cient; it was
as effective as is Mr. Bowen's name on a Bank of England note. It gave
one a pleasant feeling to know that he was somewhere within call; you
felt there would be no "routs" nor stampedes while he was there. And so
for two days those seven thousand men lay in the trenches, repulsing
attack after attack of the Turkish troops, suffocated with the heat and
chilled with sudden showers, and swept unceasingly by shells and
bullets--partly because they happened to be good men and brave men, but
largely because they knew that somewhere behind them a stout, bull-necked
soldier was sitting on a camp-stool, watching them through a pair of
field-glasses.

Toward mid-day you would see a man leave the trench with a comrade's arm
around him, and start on the long walk to the town where the hospital
corps were waiting for him. These men did not wear their wounds with
either pride or braggadocio, but regarded the wet sleeves and shapeless
arms in a sort of wondering surprise. There was much more of surprise
than of pain in their faces, and they seemed to be puzzling as to what
they had done in the past to deserve such a punishment.

[Picture: Firing from the trenches at Velestinos]

Other men were carried out of the trench and laid on their backs on the
high grass, staring up drunkenly at the glaring sun, and with their limbs
fallen into unfamiliar poses. They lay so still, and they were so
utterly oblivious of the roar and rattle and the anxious energy around
them that one grew rather afraid of them and of their superiority to
their surroundings. The sun beat on them, and the insects in the grass
waving above them buzzed and hummed, or burrowed in the warm moist earth
upon which they lay; over their heads the invisible carriers of death
jarred the air with shrill crescendoes, and near them a comrade sat
hacking with his bayonet at a lump of hard bread. He sprawled
contentedly in the hot sun, with humped shoulders and legs far apart, and
with his cap tipped far over his eyes. Every now and again he would
pause, with a piece of cheese balanced on the end of his knife-blade, and
look at the twisted figures by him on the grass, or he would dodge
involuntarily as a shell swung low above his head, and smile nervously at
the still forms on either side of him that had not moved. Then he
brushed the crumbs from his jacket and took a drink out of his hot
canteen, and looking again at the sleeping figures pressi