"How about 'X'.?" he continued, mentioning the name of one of the rudest staff officers who ever sat in a swivel chair. The five aviators among us grinned at the thought of having him to ourselves in the tiny room, far away from the list of postings and from Regulations Governing the Promotion of Officers. This happy thought almost reconciled us to the discomfort.
Always it rained. How it rained! The yard below our window was oozy with mud, and the veiled women who were our neighbours lifted their robes high as they buried their thick ankles into the slush. Three of them, with an old man, a boy, and three infants, lived in a two-roomed hovel that faced our building. Other dwellers in their hut were a donkey, a dog, and several hens. Two of the women took ostentatious care to draw their yashmaks closer whenever a prisoner showed himself at the window; but the third, rather less unprepossessing than the others, was less careful to protect her face from the gaze of the infidels. Beyond the yard was a stretch of flat mud dotted with squat, ugly buildings.
It was an Australian—I forget which one—who discovered by accident an antidote for the state of unutterable boredom and depression which was overwhelming us. He had lived in the district which for a time was the hunting ground of the Kelly gang, and he retold the vivid melodrama, as told to him by older people who had been spectators, of the bushranger brothers who wore armour and robbed so successfully, daringly, and incredibly. By the time we had listened, thrilled by wonder, to the tale of the Kellys' last great stand against a large force of police, with a burning house as background, what would have been another miserable evening had passed in tense interest.
Afterward we made full use of this means to forgetfulness. Each afternoon and evening somebody delivered himself of choses vues or choses entendues. H. told of his wanderings in Fiji; R. of sheep-farming in Queensland, I was able to relate some early-war observations on the Swiss-German frontier, in connection with German espionage. Old W. possessed both the Queen's and King's South African decorations, and for many years after the war in which he gained them had served in the Cape Mounted Rifles. His yarns of diamond-field days before Kimberley was made respectable by the De Beers monopoly, of Mafeking and the Vaal, of the Boer tribal treks, and of early Rhodesia filled many an empty hour in the hut at Alukeeshla.
When pre-1914 reminiscences ran dry, most phases of the war were described from personal experience. M. and H. had fought on Gallipoli as troopers; R. had flown in the Sinai Desert campaign; W. had been at Ypres and Neuve Chapelle in 1915; I had flown over the Somme battles in the days before the Royal Flying Corps had been provided with machines designed for warfare, instead of for inherent stability coupled with inherent unsuitability for fighting Fokkers, Halberstadts, and Rolands on equal terms.
Even Alfonso contributed to the time-killing narratives. We were discussing the war's origin, and somebody mentioned Sarajevo. "Ya Sarajevo!" he said, pointing to his chest, then plunged into a whirlpool of unintelligible talk. He knew a few German words, but mostly he spoke in Turkish or in what was either Serbian or some Bosnian dialect. I failed to gather whether he said he was a native of Bosnia or had merely lived there. It was clear, however, that he had been at Sarajevo when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was murdered, and had seen the deed. Alfonso's excited description, containing here and there a word I could understand, reminded me, incongruously enough, of Marinetti's Futurist "verse," which I had heard recited by the poet himself at a London night club in 1913. Said Alfonso:—
"Kronprinz—jabber jabber jabber—Sarajevo—
Jabber jabber jabber—automobil—
Jabber—Pouf! pouf! pouf! pouf! pouf!—
Kronprinz automobil halt boum!—