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Updated: May 14, 2025
During the campaign I noticed how he made himself very comfortable. Whenever he was stationed as a guard for a railway bridge or in any other semi-permanent post, he half-dug, half-thatched himself an excellent shelter. He made use for food supplies of every scrap of eatable stuff that came his way, and could do wonders in the manipulation and repair of an ox-cart.
Sandbags were scarce enough in all conscience in the fighting trenches, and it was not surprising that none could be spared for the troops in the back lines; any which might be available being required for such semi-permanent works as Divisional and Brigade Headquarters and the trenches occupied by the R.E. and other Divisional troops. Nor was there any form of overhead cover.
I had always realised the advantages of a semi-permanent line of signal stations along the communications to the telegraph, but I had doubted the practicability of using such complicated arrangements in action. In this torrid country, where the sun is always shining, the heliograph is always useful.
In a career as long as his own from time to time you took semi-permanent positions in bodyguards, company police, or possibly the permanent combat troops of this corporation or that. But largely, if you were ambitious, you signed up for the fracases and that meant into a uniform and out of it again in as short a period as a couple of weeks.
"The Nanshan position offered unusual advantages for defence, and had been diligently prepared for permanent occupation during many weeks. Ten forts of semi-permanent character had been built, and their armament showed that, on this occasion, the Russian artillery was vastly superior, both in calibre and in range, to the Japanese guns.
It was dusk when we rolled into Ivangorod and into the thick of that vast and complicated labor which goes on in the rear of an advancing army all that laborious building up which follows the retreating army's orgy of tearing down bridge builders, an acre or two of transport horses, blacksmiths and iron-workers, a semi-permanent bakery, the ovens, on wheels, like thrashing-machine engines, dropping sparks and sending out a sweet, warm, steamy smell of corn and wheat.
Our troops have done all that flesh and blood can do against semi-permanent works, and they are not able to carry them. More and more munitions will be needed to do so. I fear this is a very unpalatable conclusion, but I see no way out of it. "I estimate that the Turks had about 40,000 opposed to our 25,000 rifles.
There was no artillery here, and the only fortifications were semi-permanent earthworks, fronted by ditches, thrown up around the officers' quarters and the barracks and other buildings. The parade ground and recreation spaces were outside these very ordinary fortifications.
I doubt if they were paid more than a trifle, and they were from the country districts or near-by islands, moths drawn by the flame of the town to soar in its feverish heat, to singe their wings, and to grow old before their time, or to grasp the opportunity to satiate their thirst for foreign luxuries by semi-permanent alliances with whites. Lovaina's girls!
The war was not very old before the Post Office started to get concerned over the loss of some of their key personnel to the forces; it was one thing to have their employees playing at soldiers in their own time but quite another matter to lose some of their qualified staff on a semi-permanent basis.
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