The reserve-supply of water had been already tapped. For a week we had been on a quarter-ration. This eked out at about half a mug of tea per man per diem. You ate salt beef for the evening meal without tea; went to bed thirsty, dreaming of the rivers of water, woke to a breakfast of salt bacon unmitigated by tea; and entered on a burning day—though it was winter—a day relieved only by the half-pint at lunch, at which you crunched biscuit and jam.
Men were foregoing their precious nightly issue of rum because it wrought a pleasant fire in the veins, and they had already had enough of fire in the veins. Not only were you drought-stricken, but frozen too, and that to a degree from which heating food would have saved you in part. But there was no water for cooking the heating oatmeal waiting to be issued, nor for the heating rice, which could not be boiled in sea-water.
Though the blizzard came in the midst of this drought it changed all that. Rum-jars, buckets, biscuit-tins, water-cans—yea, the very jam-tins—were filled with snow and there was the precious potential water. Parched and frozen throats were slaked, beards shaven, porridge boiled, bacon and beef defied to do their worst. Removed from the fire, it had a dusty smack. But it was water!
CHAPTER VII
EVACUATION
There will be a leavening of Egyptian in the Australian vernacular after peace has broken out. It will persist, and perhaps have a weighty etymological influence—at any rate on the colloquial vocabulary. "Baksheesh" will be a universal term, not confined to sketches of Oriental travel. "Baksheesh" is merely one of the many grafted Arabic terms, but it will be predominant. "Sae'eda" will be the street greeting (varied by the Sikh "Salaam, sahib"). "Feloose kiteer," "mafish," "min fadlak," "taali hina," "etla," and the rest of them, will be household words. Other phrases, not remarkable for delicacy, will prevail in pot-houses and stable talk. Forcible ejection from a company and polite leave-taking will both be covered by an "imshee"; there will be "classy" "imshees" and "imshees" that are undignified.
Such an evacuation as was effected at Anzac was distinctly "classy." When first the notion of evacuation was mooted there was misgiving. We were with our back (so to speak) to the sea, hemmed in in a narrow sector of coast, with no ground whatever to fall back upon. There was no one who did not expect disaster in evacuating a position such as that; the only debate was as to degree. What would it cost us in lives and money? And there was a greater fear unspoken—the hideous reflection that an evacuation would make almost vain the heavy losses of eight months' fighting. Everyone hoped against a giving-up. But soon there was no mistaking the signs of the times—the easing off in the landing of supplies, the preliminary and experimental three days' restraint from fire all along the line, the added restriction upon correspondence—in especial the order to refrain from any reference to the movements of troops either present or prophetic, and either known or surmised; the detailing of inordinately large fatigues to set in order once more the last line of defence.