s--the water beautifully warm and so refreshing.

As regards the lie of the land and our positions there--coming up from
the beach at Suvla there were fully two miles of flat country before
you reached the foothills. The northern part of this plain was a
shallow lake dry in summer but with a few feet of brackish water in
winter called Salt Lake, and the southern part a few feet higher
stretched down to "Anzac," where spurs running down from Sari Bahr to
the sea terminate it abruptly. Our front line, generally speaking, was
just off the plain, a few hundred yards up the slopes of the
foothills, with any reserves there were lying in trenches on the
plain.

Imagining the whole Suvla plain and its surrounding hills to be a
horse-shoe, you might say the Turks held round three parts of the
shoe, leaving us with the two heels at Caracol Dagh on the north and
Anzac on the south, and a line between these two points across the
plain. This plain was practically bare, but Caracol Dagh was thickly
covered with dwarf oak and scrub, and Anzac with a good undergrowth of
rhododendron, veronica, and other similar bushes. At Sulajik (the
centre of the horse-shoe), and immediately to the north of it, and
also round the villages in the Turkish lines, were numbers of fine
trees, but nowhere that we could see was there anything that could be
called a wood. As regards the soil, the gullies at Anzac on the spurs
of Sari Bahr were quite bewildering in their heaped up confusion,
partly rocky, but mainly a sort of red clay and very steep. In the
centre it was a yellower clay with patches of sand and bog, and on
Caracol Dagh it was all rock and stones, so that digging was
impossible, and all defences were built either with stones or
sandbags. The view looking back to the sea from almost any part of our
line was glorious. Hospital ships and men-of-war, and generally
monitors and troop-ships in the Bay, and on the horizon the peaks of
Imbros and Samothrace reflecting the glorious sunrises and sunsets of
the Levant.

In these surroundings we spent about a week before getting a turn in
the front line. We struck a reasonably quiet sector and fairly well
dug, but there were several details in which the trenches varied from
what we were accustomed to read about. The first and most noticeable
difference from the point of view of the inhabitants was the entire
absence of head cover. Even after we had been on the Peninsula nearly
three months all we had