The Secret Battle

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II THOSE first three days were for many of us, who did not know the mild autumn months, the most pleasant we spent on the Peninsula. The last weeks of May had something of the quality of an old English summer, and the seven plagues of the Peninsula had not yet attained the intolerable violence of June and July. True, the inhabited portion of the narrow land we won had already become in great part a wilderness, the myrtle, and rock-rose, and tangled cistus, and all that wealth of spring flowers in which the landing parties had fallen and died in April, had long been trodden to death, and there were wide stretches of yellow desert where not even the parched scrub survived. But in the two and a half miles of bare country which lay between the capes and the foothills of Achi Baba was one considerable oasis of olives and stunted oaks, and therein, onthe slopes of the bridge, was our camp fortunately set. The word "camp" contains an unmerited compliment to the place. The manner of its birth was characteristic of military arrangements in those days. When we were told, on that first mysterious midnight, to dig ourselves a shelter against the morning's "searching, " we were far from imagining that what we dug would be our Peninsular "home" and haven of rest from the firing-line for many months to come. And so we made what we conceived to be the quickest and simplest form of shelter against a quite temporary emergency ?long, straight, untraversed ditches, running parallel to and with but a few yards between each other. No worse form of permanent dwelling-place could conceivably have been constructed, for the men were cramped in these places with a minimum of comfort and a maximum of danger. No man could climb out of h, s narrow drain without casting a shower of dust from the crumbling para...