It is a clear, beautiful day and appreciably warmer. Already the flies are dreadful and swarm everywhere in billions. The Kut fly is a pronounced cannibal.
I walked through the palm woods to the 4-inch guns, where I found Parsnip alone in his glory. There he has been the whole siege with a very comfortable tent under the trees, and his only job is to repeat orders from the telephone to his two antediluvian guns. As a field gunner I am not enamoured of his monotonous and stationary job. Parsnip is a subaltern also and has two characteristics. In playing chess he seizes the pieces by the head, and after describing an artistic parabola, sets them down. He is a Radical, as you would expect of any fellow so handling a pawn, let alone a queen. His second claim to notoriety is said to be as author of a future publication entitled, "Important People I intend to meet." As a hobby he kills mosquitos with a horse flick.
For over an hour beneath those biblical palms Parsnip, or Pas Nip, and I stood by his guns and smoked and looked out over the darkening plain where shadow chased shadow under the capricious moon, and where, like will o' the wisps of an extravagant dream, tiny flashes tempted us still to hope on. For what? Well, there were the flashes. They were the flashes of our guns. And I longed for tobacco and wine. Parsnip, on the contrary, was a married man!
March 25th.—This morning I had a thorough inspection of the horse and wagon lines and inspected shelters previous to my visit to headquarters to report on ammunition. Orders are out for all ranks to prepare to receive heavy bombardment. I am having the ammunition shelter even further reinforced against shell or bomb. The present scheme is to have two thick roofs each topped by kerosene tins packed close and filled with soil. One of these shelters will explode the shell or bomb, and the other receive the burst. The horse-lines have been changed and pits dug for all drivers and detachments and traversed for possible enfilade bursts. The men are working on a shelter for our basement room with tins of earth piled up. Tins are fearfully scarce, as hundreds have been requisitioned for the defence of H.M.S. Sumana and other things. We have, we believe, sheltered the probable zones with what tins we have. Thus the doorway and window are unprotected because the upper back room would stop all except howitzer fire, and the enemy's howitzer is south of Kut. Similarly to prevent a lucky shell bursting through the wall of the first-floor room and roof of our present one, we have had three rows of tins—all we could get—arranged in front of the wall upstairs. I have calculated that any burst entering higher than this would get the opposite upstairs wall and pass out into the street.
Tudway and Square-Peg have accused me of being cold-blooded over the affair. But I intended to be nothing if not practical, and the next morning discovered that any shell of average intentions, in fact one falling ten feet shorter than the very one that had plugged into my bedroom wall up above, would have no difficulty in going through the mess roof and so through the mess cupboard—a large receptacle into the wall—into our so-called impregnable bedroom which was to be the emergency shelter for all hands. My bed was just beyond the cupboard the other side of the three-foot wall. So this evening when Tudway went to the cupboard for the jam and meat and bread he found a solid wall of tins filled with earth. This he considered a master-stroke. The provisions, as he explained, would have been directly in the line of fire!
Moreover, I have had removed a score or two of loose bricks which were wedged in the best Damocletian style between the joists and the ceiling. For last night I dreamed one fell on my head. Why my head is always in the line of trouble I can't say.
Talking of dreams, that is the second nasty one in a few days. The previous time I dreamed I was being hung. That was probably due to a button that I had sewn on to the neck of my pyjama jacket by the uncertain light of dubbin oil!
10 p.m.—There is heavy and continuous firing downstream. I respectfully suggest a variation of Watts's "Hope"—that popular picture. A junior sub asleep in a barricaded corner of a room in Kut beside a four-ounce slice of bread, listening in his dreams to distant guns.
I must now make one of the most important entries of the whole siege. General Smith gave me a Punch. I mean that having finished with a copy of Punch, sent to him by aeroplane, he has passed it on to me.
Shakespeare, Thackeray, and Punch. In the flesh, what friends those three would have been!