Part 10

The next hour or two saw us busy among the horses—removing the superfluous dirt from their coats, cleaning up the stable lines, and watering and feeding our jaded mounts. We were then marched to the Q.M.’s to be issued with an extra blanket. In the usual way of Q.M.’s, this just allowed us back in time for six o’clock breakfast. During the meal they broke the news gently to us that there was a mounted parade at seven, to go through a “little training.” More grumbles, of course, but the time was too short to allow of any delay for grousing, so we got out for our “little training.” This delightful exercise consisted of a gruelling couple of hours in the sun, after which we had to groom and stable our horses, had a quarter of an hour’s “smoke-o,” and then the pleasure of lecture for half an hour or so.

Dismissed to our tents, we distributed ourselves behind the covers of various journals—ranging, according to taste, from “War Cry” to the “Bulletin.” Hardly was our interest fixed, when there was borne in on our ears a stentorian cry which resolved itself into the voice of our two-bar artist yelling “Fall in for water!” and away we went again like lambs. A struggle with four horses, two on each side of you, and each couple desiring to go in a different direction, is not calculated to improve one’s temper; but we got the job done and returned for dinner. This meal was not the one of our dreams, but we settled down after it as though we’d lunched at “Shepheards,” and began to think that the “rest” part of the stunt was at hand. Then the orderly sergeant announced that there would be a grazing parade at two o’clock. So out we all had to turn again and spend a couple of hours on the grassy slope a mile or so away, thinking sad thoughts and uttering strong utterances.

Back again, stable the horses, we finished just in time for tea, to which we did ample justice, and allowed ourselves to drift into a better frame of mind. After tea we at last settled down in our tents, and had just dealt the cards for a quiet game of poker, when, lo and behold! the orderly corporal looked in and said, quite pleasantly and off-hand, too, “There will be an inspection at 9 a.m. to-morrow; all saddlery and gear to be cleaned and placed outside tents at 8 a.m.” Well, we looked at one another—we were past words. Slowly the hands were thrown in; more in sorrow than in anger we cleared the card-blanket away, and the last scene saw six queerly silent figures listlessly polishing up bits and stirrup irons and greasing leather gear, with the mutely suffering look in each face akin to the look of the dog which has just received a kick in the ribs as the grand finale to a series of ill-usages. So ended a day of rest. In that tent, that night, men went to bunk murmuring, “If this is rest, send us back to work.”

“TRALAS.”

THE MUKHTAR’S GOATS

Said Breezy Bob to Baldy Bill, “I’m giving you the oil; There’s whips of blinking eatables on this ’ere virgin soil. So what abart a forage hunt, me bold and noble chief? It’s time we had some mutton now instead of bully-beef.”

Now, Baldy Bill was leader of an enterprising mess; His cobbers all would back him up in deeds of wickedness. So when Old Bob suggested that the gang should have a hunt For tasty chops and cutlets, they agreed upon the stunt.

It happened that the n’th Light Horse were camping in a grove Of olives, figs and oranges, the hedges interwove With prickly pear grown very thick, and on the other side The grazing land by cattle, sheep and goats was occupied.

An Arab Chief, or Mukhtar, was the owner of the flock, Named “Abdul el Mahomed,” a monopolist in stock. Now Baldy Bill and Breezy Bob were socialistic coves Who spouted on equality amongst the olive groves.

And so in tones of ecstasy the plot was duly laid, And in the hedge of prickly pear a hole was quickly made. Then Bob and Baldy sallied forth—a ration bag of oats Was carried by the doughty pair to snare the Mukhtar’s goats.

They crawled along in silence, seeking shade from tree to tree, Until they came upon the flock all feeding peacefully. The Mukhtar, squatting in the shade, engaged in silent thought, Was dreaming of the prosperous times the “awful war” had brought.

Now, Baldy in the ration bag had made a little spout, And as they crawled along the grass the oats were trickling out; But as they neared the Mukhtar’s flock they rose upon their feet, Salaamed in true Australian style, the pastoralist to greet.

In friendly pidgin-Arabic they talked a little while, Then bade farewell to Abdul in the dinkum Aussie style; And as they sauntered back to camp they noticed with a grin, That Abdul’s goats had found the oats, and all were “wiring in.”

The feeding flock came slowly towards the hedge of prickly pear. A fine big “billy” led the lot, quite eager for his share, And as he wandered close enough the prickly pear to feel, He “got it” quickly in the neck—a blade of polished steel.

Then Bill and Breezy dragged their prize into the Squadron’s lines, Cut up the mass of quivering flesh in various designs. With plenty swords available they soon got off the hide; In less time than it takes to tell the billy-goat was fried.

That night the stew was “counted out” and mutton reigned instead, And when old Abdul “counted in” his flock he hit his head In anger, for he came upon the remnants of the oats That Breezy Bob distributed to snare the Mukhtar’s goats.

Since then the Military Police are looking for a clue; They never made enquiries about discarded stew, Or else they might have found the truth; and Bill and Breezy gloat, To tell the yarn in secrecy about the Mukhtar’s goat.

“2469”

The Batman

by W. M. W.

With “stand to Arms” at half past three, in cold and wet and misery, Who brings a nice, warm cup of tea? “My Batman.”

Who knows the movement of all troops and brings the dinkum with my boots? Who finds but never, never, loots. “My Batman.”

The last to sleep, the first to rise, who sorts the rumor as it flies, and in a whisper puts me wise. “My Batman.”

Fount of all wisdom without doubt who knows just what we are about but very seldom lets it out. The General’s Batman.

Damascus

The first charm of Damascus as a whole city lies in the contrast which those brown sandhills behind it make with the green strip of the Barada Valley. Journeying from Ludd through the monotony of lank, brown growth that straggles to the horizon from the road, you give up hope of ever seeing foliage again, until you pass El Kunneitra. Then you see the green of Barada; and it is the richer for the hills behind it—browner, more desolate by far, than any landscape skirting Galilee or the Jordan. Far up the clay feet of those rocky hills straggles the brown-and-white suburb of Salahiye, all square-built and flat-topped—from the distance like bricks inserted in the clay soil. The line of hills is cleft cleanly by the Pass, the scene of that hideous slaughter by our machine guns. If you climb into the fringe of Salahiye you see the curious shape of Damascus—a jagged comet-form, all the angles and serrations of the brown tail defined with unnatural clearness by the depth of the green about it. In the amorphous head are a few minarets—like jewels. In Cairo there are too many minarets as you look from the Bey’s Leap: they protrude like a porcupine’s quills. In Damascus the city’s flat brownness is just relieved by them. When we came to Damascus it was drought-stricken. Soon afterward, it rained torrentially for a day. Then the sun shone and drew from the city such colour as we never dreamed was there. Nor had we dreamed that the trees were dusty—so green they seemed after the southern country. But, washed, they helped to throw up the wonderful colour of “that great city,” as it is called in Scripture.

It is a relief to be delivered from the sight of the everlasting cactus-hedge of the southern towns. The cactus does flourish in Damascus; but so thick is the foliage that it is lost in the mass. You cannot look down on Nazareth without being obsessed by the ubiquitous pest. You can look down on Damascus and be unconscious of it. It straggles about the leafy roads in patches beside the mud walls. That you can bear, because it does not rise above the all-enclosing foliage.

The smells of Damascus you will remember for ever. Cairo is clean by comparison: the alleys of Cairo are not foul. The stinks of Damascus are literally overpowering. There is offal, refuse, foul puddles in every street of the Bazaars. The Abana is a foul river. “Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel”? The answer is: Certainly not. There is an ill-kemptness about the place that carries Oriental slackness a bit too far. In the streets that thread the heart of the city are ruts and holes that break the springs of M.T. every day. The tramline protrudes eight inches. This gives rise to deadlocks in traffic that hold up movement for an hour. Incredibly narrow and tortuous are the highways of the city. The only decent road is that which skirts the fountained promenade near the Hedjaz Station. I am sure the Damascans look on this bit of orderliness as a Western intrusion; just as I am sure that if they found themselves in an English town guileless of smells they would call it insipid....

In the bazaars there is a baffling complexity of colour, of race, of wares. The Mousky is less heterogeneous. In the Square, in the street which is called Strait, in the gold bazaar, grain bazaar, sweets bazaar, silk bazaar, you have all the various colour of tarbooshed Cairo, and more. Here the soldiers of the King of the Hedjaz throng; there is endless variety in their clothes and their flowing head-dress. The Moslem women, who veil their faces, affect far more variety than the Mohamedan women of Cairo, with their yashmaks. The French are here. The Australian hat and plume is everywhere. I never saw so great a number of Australian soldiers moving at random in any city. There is great jostling in these narrow streets, more than the normal jostling you get in any crowd.

The dusty bazaars are in semi-darkness; their streets bear a covered roof of iron; they must get protection from rain. In Cairo all is open; for there it rains but rarely. Not only are the bazaar streets in Cairo without roofs that would stop a shower, but the shops, themselves, full of treasures. Here the rain comes in a deluge. From some of the street roofs the enemy had taken the iron for military use. What the state of these roofless streets will be when the rains come is sad to think. They will be flooded all winter.

Except that there is greater diversity of peoples—both buyers and sellers—the bazaars of Damascus are much like those of the Mousky. There are the same well-defined areas for specific commodities; the same little cubicles for shops, where vendors squat and “reach for things”; there is the same voluble haggling—the same conversations carried on in tones that you would first mistake for quarrelsome; there are the same crying, peripatetic vendors of _limonade_, quoit-shaped cakes and toffee; the shoe-blacks are here, but they are ahead of Cairo, with their gongs to attract the uncleanly-shod. There is a more incessant stream of laden donkeys through the bazaars here. In Cairo the donkeys are chiefly for pleasure riding; here they are mercantile, over-laden with the striped sacks of grain and fabric. There are additions to the bazaars of Cairo in the goldsmiths’ bazaar, the sweets bazaar. The goldsmiths work with their blowpipes and tiny forges and tiny tools, moulding and fashioning. It is curious to see the workshop as part of the sale-shop. The belts, brooches, rings and trays exposed for sale in a showcase were made two yards away by that cunning Oriental fashioner squatting on his haunches. The sweets bazaar tempts you hideously. Eastern nutted sweets and Turkish-delight and toffees look as well as they taste. Mere assorted chocolates—such as you get at Groppi’s—are crude by comparison. There are great serpentine coils of Turkish-delight lurking in icing-sugar—nut toffee that is all nuts—none of your miserable paucity of nuts such as one gets in English almond-rock: nuts form the matrix here.... But enough of that; here, if ever, you are tempted to generate a liver the size of your hat.

Public baths abound in the heart of the bazaars. Fronting the street is the final, open, divaned, cooling-off room—an amphitheatre of couches upholstered with a kind of gay-coloured towelling. A fountain plays in the midst. The bathed sit swaying in the ecstasy of reaction from the steam, with closed eyes. No Roman ever bathed more voluptuously. No one minds your going in nor your penetrating to the bowels of the establishment. Room after room you pass, with swinging doors; each is hotter than the last. In the last, and hottest room, the smell of man is overpowering; you hastily retrace your steps through the series of chambers and regain the comparative sweetness of the bazaars.

Foul as this city may be, there is beauty in every foot of it. The beauty of Cairo lies rather in the view you get of “chunks” of it—the vista of the street, the space of a market-place, the mass of a mosque. Here the beauty lies in little pieces of wall, looked at minutely, in a tiny piece of domestic architecture. It is a beauty in colour rather than in form. Form in Cairo counts for much—in Damascus for almost nothing. Here there is dilapidation in a degree undreamt of in Cairo. But dilapidation does not necessarily make for beauty, though some people think it does. I believe the beauty of colour in Damascus lies in extreme age—in the mellowing of age. After Cairo, the intense antiquity of the older city—of every fragment of it—comes to you impressively. You feel the age of it as you pace every yard of its alleys. Cairo is comparatively modern, and comparatively garish. There is a fine, if filthy, harmony in Damascus.

Intimate in the memory of most Light Horsemen will always be certain features of Damascus. Our men will not forget the Hedjaz Headquarters in the heart of the city, the German Club, the Local Resources Office, the filthy Turkish hospital, the English and French hospitals in the suburb, the littered railway station, the suburban roads, unspeakably rough and muddy, the afternoon perambulations of blatant under-dressed bints in gharries, the guards—on the aerodrome, on the Ottoman Bank, on the captured grain stores, on the captured guns—the plentiful lack of ordnance and canteen stores, the corpses of dogs and horses in open spaces, the multitudinous beggars, the exorbitant prices asked for German razors that cost their vendors nothing, the moderate cost of silver and brass ware, the Hedjaz recruiting processions, the glut of matches, the potency of arak, the cunning of the plausible English-speaking small boys, the puzzling complexity and fluctuation of the currency, the paucity of mails, the liberty and the usefulness of Turkish prisoners, the fitful and lawless discharge of firearms about the city all through the night, the suddenness with which sickness made its descent upon the apparently immune, the daily receipt and despatch to time-table of official mails by air, the dancing lights of Salahiye that burned till dawn....

H. W. D.

Malaria

You, with your winding, creeping course, What of the men of our Southern Horse? Valley of night, with your wingèd pest, What of our heroes now at rest, Down by your Dead, salt Sea? What of the ones we have left behind? What of these men of our kith and kind, Nigh where your blood streams hiss? Better the true and unerring shot! Better the Death when their blood runs hot— Than this, Malaria! Malaria!

You, with your agèd river’s flow, What of our Riders laid below? Valley of Death, with your torpid heat, Look where your swirling hill streams meet, Down by your Dead, salt Sea! Look to the ones on your mounded knoll! Look to the ones of your chosen toll! Those of your fevered kiss! Better the blast of the rending shell! Better the toll of the War God’s knell, Than this, Malaria! Malaria!

“KOOLAWARRA.”

Fall Out the 1914 Men

After four years’ service, the remnants of the First and Second Contingents were assembled preparatory to return to Australia. Such a prolonged absence from their homes might have led one to expect a wild emotional outburst; but they received the tidings casually.

As they fell into line to be farewelled by the Brigadier, they presented an inspiring sight; shoulder to shoulder, each man a history in himself; true mates, every one of them: their fellowship cemented by the blood of fallen comrades. Alert they stood, hardened by the privations and hardships of long years of campaigning, but—true test of manhood—ready to face it all over again if their principles were involved.

As they waited for the “Old Man,” as the Brig. is affectionately termed, visions of the past began to take form before their eyes. Mine saw the silent, winding streams of human life, being hurried through the streets of sleeping cities on their way to grim, silent transports. No gay farewells, no playing of bands, no gathering of gaily-dressed crowds to wave them farewell on their way to foreign shores. As they strained their eyes for a last glimpse of their native land, many must have tried to visualize their return. None realized how or when, and many of the stout hearts on those sea-sprayed ships who gazed with loving eyes on their sunny land were saying the last farewell. Their graves are in strange lands, their deeds imperishable memories.

“Boys”—it was the Old Man speaking—“we come together to say good-bye.” He outlined his association with the Brigade, and touched briefly on the outstanding incidents of its career. He humorously alluded to their “weakness” in a few respects, but he was proud to say that no man had ever complained of his punishment. Everybody had played the game, and his life was infinitely richer because of his association with them. He wished all a bright future, and they were never to forget him if they were ever in any difficulty.

At the close of the homily, I am afraid, the etiquette of military discipline was violated in many ways. “Good old Brig., the whitest ever made,” and such-like remarks were punctuated by cheering and the waving of hats. A personal handshake with each man and wishes of “good luck”; and then came the farewells round the camp, when mates of years bade each other good-bye, and turned away.

Friendship such as this will stand the test of time.

“BATAGGI.”

“Old Horse o’ Mine”

Hoof-beats, that rang on the crowded street, Had never beat unto me All the wealth of the gold in your old black hide, All the grit of your loyalty; But deep in the sand of a lonely land, Out on many a far flung trail, Your old hoofs spoke of a heart you broke For me, that _you_ might not fail.

Great eyes, that dusked in the green gums’ wave, Though I recked not that you were there, That danced or dulled at the whim mayhap Of a fancy unaware— How the mateship grew in the depths of you, When the waste spread its gauntness wide. How you parched with me, how you marched with me, Through that Hell of a thirst denied.

Brave Soul that sprung in the colt of you, Unguessed in the years far back, Ere your Fate ran out from a land of streams To the drought of a sun-blazed track— For the days since seen, for the pals we’ve been, When Old Time sees us through— O! If then there be for the likes o’ me, A Heav’n—it must hold you, too.

T. V. B.

Concerning Machine Guns

“Vickers Light Automatic, ·303,” so saith the machine gun handbook. Further on, it informs the reader that the gun weighs 38 lbs. when the water jacket is filled. These statements have been the subject of many bitter outbursts, and not a few have wondered whether they had a pair of scales at the War Office (this unfortunate institution is, of course, responsible for everything that goes wrong).

There have been countless instances where a sweating, cursing Billjim, struggling up a scorching precipice with the said Vickers Light Automatic, would have betted all his deferred pay that it weighed at least ten times as much as the handbook implies. Even on such kindergarten exercises as gun drill, wonder has often been expressed that “they” had the blooming neck to print such a fib. Still another proof that the real weight greatly exceeds the official figures. Watch the hefty No. 2, capable of lifting an 18 pdr., as, after continuous firing, he gets the order, “Out of action!” In a flash, the pins are wrenched out, he seizes the smoking gun where the protecting piece of puttee, numnah pad or sock isn’t, and instantly drops the weapon to the ground. Isn’t that convincing?

There are other minor details about the machine gun handbook that are apt to be misleading. It states that there is a No. 1, who is the boss and only carries the tripod—a flimsy toy of some 48 lbs. of brass and steel; next, a No. 2, who juggles with a Vickers Light Automatic; also a No. 3, who has nothing to do but carry a few boxes of ammunition, these being mere tin cases no bigger than the handbag he used to carry his pyjamas in, and containing only one belt; then there are a few other superfluous hangers-on; a No. 4, who aids the No. 3; a No. 5, who aids him; and so _ad infinitum_ down to that humble creature, the pack leader, who holds three horses during an action.

Thus far, the handbook is perfect, photographic plates and all. Where the discrepancy comes in, is that there is no advice regarding a hitch. It has nothing to say about this: A person is observed toiling along with the tripod, a box of 250 cartridges hanging on each leg, straddled across his shoulders; some distance behind him wobbles another sagging individual, bearing the gun, more belt boxes, a pick and a shovel; while a third—sometimes—struggles on with still more belt boxes, range-finder, spare parts wallet, a can of water, steam escape tube, a bag to prevent dust at the gun’s muzzle, and a few other trifles; and down in some more or less protected hollow, three or four distracted pack leaders curse away their last remaining hope of salvation trying to keep untangled the twenty-odd hungry brutes that crane their necks to nibble at infinitesimal, dead grass stalks. Let us dismiss the handbook.

The machine gun can be put to many uses. As a seat, it is admirable, also as a clothes horse for small gear; and as a horse rack, providing the animal doesn’t pull it over, it stands alone. It has also been known to remove Turkish folks from their ration strength—but accidents will happen.