United States or Hungary ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Automatic machinery was unloading cargo, and loading it into trucks. There were several men, with their luggage, standing about. One was a huge, brutish-looking man, another a slender young chap about Hanlon's own age, apparently well-educated, from his manner, but with a certain shiftiness in his eyes; the others common-place laborers. "Any of you been here before?" the officer asked.
For a while, they sat silent, looking with bored distaste at the swarm of steel-helmeted Army riflemen and tommy-gunners guarding the transfer platforms and the vehicles gate. A string of trucks had been passed under heavy guard into the clearance compound: they were now unloading supplies onto a platform, at the other side of which other trucks were backed waiting to receive the shipment.
On points relating to wheels of waggons and the harness of horses, the opinions of these men were probably worth something; but in relation to steam locomotives, carriages and trucks running upon rails, their judgment was not merely worthless, but a good deal worse; it was indeed actually misleading, because based on a pretence of knowledge of a trade which was to be called into existence to compete with their own.
Nevertheless, repairs were put in hand immediately, leaky engines were made water-tight, damaged trucks and coaches were made fit to travel, and, within a very short space of time, there was a train running each way between Junction Station and Deir Sineid. As being the services of primary importance, the first trains were confined to the bringing up of ammunition and the taking down of wounded.
Thrale's brewery wheat, beef, fodder, and the four spices dear to the delicate palates of the Indian contingent. Somewhere behind there is a park of ammunition guarded like a harem. In the railway sidings are duplicate supply trains, steam up, trucks sealed, and the A.S.C. officer on board ready to start for rail-head with twenty-four hours' supplies.
At the top of the ladder they found some empty trucks which had delivered their burden into a kind of shoot, through which it fell to the lower level, and there another truck was waiting to take it to the main shaft, from whence it went up to the puddlers.
The weather was beginning to get very cold, and each mile added to our discomfort, and the only accommodation for officers on two of the three trains were cattle trucks. After my official visit I made request for two carriages. The station commandant pretended to consult the Russian and Japanese officials, and then informed me that there was not one available. I told him it was untrue.
Then whack! into a tunnel, and then into Sandling Junction, which was now embedded and dark its lamps were all alight in a great thicket of rhododendron that had crept out of some adjacent gardens and grown enormously up the valley. There was a train of trucks on the Sandgate siding piled high with rhododendron logs, and here it was the returning citizen heard first of Boomfood.
There had been some talk that at certain of these concentration camps there was no water supply, and he gave orders, did Jemal the Great and the Merciful, that water should be sent. A train consisting of trucks of water accordingly was despatched to one of those camps, situated in the desert, with no supply nearer than six miles, and an eye-witness describes its arrival.
But he found his way impeded by all sorts of obstacles; a gate closed across the street to let some trains draw in and out of a station; then a lot of string teams and slow, heavy-laden trucks got before him, with a turmoil of express wagons, herdics, and hacks, in which he was near being run over, and was yelled at, sworn at, and laughed at as he stood bewildered, with his lank bag in his hand.
Word Of The Day