rock.  As the Turkish aim grew better these volcanoes appeared higher up the hill, creeping nearer and nearer to the rampart of fresh earth on the second trench until the shells hammered it at last again and again, sweeping it away and cutting great gashes in it, through which we saw the figures of men caught up and hurled to one side, and others flinging themselves face downward as though they were diving into water; and at the same instant in our own trench the men would gasp as though they had been struck too, and then becoming conscious of having done this would turn and smile sheepishly at each other, and crawl closer into the burrows they had made in the earth.

From where we sat on the edge of the trench, with our feet among the cartridges, we could, 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 sitting and attack the people on top of it.  And the spectacle at once became comprehensible, and took on the human interest it had lacked.  The men seemed to feel this, for they sprang up and began cheering and shouting, and fired in an upright position, and by so doing exposed themselves at full length to the fire from the men below.  The Turks in front of the village ran back into it again, and those in the fields beyond turned and began to move away, but in that same plodding, aggravating fashion.  They moved so leisurely that there was a pause in the noise along the line, while the men watched them to make sure that they were really retreating.  And then there was a long cheer, after which they all sat down, breathing deeply, and wiping the sweat and dust across their faces, and took long pulls at their canteens.

The different trenches were not all engaged at the same time.  They acted according to the individual judgment of their commanding officer, but always for the general good.  Sometimes the fire of the enemy would be directed on one particular trench, and it would be impossible for the men in that trench to rise and reply without haying their heads carried away; so they would lie hidden, and the men in the trenches flanking them would act in their behalf, and rake the enemy from the front and from every side, until the fire on that trench was silenced, or turned upon some other point.  The trenches stretched for over half a mile in a semicircle, and the little hills over which they ran lay at so many different angles, and rose to such different heights, that sometimes the men in one trench fired directly over the heads of their own men.  From many trenches in the first line it was impossible to see any of the Greek soldiers except those immediately beside you.  If you looked back or beyond on either hand there was nothing to be seen but high hills topped with fresh earth, and the waving yellow grass, and the glaring blue sky.

General Smolenski directed the Greeks from the plain to the far right of the town; and his presence there, although none of the men saw nor heard of him directly throughout the entire day, was more potent for good than would have been the presence of five thousand other men held in reserve.  He was a mile or two miles away from the trenches, but the fact that he was there, and that it was Smolenski who was giving the orders, was enough.  Few had ever seen Smolenski, but his name was sufficient; 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.

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.