“COMMUNICATIONS”
The native only needs a drum,
On which to thump his dusky thumb--
But WE--the Royal Engineers,
Must needs have carts and pontoon-piers;
Hundreds of miles of copper-wire,
Fitted on poles to make it higher.
Hundreds of sappers lay it down,
And stick the poles up like a town.
By a wonderful system of dashes and dots,
Safe from the Turkish sniper's shots--
We have, as you see, a marvellous trick,
Of sending messages double-quick.
You can't deny it's a great erection,
Done by the 3rd Field Telegraph Section;
But somewhere--
THERE'S A DISCONNECTION!
The native merely thumps his drum,
He thumps it boldly, thus--“Tum! Tum!”
J. H.
(Sailing for Salonika.)
Kangaroo Beach was where the Australian bridge-building section had
their stores and dug-outs.
It was one muddle and confusion of water-tanks, pier-planks, pontoons,
huge piles of bully-beef, biscuit and jam boxes. Here we came each
evening with the water-cart to get our supply of water, and here the
water-carts of every unit came down each evening and stood in a row and
waited their turn. The water was pumped from the water-tank boats to the
tank on shore.
The water-tank boats brought it from Alexandria. It was filthy water,
full of dirt, and very brackish to taste. Also it was warm. During the
two months at Suvla Bay I never tasted a drop of cold water--it was
always sickly lukewarm, sun-stewed.
All day long high explosives used to sing and burst--sometimes killing
and wounding men, sometimes blowing up the bully-beef and biscuits,
sometimes falling with a hiss and a column of white spray into the sea.
It was here that the field-telegraph of the Royal Engineers became a
tangled spider's web of wires and cross wires. They added wires and
branch wires every day, and stuck them up on thin poles. Here you could
see the Engineers in shirt and shorts trying to find a disconnection, or
carrying a huge reel of wire. Wooden shanties sprang up where dug-outs
had been a day or so before. Piers began to crawl out into the bay,
adding a leg and trestle and pontoon every hour. Near Kangaroo Beach was
the camp of the Indians, and here you could see the dusky ones
praying on prayer mats and cooking rice and “chupatties” (sort of
oatcake-pancakes).
Here they were laying a light rail from the beach up with trucks for
carrying shells and parts of big guns.
Here was the field post-office with sacks and sacks of letters and
parcels. Some of the parcels were burst and unaddressed; a pair of
socks or a mouldy home-made cake squashed in a cardboard box--sometimes
nothing but the brown paper, card box and string, an empty shell--the
contents having disappeared. What happened to all the parcels which
never got to the Dardanelles no one knows, but those which did arrive
were rifled and lost and stolen. Parcels containing cigarettes had a
way of not getting delivered, and cakes and sweets often fell out
mysteriously on the way from England.