The camp was the office, so to speak, of the division commander, with his clerks, telephone operator, commissary machinery, and so on, the commander himself living at the immediate front.  It was like scores of other camps hidden away in the hills—­brush-covered tents dug into the hillsides, looking like rather faded summer-houses; arbor-like horse-sheds, covered with branches, hidden in ravines; every wagon, gun, or piece of material that might offer a target to an aeroplane covered with brush.  They were even painting gray horses that morning with a brown dye.  A big 38-centimeter unexploded shell, dropped into a near-by village by the Queen Elizabeth, and with difficulty pushed up on end now by a dozen men, was shown us, and presently we climbed into the carriage with the captain, and went rocking over the rough road toward the Aegean.

The country reminded one of the California foot-hills in the dry season, and me, particularly, of Honduras and the road from the Pacific up to Tegucigalpa—­gravelly brown hills and tangled valleys with sparse pines and scrub-oaks; rocky slopes down which tinkled brown and white flocks of sheep and goats; sunshine and scarlet poppies and fresh wind; and over all a curious, quiet, busy web of war; a long shoulder, sharp against the blue, with a brown camel train ambling down it; a ravine with its arbor-like shelters for cavalry; wounded soldiers in carts, or riding when they were able to ride; now and then an officer on his cranky little stallion—­the whole countryside bristling with defense.

Up one of the hot little valleys we climbed, left the carriage, and, walking up a trail, cut into the bank, past men and horses hidden away like bandits, and came at last to the top and several tents dug into the rim of the hill.  It was the headquarters of Essad Pasha, defender of Janina in the last war, and division commander in this sector of the front.  He received us in his tent beside a table littered with maps and papers—­a grizzled, good-natured soldier, who addressed us in German, and might indeed have passed for a German.  He apologized for the cramped quarters, explaining that they were likely at any time to be bombarded, and had to live in what was practically a trench, and then at once, in the Turkish fashion, appeared an orderly with tiny cups of sweet coffee.

Things were quiet at the moment, he said.  There was nothing but the desultory crack-crack of snipers, coming from one knew not just where, the every-day voice of the trenches—­possibly the enemy were dismayed by the loss of the Triumph.  He had seen it all, he said, from this very spot—­a sight one was not likely to see more than once in a lifetime.  The great ship had rolled over like a stricken whale.  Her torpedo-nets were out, and as she turned over these nets closed down on the men struggling in the water, and swept them under.  He, too, expressed entire confidence in the Turk’s ability to stop any farther advance and, calling an aid, sent us to the periscope, which poked its two eyes through a screen of pine branches a few yards away, and looked over the parapet and down on the first-line trenches and the sea.