Nor is there monotony in either weather or temperature. This is the late October. Late October synchronises with late autumn. Yet it is a halting and irregular advance the late autumn is making. Changes in temperature are as incalculable as at Melbourne, in certain seasons. Fierce, biting, raw days alternate with the comfortableness of the mild late-summer. To-day to bathe is as much as your life is worth (shrapnel disregarded); to-morrow, in the gentle air, you may splash and gloat an hour, and desire more. And you prolong the joy by washing many garments.
The Ægean autumn has yet shown little bitterness. Here on Anzac we have suffered the tail-end of one or two autumn storms, and have had two fierce and downright gales blow up. The wind came in the night with a suddenness that found most unprepared. There was little rain; insufficient to allay the maelstroms of choking dust that whirled over our ploughed and powdered ridges. In half an hour many of us were homeless, crouching about with our bundled bed-clothes, trespassing tyrannically upon the confined space of the more stout dug-outs of our friends: a sore tax upon true friendship. Men lay on their backs and held down their roofs by mere weight of body, until overpowered. Spectral figures in the driving atmosphere collided and wrangled and swore and blasphemed. The sea roared over the shingle with a violence that made even revilings inaudible. It was a night for Lear to be out. Men had, for weeks, in spare time, been formally preparing dug-outs against the approach of winter, but they were unprepared for weather of such violence. And if this is a taste of the quality of winter storms, the warning comes timely.
For the morning showed a sorry beach. Barges had been torn adrift from moorings and trawlers, and hurled ashore. Some were empty; some were filled with supplies; all were battered; some disabled; some utterly broken. One was filled with rum. Never before, on active service, had such a chance of unlimited spirits offered. Many jars had been spirited away when the time of unlading came. There were riotous faces and super-merriment on the beach that morning; and by mid-day the "clink" was overflowing. Far more serious was the state of the landing-piers. There were—there had been—three. One stood intact; the landward half of the second was clean gone; of the third there was no trace, except in a few splintered spars ashore. A collective grin overlooked the beach that morning at the time of rising. The General grinned too—a sort of dogged grin. The remedying began forthwith; so did the bursting of shrapnel over the workmen. This stroke of Allah upon the Unfaithful was not to go unsupplemented. But it was as with the unhappy Armada: the winds of heaven wrought more havoc than the enemy guns. By nightfall the abridged pier was re-united to the shore—and this in spite of a sea that made it impossible for barges to come alongside. For two days the after-wind of the gale kept bread and meat and mails tossing on the face of the waters off Anzac; and we fed on bully-beef and biscuit, and eyed wistfully the mail-trawler pitching there with her precious burden.
The arrival of mails eclipses considerations of life and death—of fighting and the landing of rations. The mail-barge coming in somehow looms larger than a barge of supplies. Mails have been arriving weekly for six months, yet no one is callous to them. Sometimes they come twice in a week; for a fresh mail is despatched from the base post-office in instalments which may spread over three or four landings. The Army Corps Post Office never rests. Most mails are landed between sunset and dawn—generally after midnight. Post-office officials must be there to supervise and check. It's little sleep they get on "mail nights." Incoming mails do not constitute all their cares. Mails outgoing from the firing-line are heavy. And there are the pathetic "returns" to be dealt with, the letters of men who will never read them—letters written before the heavy news had got home. It is a huge bulk of correspondence marked Killed and re-addressed to the place of origin of the fallen. Their comrades keep their newspapers. Usually the parcels of comforts directed to them bring melancholy cheer to their still fighting comrades in arms. What else is to be done with them?
Of incoming mails letters stand inevitably first. They put a man at home for a couple of hours. But so does his local newspaper. Perusing that, he is back at the old matutinal habit of picking at the news over his eggs-and-coffee, racing against the suburban business-train. Intimate associations hang about the reading of the local sheet—domestic and parochial associations almost as powerful as are brought to him by letters. Relatives at home, did they know this fully, would despatch newspapers with a stricter regularity.
And what shall be said of parcels from home? The boarding-school home-hamper is at last superseded. No son away at grammar-school ever pursued his voyage of discovery through tarts, cakes and preserves, sweets, pies and fruit, with the intensity of gloating expectation in which a man on Gallipoli discloses the contents of his "parcel": "'Struth! a noo pipe, Bill!—an' some er the ole terbaccer. Blimey! cigars, too! 'Ave one, before the crowd smells 'em. D——d if there ain't choclut! look 'ere! An' 'ere's some er the dinkum coc'nut ice the tart uster make. Hullo! more socks! Never mind: winter's comin'.—'Ere! 'ow er yer orf fer socks, cobber? Take these—bonzer 'and-knitted. Sling them issue-things inter the sea.... I'm b——d!—soap fer the voy'ge 'ome.... 'Angkerch'fs!—orl right when the —— blizzerds come, an' a chap's snifflin' fer a ——in' week on end.... Writin' paper!—well, that's the straight —— tip! The ——s er bin puttin' it in me letters lately, too. Well, I'll write ter night, on the stren'th of it.... Gawd! 'ere's a shavin'-stick!—'andy, that; I wuz clean run out—usin' carbolic soap, —— it!... Aw, that's a dinkum —— parcel, that is!"
"Bonzer tarts" (and others) may infer that a parcel is as a gift from the gods, and carries more than "its intrinsic worth." Such treasures as the 'and-knitted socks and coc'nut ice bring home rather more near than it ever comes to the man who has no part in the parcel mail.
Mails deserve all the organised care the War-Office can bestow; they make for efficiency.
There is no morning delivery of the daily newspaper at Anzac. But we get the news. At the foot of Headquarters gully is the notice-board. The wireless messages are posted daily. At any hour men are elbowing a way into the perusing circle. There is news of the operations along our own Front and copious messages from the Eiffel Tower of the Russian and Western Fronts. The Melbourne Cup finish was cabled through immediately. The sports foregathered and collected or "shelled out"; there were few men indeed who did not handle their purses round the board that evening. No war news, for months, had been so momentous as this. The associations called up by the news from the Australian Mecca at Flemington, whither the whole continent makes annual pilgrimage, were strong, and homely as well as national. All the detail of the little annual domestic sweeps at the breakfast-table came back with a pathetic nearness. Men were recalled for a while from the land of blood to the office, the bank, the warehouse, the country pub., the shearing-shed, where the Cup bets were wont to be made. Squatters' sons were back at the homestead making the sweeps. The myriad-sided sporting spirit is perhaps stronger than any other Australian national trait. The Defence-Department knew it when they made provision for a cabled despatch of the running.