resentative of an American newspaper who saw this fight
from its beginning to its end.

We found all the hills to the left of the town topped with long lines of
men crouching in little trenches. There were four rows of hills. If you
had measured the distance from one hill-top to the next, they would have
been from one hundred to three hundred yards distant from one another.
In between the hills were gullies, or little valleys, and the beds of
streams that had dried up in the hot sun. These valleys were filled with
high grass that waved about in the breeze and was occasionally torn up
and tossed in the air by a shell. The position of the Greek forces was
very simple. On the top of each hill was a trench two or three feet deep
and some hundred yards long. The earth that had been scooped out to make
the trench was packed on the edge facing the enemy, and on the top of
that some of the men had piled stones, through which they poked their
rifles. When a shell struck the ridge it would sometimes scatter these
stones in among the men, and they did quite as much damage as the shells.
Back of these trenches, and down that side of the hill which was farther
from the enemy, were the reserves, who sprawled at length in the long
grass, and smoked and talked and watched the shells dropping into the
gully at their feet.

The battle, which lasted two days, opened in a sudden and terrific storm
of hail. But the storm passed as quickly as it came, leaving the
trenches running with water, like the gutters of a city street after a
spring shower; and the men soon sopped them up with their overcoats and
blankets, and in half an hour the sun had dried the wet uniforms, and the
field-birds had begun to chirp again, and the grass was warm and
fragrant. The sun was terribly hot. There was no other day during that
entire brief campaign when its glare was so intense or the heat so
suffocating. The men curled up in the trenches, with their heads pressed
against the damp earth, panting and breathing heavily, and the heat-waves
danced and quivered about them, making the plain below flicker like a
picture in a cinematograph.

From time to time an officer would rise and peer down into the great
plain, shading his eyes with his hands, and shout something at them, and
they would turn quickly in the trench and rise on one knee. And at the
shout that followed they would fire four or five rounds rapidly and
evenly, and then, at a sound from th