tary style.

The Arab steed pranced, and arched its great neck. With the blue of
the bay as a background it made a magnificent picture, worthy of the
Thousand-and-One Nights.

Day by day we improved our dug-out, going deeper into the solid rock,
and putting up an awning in front made of two army blankets, with a
wooden cross-beam roped to an old rusty bayonet driven into the sand.

We lived a truly Robinson Crusoe life, with the addition of Turkish
high-explosives, and bully-beef-and-biscuit stew.

Our dug-out was back to the firing-line, and at night we looked out
upon the bay. We lay in our blankets watching the white moonlight on the
waves, and the black shadows of our ambulance wagons on the silver sand.

It was in this dug-out that Hawk used to cook the most wonderful dishes
on a Primus stove.

The language was thick and terrible when that stove refused to work,
and Hawk would squat there cursing and cleaning it, and sticking bits of
wire down the gas-tube.

He cooked chocolate-pudding, and rice-and-milk, and
arrowroot-blancmange, stewed prunes, fried bread in bacon fat, and many
other tasty morsels.

"The proof of a good cook," said Hawk, "is whether he can make a meal
worth eating out of PRACtically nothink"--and he could.

There were very few wounds now to attend to in the hospital dug-out.
Mostly we got men with sandfly-fever and dysentery; men with scabies and
lice; men utterly and unspeakably exhausted, with hollow, black-rimmed
eyes, cracked lips and foot-sores; men who limped across the sandy
bed, dragging their rifles and equipment in their hands; men who were
desperately hungry, whose eyes held the glint of sniper-madness; men
whose bodies were wasting away, the skin taut and dry like a drum, with
every rib showing like the beams of a wreck, or the rafters of an old
roof.

Always we were in the midst of pain and misery, hunger and death. We do
not get much of the rush and glory of battle in the "Linseed Lancers."
We deal with the wreckage thrown up by the tide of battle, and wreckage
is always a sad sight--human wreckage most of all.

But the bay was always full of interest for me, with its ever-changing
colour, and the imprint of the ripples in the gleaming silver-sand.

And the silver moonlight silvers the silver-sand, while the skeletons
of the Xth sink deeper and deeper, to be rediscovered perhaps at some
future geological period, and recognised as a type of primitive man.

CHAPT