Lark Hill is where the Canadian Engineers live, in the midst of a
profligate abundance of tools and carts, pontoon wagons, field
telephones, and other mouth-watering gear. Hundreds of tin huts are
being built there, but quite leisurely, by contract. I noticed three
workmen, at eleven o’clock of that Monday forenoon, as drunk as Davy’s
sow, reeling and shouting across the landscape. So far as I could
ascertain, the workmen do not work extra shifts, nor even, but I hope
this is incorrect, on Saturday afternoons; and I think they take their
full hour at noon these short days.
Every camp throws up men one has met at the other end of the earth; so,
of course, the Engineer C.O. was an ex-South African Canadian.
‘Some of our boys are digging a trench over yonder,’ he said. ‘I’d like
you to look at ‘em.’
The boys seemed to average five feet ten inches, with thirty-seven inch
chests. The soil was unaccommodating chalk.
‘What are you?’ I asked of the first pickaxe.
‘Private.’
‘Yes, but before that?’
‘McGill (University understood). Nineteen twelve.’
‘And that boy with the shovel?’
‘Queen’s, I think. No; he’s Toronto.’
And thus the class in applied geology went on half up the trench, under
supervision of a Corporal-Bachelor-of-Science with a most scientific
biceps. They were young; they were beautifully fit, and they were all
truly thankful that they lived in these high days.
Sappers, like sergeants, take care to make themselves comfortable. The
corps were dealing with all sorts of little domestic matters in the way
of arrangements for baths, which are cruelly needed, and an apparatus
for depopulating shirts, which is even more wanted. Healthy but unwashen
men sleeping on the ground are bound to develop certain things which at
first disgust them, but later are accepted as an unlovely part of the
game. It would be quite easy to make bakehouses and super-heated steam
fittings to deal with the trouble. The huts themselves stand on brick
piers, from one to three feet above ground. The board floors are not
grooved or tongued, so there is ample ventilation from beneath; but they
have installed decent cooking ranges and gas, and the men have already
made themselves all sorts of handy little laboursaving gadgets. They
would do this if they were in the real desert. Incidentally, I came
across a delightful bit of racial instinct. A man had been told to knock
up a desk out of broken packing-cases. There is only one type of desk in
Canada—the roller-top, with three shelves each side the knee-hole,
characteristic sloping sides, raised back, and long shelf in front of
the writer. He reproduced it faithfully, barring, of course, the
roller-top; and the thing leaped to the eye out of its English office
surroundings. The Engineers do not suffer for lack of talents. Their
senior officers appear to have been the heads, and their juniors the
assistants, in big concerns that wrestle with unharnessed nature. (There
is a tale of the building of a bridge in Valcartier Camp which is not
bad hearing.) The rank and file include miners; road, trestle, and
bridge men; iron construction men who, among other things, are
steeplejacks; whole castes of such as deal in high explosives for a
living; loco-drivers, superintendents, too, for aught I know, and a
solid packing of selected machinists, mechanics, and electricians.
Unluckily, they were all a foot or so too tall for me to tell them that,
even if their equipment escaped at the front, they would infallibly be
raided for their men.