BOOK III
BACK TO EGYPT
CHAPTER I
LEMNOS
After many delays we landed, and after many wanderings arrived at a camping-ground, and went supperless and tentless to bed—too tired to remark, rolled in our blankets, either drenching dew or stony ground, but not so weary as to be unconscious of the absence of shell. Our Last Post for many months had been sounded by bursting shell (for many a man it had been Last Post indeed); the massed buglers of the battalions seemed now a voice from the land of spirits. There were men (they are to be believed) literally wakened by the stillness in the night, restless through the sudden deprivation of the midnight shriek from the flank and of our own roar of discharge from above. For the nocturnal crack and whistle of bullets, here was the distraction of utter quietness. For a week it was disconcerting.
The réveille which wakened you at dawn was hard to place in the first few moments of semi-consciousness. "Am I dreaming? Back in camp at Melbourne?" The flood of consciousness sweeps off that sweet delusion—however sweet this island of rest may be.... A woman's voice draws you blinking to the tent door—"Vashung! Vashung!" It has a Teutonic gerundial flavour. But it's only the Greek ladies soliciting in the mist the soiled garments of soldiers. They move about the camp until the sun is well transmuted from that dull-glowing ball into the mist-dispelling Day's-Eye, stripping the whole landscape down into stony detail and making those volcanic peaks in the north to glow. Before breakfast is well on the women have amassed their huge bundles, and the 'cute Greek boys, in pantaloons and soldiers' cast-off tunics, have sold you a day's store of oranges and chocolate.
The days are easy. We know we shall move to Egypt (or "elsewhere") incontinently, and will take the leisure the war-gods provide us while we may. Only the fatigues necessary to camp cleanliness and to eating mar the day. Most of it is spent lounging, reading, smoking, yarning reminiscently of Anzac, and scrambling. Write letters we may not at this stage. The general order prohibiting letters dealing with the evacuation and with movements of troops either known or surmised has never been revoked; and has been reinforced by a prohibition against correspondence of any sort—except upon field-service cards—those "printed abominations" for which correspondents at home "thank you very much indeed for sending me."