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At the same time, Captain Tomson, finding his Company now consisted only of his signallers, runners, and batmen, and unable to find out where the rest had gone, determined to try and rush the machine guns which were keeping up such a steady fire close to his left flank. His little party forced their way through some wire and found themselves opposed by three guns.
Of course we might do as that dear old gentleman suggests, and send seventy horses and mules on a sea voyage in charge of a party of cooks, signallers, and machine-gunners, and let the grooms and drivers go with the bicycles and machine-guns and field kitchens. But I don't think we will. Nobody would enjoy the experiment much except perhaps the mules.
We are rather on wires now that the time is drawing near; Woodward, though he has only been here one night, is on barbed wires. His cabin is next the signallers and he could not get to sleep. He wants some medical detachments sent up post haste from Alexandria. I have agreed to cable for them and now he is more calm.
Here was a bombing-school urgently killing imaginary Turks; there a squad of bayonet-fighters engaged in the same pleasurable pursuit; while farther away an eager band of signallers with their handy little cable-waggons laid a wire at incredible speed.
Two brave men, Sergeant Coe and Private M.J. O'Connor, signallers, went into the machine gun trench, which was on our extreme left behind a hedge, to bring out Captain Dansereau's body. I also told them to bring back any papers which were left in the shelled and ruined dugout. Through the hurricane of shot and shell that tore the earth up in all directions they made their way.
"It's half-past eleven now. Your line ought to be through by this time." "Yes, sir; it's been through once, but it went half an hour ago. I expect my signallers back any minute." "Very well! you can be working out your switch angle and your angle of sight while you wait."
As the colonel of the 2nd s was keen to be in liaison with us, he and his adjutant and a couple of signallers shared the shaft. The servants gathered clean straw from the German dump and strewed it down the shaft.
They had retreated to their triangle of cylinders again, in the circle about Woking. Signallers with heliographs were pushing forward upon them from all sides. Guns were in rapid transit from Windsor, Portsmouth, Aldershot, Woolwich even from the north; among others, long wire-guns of ninety-five tons from Woolwich.
Wilde and his signallers, the cook and his servants, had installed themselves in a roomy hut stuck in a big bank thirty yards away. There was a sort of well at the top of the shaft, with steps cut in the earth, leading down from the ground-level. We fastened a tarpaulin across the top of the well and made it our mess.
Lyte, however, is equal to the occasion, and calls to the reading signallers "Tell the fool to semaphore!" "He carn't," gasps the sergeant in a horrified whisper; "He's young, an' he don't know nothink but Morse." Lyte groans.
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