Three weeks ago began the flight of birds before the Russian winter. They came over thick, in wedge formation, swallowing up, in their hoarse cries, the crack of rifles over the ridges, from which, otherwise, only the roar of a half-gale delivers us, day or night. Over Anzac—which seemed to mark a definite stage in the journey—they showed a curious indecision as to direction. Possibly they were interested in the bird's-eye view of the disposal of forces. They wheeled and re-formed into grotesque figures; men would stop in their work and try to decipher the pattern. "That's a W."—"Yes; and what's that?"—"Oh, that?" (after a crafty pause)—"that's one er them Turkish figgers—'member them in Cairo?"
The flight of birds south is surely the most reliable of all forecasts as to what we may expect in temperatures. Yet the official account, published for the information of troops, of the traditional weather between October and March shows we need expect nothing unreasonably severe before the middle of January; but that then will come heavy snow-storms and thoroughgoing blizzards. Furthermore, men are advised to instruct their sisters to send Cardigans, sweets in plenty, and much tobacco. Amen to this; we shall instruct them faithfully.
Meanwhile the systematic fortification of dug-outs against damp and cold goes on.
We foresee, unhappily, the winter robbing us of the boon of daily bathing. This is a serious matter. The morning splash has come to be indispensable. Daily at 6.30 you have been used to see the bald pate of General Birdwood bobbing beyond the sunken barge in shore, and a host of nudes lining the beach. The host is diminishing to a few isolated fellows who either are fanatics or are come down from the trenches and must clear up a vermin- and dust-infested skin at all costs. Naturally we prefer to bathe at mid-day, rather than at 6.30, when the sun has not got above the precipitous ridges of Sari Bair. But the early morning dip is almost the only safe one. The beach is still enfiladed by Turkish artillery from the right flank. But times are better; formerly both flanks commanded us. The gun on the right continues to harass. He is familiarly known as Beachy Bill. That on the left went by a name intended for the ears of soldiers only. Beachy Bill is, in fact, merely the collective name for a whole battery, capable of throwing over five shell simultaneously. Not infrequently Beachy Bill catches a mid-morning bathing squad. There is ducking and splashing shorewards, and scurrying over the beach to cover by men clad only in the garments Nature gave them. Shrapnel bursting above the water in which you are disporting yourself raises chiefly the question: Will it ever stop? By this you, of course, mean: Will the pellets ever cease to whip the water? The interval between the murderous lightning-burst aloft and the last pellet-swish seems, to the potential victim, everlasting. The suspense always is trying.
The times and the seasons of Beachy Bill are inscrutable. Earlier on, the six o'clock bather was not safe. Now he is almost prepared to bet upon his chances. Possibly an enemy gun is by this time aware that there goes on now less than heretofore of that stealthy night discharge of lighters which used to persist beyond the dawn—until the job was finished.
Wonderful is the march of organisation. It appreciably improves daily, under your eyes—organisation in mule transport to the flanks, in the landing of supplies, in the local distribution of rations; the last phase perhaps most obvious, because it comes home close to the business and bosoms of the troops. Where, a month ago, we languished on tinned beef and biscuit, we now rejoice daily in fresh meat, bread, milk, and (less frequently) fresh vegetables. It all becomes better than one dared to expect: a beef-steak and toast for breakfast, soup for dinner, boiled mutton for tea. This is all incredibly good. Yet the sickness diminishes little. Colic, enteric, dysentery, jaundice, are still painfully prevalent, and our sick are far-flung and thick over Lemnos, Egypt, Malta, and England. So long as flies and the unburied persist, we cannot well be delivered. But the wastage in sick men deported is near to being alarming.
A regimental canteen on Imbros does much to compensate. Unit representatives proceed thence weekly by trawler for stores. One feels almost in the land of the living when, within fifteen miles, lie tinned fruit, butter, coffee, cocoa, tinned sausages, sauces, chutneys, pipes, "Craven" mixture and chocolate. Such a répertoire, combined with a monthly visit from the Paymaster, removes one far from the commissariat hardships of the Crimea.
The visualising of unstinted civilian meals is a prevalent pastime here. Men sit at the mouths of their dug-outs and relate the minutiæ of the first dinner at home. Some men excel in this. They do it with a carnal power of graphic description which makes one fairly pine. I have heard a Colonel-Chaplain talk for two hours of nothing but grub, and at the end convincingly exempt himself from the charge of carnal-mindedness. Truly we are a people whose god is their belly. One never realised, until this period of enforced deprivation, the whole meaning of the classical fable of the Belly and the Members.
Yet in the last analysis (all this talk is largely so much artistry) one is amazingly free from the hankering after creature-comforts. There is a sort of rough philosophy abroad to scorn delights and live laborious days. Those delights embraced by the use of good tobacco and deliverance from vermin at nights are the most desired; both hard to procure. There is somehow a great gulf fixed between the civilian quality of any tobacco and the make-up of the same brand for the Army. (The Arcadia mixture is unvarying, but cannot always be had.) This ought not to be. Once in six months a friend in Australia despatches a parcel of cigars. Therein lies the entrance to a fleeting paradise—fleeting indeed when one's comrades have sniffed or ferreted out the key. After all, the pipe, with reasonably good tobacco, gives the entrée to the paradise farthest removed from that of the fool. One harks back to the words of Lytton: "He who does not smoke tobacco either has never known any great sorrow or has rejected the sweetest consolation under heaven."
Of the plague of nocturnal vermin little needs be said explicitly. The locomotion of the day almost dissipates the evil. It makes night hideous. One needs but think of the ravages open to one boarding-house imp amongst the sheets, to form some crude notion of what havoc may be wrought at night by a vermin whose name is legion. Keating's powder is not "sold by all chemists and storekeepers" on the Peninsula. One would give a week's pay for an effective dose of insectibane.