The ground was hard, the sun hot, but the men dug like beavers, and within an hour had made themselves pretty safe. But there was no letting up. Colonel Conway insisted upon a regular trench of the latest pattern with proper traverses, and deep enough to give plenty of head room. The men grumbled, but some, like Ken, realised that the game was well worth the candle.
'He's looking for an attack in force later on,' Ken told Dave and Roy Horan. 'You may be jolly sure that the Turks are bringing up reinforcements.'
'There are quite enough of the beggars already,' said Dave. 'Just listen to the bullets coming over. That scrub in front of us fairly hums with snipers.'
By the time that the trench was finished it was nearly midday. The men were given a rest, and dinner was served out. In spite of the enemy's fire the Army Service men had managed to bring their stores right up to the trench, and there was fresh bread, butter, cheese, and jam for the hungry fighters.
Down below, engineers were at work, making a path up the cliff, while boats travelled up and down with a dogged and admirable persistence.
The enemy fire in front of the new position grew steadily heavier. If a cap was put up on a cleaning rod over the parapet, it was sometimes struck by two or three bullets at once. It seemed clear that the Germans who led the Turks were concentrating their forces in front of the trench, but whether they were new men or not it was impossible to say. The broken nature of the ground and the heavy scrub hid all that was going on a very little way inland.
'This is getting a bit thick,' said Roy Horan, as a fresh crackle of rifle fire burst from a wooded height about a quarter of a mile inland. A maxim carefully emplaced behind sandbags in the trench replied with a storm of bullets, but it was a poor job, firing at an enemy who were quite invisible, and a feeling of slight depression had begun to settle on the occupants of the trench.
'The colonel's having a pow-wow with the other officers,' said Dave. 'Something's going to happen before long.'
Something did happen. Presently the whistles trilled, and a sigh of relief went up.
'Cold steel, bhoys,' said Sergeant O'Brien. 'Don't any of ye wait to shoot. And open order, mind ye!'