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Updated: May 15, 2025
Here were no swift, easy-running cars, no comfortable hospital-trains to whirl them down to a Base where there were baths, clean linen, and kindly sisters to make them forget what had passed. Instead, two or three bell-tents wherein doctors and orderlies, worked almost to a standstill and rocking on their legs with fatigue, strove to dress the wounds of the maimed and shattered men.
There was much shouting and laughing.... And so to Aldershot. Aldershot was a seething swarm of civilians who had enlisted. Every class and every type was to be seen. We found out the R.A.M.C. depot and reported. A man sat at an old soapbox with a lot of papers, and we had to file past him. This was in the middle of a field with row upon row of bell-tents. "Name?" he snapped. I told him. "Age?"
The 33rd Regiment distinguished itself by the persevering way in which the men laboured, often going out as grass-cutters, laying out the camp, and working hard at road-making, along the whole line. All superfluous baggage had been sent to the rear. The camp equipage now consisted of small bell-tents only, without tables, chairs, bedsteads, luggage, or any of the usual comforts of camp life.
In the British army, bell-tents are not allowed at all as hospital tents. Active, healthy men may use them in their resting hours; but their condemnation as abodes for the sick shows how pressing is the duty of ventilating them for the use of the strongest and healthiest. A sound and airy tent being provided, the next consideration is of bedding.
"White uns, sir, with flags flying, and that sort of thing? What are they marquees, or bell-tents like the soldiers have?" "I don't suppose they are either, but native tents," said Frank, shading his eyes again. "They look very low and small, right away on the horizon, and they seem to be brown." "On the horizon, sir? Why, that means out at sea, and we sha'n't be there before night."
There was a Pears' Annual print of an old fisherman telling a story to a little girl stuck over the mantelpiece. We had eggs and bread-and-butter and tea for breakfast, and I think the woman only charged us three shillings all told. Once down at the parade-ground we looked about for "Section E" and found their lines in the hundreds of rows of bell-tents.
The quiet isolation and khaki desolation of jagged peaks and sandy slopes was nerve-breaking. You could see the thin lines of the wireless station and little groups of white bell-tents dotted here and there. Robinson Crusoe wasn't in it. Sand and flies and sun; sun and flies and sand. "Wot 'ave we struck 'ere, Bill?" "Some d -d desert island, I reckon!" "A blasted heath..."
It began with a view of a camp of curious little bell-tents about which strode remarkable, big-booted, long-haired, bedizened men looking strangely effeminate and strangely fierce, with their feathered hats, curls, silk sashes, velvet coats, and with their long swords, cruel faces, and savage oaths. Some wore steel breastplates, like that of the suit of armour in the hall, and steel helmets.
Then we came upon a barbed-wire compound, and, caught by the morbid fascination of all prisons, looked in. It was full of sick and wounded Turks, who lay on stretchers in bell-tents, and, by a miserable pantomime of raising two fingers to their lips and blowing into the air, besought of our charity a cigarette. We went in, and handed Abdullas among them.
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