Enemy machines now hovered over us daily, seeking information and dropping powerful reminders of their presence. In this latter respect they paid particular attention to the long trains arriving daily and also to a large shell-dump near the station, which they bombed unmercifully. A remarkable and, to my mind, deplorable feature here and elsewhere was the frequency with which a field-ambulance or hospital of some sort found itself alongside an ammunition-dump. So common was the practice that a man seeking temporary treatment would first look for the dump, and sure enough the hospital was hard by. We used to strafe the Turks for bringing up ammunition to the firing-line under cover of the Red Cross, but it seems to me that in effect we were doing much the same thing. You cannot expect the enemy to play the game according to the Geneva Convention if you yourself fail to observe the rules.
Turkish airmen used to drop messages asking us kindly to move our hospitals lest they should be hit by bombs intended for the dumps. Presumably out of pure cussedness the hospitals stayed where they were; and inevitably they were bombed. Then they moved. As a case in point: there was a large field ambulance alongside the main shell-dump at Belah upon which several bombs were dropped with disastrous results. One marquee full of sick and wounded men was completely destroyed. Several others were badly damaged, and the occupants, many of whom were desperately ill with dysentery, while helping their weaker comrades out of the débris were bespattered with bullets from the low-flying machines above. Little imagination is needed to picture what would have happened to the hospital _in toto_ had a bomb hit the fringe of the dump.
Apart from this it was uncanny how the Turks spotted the places where our heavy guns were concealed ready for the coming show. In broad daylight they came over and dropped bombs with amazing precision. Under cover of darkness the guns would be moved and profane gunners laboured half the night to make them invisible--and in one case their work was so well done that twenty yards away it was impossible to see any signs of a battery. Yet the Turks found them the very next morning and made the position very hot indeed. Obviously this was not the result of direct spotting; somewhere there was a leakage; and presently it was found--and stopped.