ld, by leaning forward, look over the piled-up earth
into the plain below, and soon, without any aid from field-glasses, we
saw the blocks of blue break up into groups of men. These men came
across the ploughed fields in long, widely opened lines, walking easily
and leisurely, as though they were playing golf or sowing seed in the
furrows.

The Greek rifles crackled and flashed at the lines, but the men below
came on quite steadily, picking their way over the furrows and appearing
utterly unconscious of the seven thousand rifles that were calling on
them to halt. They were advancing directly toward a little sugar-loaf
hill, on the top of which was a mountain battery perched like a tiara on
a woman's head. It was throwing one shell after another in the very path
of the men below, but the Turks still continued to pick their way across
the field, without showing any regard for the mountain battery. It was
worse than threatening; it seemed almost as though they meant to insult
us. If they had come up on a run they would not have appeared so
contemptuous, for it would have looked then as though they were trying to
escape the Greek fire, or that they were at least interested in what was
going forward. But the steady advance of so many men, each plodding
along by himself, with his head bowed and his gun on his shoulder, was
aggravating.

There was a little village at the foot of the hill. It was so small that
no one had considered it. It was more like a collection of stables
gathered round a residence than a town, and there was a wall completely
encircling it, with a gate in the wall that faced us. Suddenly the doors
of this gate were burst open from the inside, and a man in a fez ran
through them, followed by many more. The first man was waving a sword,
and a peasant in petticoats ran at his side and pointed up with his hand
at our trench. Until that moment the battle had lacked all human
interest; we might have been watching a fight against the stars or the
man in the moon, and, in spite of the noise and clatter of the Greek
rifles, and the ghostlike whispers and the rushing sounds in the air,
there was nothing to remind us of any other battle of which we had heard
or read. But we had seen pictures of officers waving swords, and we knew
that the fez was the sign of the Turk--of the enemy--of the men who were
invading Thessaly, who were at that moment planning to come up a steep
hill on which we happened to be si