me
game, and the Turks had a better supply of bombs.

Two halves of the Squadron took in turn the holding of the front saps
and the main line. The former were narrow, shallow twisting ditches
between piles of loose earth and rotting bodies. Parts were covered in
as bomb-proof shelters, and in places sloping shafts led steeply down
to mine galleries before the enemy's front line. Between those two
series of drab mounds of earth which marked the opposing lines, lay as
terrible an acre as ever was. The hasty burying during the armistice
three months ago had been inadequate, and the saps had cut through many
of the hastily-scratched graves. Since then many men had fallen, to
rot unburied in the sun and to be again and again torn by shells and
bombs and bullets.

A few shattered sticks were the forlorn remnants of the luxurious
scrub. Wire twined in untidy coils here and there, but there was
nothing to hide the blackened bodies. Sometimes at night low fires
licked among the corpses, apparently started by the Turks by throwing
over their parapet paraffin or petrol, and there would be spasmodic
explosions for an hour or more of the ammunition in the equipment round
the dead forms, sounding like the burning of a Guy Fawkes effigy.

Mac had never more than swiftly surveyed the scene direct--for there
was a deadly accuracy in the practice of the snipers at twenty yards
range--but viewed its details and the Turkish parapets through a
periscope. These, too, the snipers shattered with annoying frequency,
though the Turks themselves had no rest whatever in the matter of being
sniped at. And in these wretched saps amid a horror of desolation Mac
and his cobbers passed every second twenty-four hours. In the day-time
the sun beat into them with unrelieved violence, and many troopers
squeezed into the bomb-proof shelters and tunnel entrances to seek
shade. There was no where to cook food, and bully beef, biscuits and
water formed the fare. But they had small appetite for anything, as
the stench of the dead and the flies which swarmed left few men hungry.
At one corner hung a blanket. Some time a sapper in his work had come
to a body, and had turned the sap to the right to avoid it, and the
blanket had been tacked up as a screen to the body in the recess.

One hard case found this recess a shady spot and with more room for his
cramped legs, and declared that it was no worse alongside the several
months old corpse than any