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Parties carrying up rations and pushing trolleys up the light railway from Clarke's Dump had several casualties, and on one occasion the camp was hit and all the signallers who had been left out of the line for training became casualties. In the line itself the only outstanding incident happened to a patrol which found itself surrounded one night, but succeeded in getting back safely.
The roads were packed with traffic. Column after column of lorries came pounding along, bearing their freight of shells, trench-mortar bombs, wire, stakes, sandbags, pipes, and a thousand other articles essential for the offensive, so that great dumps of explosives and other material arose in the green wayside places. Staff cars and signallers on motor-bikes went busily on their way.
I'll be delighted to come, if you'll forgive me should I be a little late. I've got to take the signallers' parade this afternoon. I'll tell Burke when I get to the Mess. I'm going straight there now." "Thank you. That will save me writing. Au revoir."
Inside of ten minutes it was destroyed by a couple of "coal boxes." One of our signallers, Bell, tried to hang on to the telephone at our centre in St. Julien village, although two shells burst in the building and he narrowly escaped death. The signalling section under Sergeant Calder soon had the line connected up with our trenches, and Bell was ordered to leave St.
Finally, the Retvisan adopted our own tactics and retaliated by firing her heavy guns over the intervening high ground, while some of the forts did the same, a party of signallers being stationed on the crest of the hill to direct their aim.
Mastering an almost overpowering desire to run for the redoubt, he assisted two signallers to investigate and discovered that the wire had caught in the foot of a straying camel, which had proceeded on its thoughtless way with the receiver attached. But as is usual in desert warfare, time passed and nothing happened.
One of the signallers was heard plaintively to remark as we waited, 'What 'ave we done to deserve all this? Finally we descended into Lières, a pleasant remote village in a fold of the chalk, full of cherry trees, and slept peaceably till noon. After a day's rest we marched on Sunday afternoon, July 18th, to La Berguette station, on the Hazebrouck line west of Lillers.
Almost immediately a detachment of Cossacks appeared, advancing at a gallop toward the signallers, from the direction of Linshiatun, a village on the shore of Sunk Bay, and as the horsemen appeared every Japanese soldier vanished, as if by magic, having flung himself down upon the ground and taken cover.
The telephones were never working when they were most required, but that was no fault of the signallers. The incessant enemy shelling was continually cutting the wires, and it was as a rule only for odd intervals of half an hour at a time when things were quiet that Headquarters was through to companies.
Meanwhile all the telephone lines had gone owing to the shelling, cutting us off from Brigade, other Batteries and O.P.'s. But intermittent communication was maintained by runners, and signallers were out, hour after hour, mending breaks in the line and showing their invariable gallantry. Till about six o'clock our orders were to lie low, to keep under cover and not to open fire.
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