bestir himself for the work of the night. Then all the line stirred with life again, with the cleaning of rifles thick with heavy dust, and the bustle of men making ready to 'Stand to Arms.' Now, indeed, could a man have slept when all the pests of the day had been exorcized by the cool dusk, and the bitter cold of the midnight was not yet come. But there was no sleep for any man, only watching and digging and carrying and working and listening. And so soon as Achi Baba was swathed in shadow, and the sun well down behind the westward islands, the Turk began his evening fusillade of rapid fire. This was an astonishing performance. Night after night at this hour every man in his trench must have blazed away till his rifle would do its work no more. 'Rapid fire' has been a speciality of the Turkish infantryman since the days of Plevna, and indeed he excels in it. Few English units could equal his performance for ten minutes; but the Turk kept up the same sustained deafening volume of fire for hours at a stretch, till the moon came up and allayed his fears. For it was an exhibition of nervousness as well as musketry: fearful of a stealthy assault in the dark, he would not desist till he could see well across his own wire. Captured orders by the Turkish High Command repeatedly forbade this reckless expenditure of ammunition, and sometimes for two nights he would restrain himself, but in the early days never for more. Our policy was to lie down in the trench, and think sardonically of the ammunition he was wasting; but even this was not good for men's minds. Most of the fire was high and whizzed over into the gullies, but many hundreds of all those thousands of bullets hit the parapet. There was a steady, reiterant rap of them on the sand-bags, very irritating to the nerves, and bits of the parapet splashed viciously into the trench over the crouching men. In that tornado of sound a man must shout to make himself heard by his friends, and this produced in his mind an uncomfortable sense of isolation; he seemed cut off from humanity, and brooded secretly to himself. Safe he might be in that trench, but he could not long sit alone in that tempestuous security without imagining himself in other circumstances--climbing up the parapet--leaving the trench--walking into THAT.