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Updated: May 14, 2025
Hudson who had to return to Suakim that night before dark was ordered, with three regiments in line and advanced files, to cover McNeill and the working-party, while the commander himself went about encouraging the tired men, and urging them to increased exertion.
This reduced the number of O'Gorman's gang to nine effectives, or, deducting the cook and steward, a working-party of seven, all told, who would have to be divided into two watches.
During these brief hours there exists an informal truce, founded on the principle of live and let live. It would be an easy business to wipe out that working-party, over there by the barbed wire, with a machine-gun. It would be child's play to shell the road behind the enemy's trenches, crowded as it must be with ration-waggons and water-carts, into a blood-stained wilderness.
With the third the "heavy stuff" ought to be right on. But don't forget that there was also an order for some "Right stuff," identified as shrapnel by its soft, nimbus-like puff which was scattering bullets as if giving chase to that working-party as it hastened to cover. There you had the ugly method of this modern artillery fire: death shot downward from the air and leaping up out of the earth.
Accordingly he gave Hoskins, who was to have charge of the working-party, the most elaborate instructions as to how to proceed and what to do.
The fine weather came to an end the same day, and it rained hard all the time, which would have been bad enough in bivouacs, and was worse for us who had to spend most of our day on some working-party, either dug-outs, or trying to drain some hopelessly water-logged communication trench, such as the one from Manor Farm to Square Wood.
This novel form of working-party at first delighted the men, who set about the crops in goodly earnest. In a short space of time wheat, oats, and barley were added to our battle-honours. But if the spirit was willing, our reaping implements were correspondingly weak.
By the simple process of walking round the peak we obtained a view of the entire island, with its lagoon and barrier reef; and so clear and pure was the atmosphere that we could not only see but also identify every member of the working-party.
A Belgian battery had just arrived close to us, and unfortunately they gave the position away. In the afternoon I went a long round to various reserve bomb stores to check the stores. Next night I paid a last visit to the Cutting at Hill 60 with a working-party. Second-Lieut. E.W. Styles was also there on a similar job.
It was a part of the duty of the Working-party to carry these on deck, at the time when the prisoners ascended in the morning, and to return them between decks in the afternoon. "Our beds and clothing were kept on deck until nearly the hour when we were to be ordered below for the night.
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