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The advantage of these fortifications and of an augmented naval force in the extent contemplated, in a point of economy, has been fully illustrated by a report of the Board of Engineers and Naval Commissioners lately communicated to Congress, by which it appears that in an invasion by 20,000 men, with a correspondent naval force, in a campaign of six months only, the whole expense of the construction of the works would be defrayed by the difference in the sum necessary to maintain the force which would be adequate to our defense with the aid of those works and that which would be incurred without them.
At the capital reside the politico-military governor, a secretary, judge and attorney-general, a number of public functionaries, a captain of engineers, and the captain of the port. At the northern part of the island, where a convent stands, a low cliff fringes the shore, being an upper stratum of the upheaved reef.
Meanwhile their fellows at the river bank with the engineers were slashing down the trees on the Bolo side clearing the bank to prevent surprise of the Allied position over the seven foot ice that now made the river into a winding roadway. More blockhouses and gun positions were put in. It was only a matter of time till they would have to retreat to the old position on the river.
There was a Canon at dinner, and two engineers and ladies. We talked of India and home, and these kind people's children over seas, and we talked art too.
Then the Staff rode on, into the ginger yellow dust-cloud, leaving the officer of Engineers standing in the beaten tracks of many iron-shod hoofs and many iron-shod wheels. He was not left alone. A little cluster of mounted Cape Police had detached itself from the rear of the Division.
Neale flushed with pride; his eyes flashed; his jaw set. But he said little while the engineers led him out to the scene of the latest barrier. It was a rugged gorge, old and yellow and crumbled, cedar-fringed at the top, bare and white at the bottom. The approach to it was through a break in the walls, so that the gorge really extended both above and below this vantage-point.
The campaign was largely an engineers' and an artilleryman's war, waged in the mountains, much of it in regions of perpetual snow highly picturesque and spectacular. Finally, it was as little destructive as war well can be, because the Italians were fighting in territories which they hoped to hold after the conflict, and they spared the towns and villages to the greatest extent possible.
These distinctions were enumerated with due solemnity in a General Order of the Government of India, which contained also a passing reference to "the praiseworthy co-operation afforded by the troops of H.H. the Nuwaub of Hubsheeabad, accompanied by Lieutenant Henry Gerrard, Engineers." That was all.
What was there left for these simple people to do, these bricklayers and engineers and cultivators of the earth, who, bent over their daily tasks, had lived without vision into the future what was there left for them to do when the grand folks, the learned people, their own captain with the three golden stars on his collar, assured them it was their duty and a most praiseworthy thing to shoot Italian bricklayers and engineers and farmers into fragments?
Lieutenant Matheson of the engineers had arrived and Lt.-Colonel McHarg, Lieutenant Matheson and Major Odlum proceeded down the slope from their lines towards some ruined houses in their front, which they entered, and from the back windows of which they immediately saw the enemy lining the hedges not one hundred yards away.
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