He and I had been friends at the same New Zealand ’varsity, but, like so many of the best of his race, he was no “sticker,” and in the third year of his medical course he had side-tracked himself on troubled studies of mind and consciousness and refused to carry on with his dull public health and medical jurisprudence. Since leaving ’varsity he had been living on his means, he told me, spending most of his time in wandering. Napier, the tea-planter of Ceylon, was your well-bred, clean-limbed, rather aggressively healthy-minded young Englishman.
These three, at any rate, were the centre of that bright little knot of friends that, in a three months’ stay in Alexandria, had drifted and stuck together in a community of tastes and ideas and downright liking for one another. And though one or other of us might be held by night pickets, or C.B., or on visits to our hospitable French and Italian friends, yet on any night of the week, from seven till midnight, you would find two or three of us forgathered at the back of the little shop in the shadow of the great black casks and behind the wooden grille that, while allowing us from the dim interior a clear view of the street, yet shut us off effectively from the eyes of the night patrol. For it was before Sir John Maxwell’s “Iron Law of closing time” that we held our revelry chez Benci, and it was safe to wager that something was amiss if we went home by any but the 1.10 A.M. tram for Ramleh, or by carriage even later.
But those were our palmy days in Alexandria—the days before the swarm of Tommies came, and our pockets began to empty, and an officious picket in the fullness of its own importance went farther afield than Sisters Street and patrolled the whole town in its lumbering motor-wagons....
L. J. Ivory,
4th Howitzer Battery N.Z.F.A.
Grey Smoke
F.R. CROZIER
Old pipe! old comrade! friend o’ mine,
Have I then made you sad? Or is it just