Читать книгу By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal онлайн

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You need more self-control in these enchanting places than the confirmed drinker in the neighbourhood of a pub. Unless you restrain yourself with an iron self-discipline, you'll exhaust all your feloose. The event rarely shows you to emerge with more than your railway-fare back to camp. But under your arm are treasures that are priceless—except in the eyes of the salesman. You trek to the post office and send off to Australia wares that are a joy for ever. And there you find on the same errand officers and privates and Sisters. There is a satisfied air about them, as of a good deed done and money well spent, as who should say: "I may squander time, and sometimes I squander money and energy in this Land; but in this box is that which will endure when peace has descended, and purses are tattered, and Egypt is a memory at the Antipodes."

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GALLIPOLI

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THE JOURNEY

We were given twelve hours to collect bag and baggage and clear out from Abbassieh. It was a night of alarms and excursions. In the midst of it all came a home-mail. That was one of many occasions on which one in His Majesty's service is forced to postpone the luxury of perusal. Sometimes a mail will come in and be distributed just before the "Fall-in" is blown. This means carrying about the budget unopened and burning a hole in the pocket for a half-day—and more. In this case the mail was read in the train next morning. We were out of camp at sunrise, with the waggons ahead. By eight o'clock we had taken leave of this fair-foul, repulsive yet fascinating city, and were sweeping across the waving rice-fields of the delta towards the city of Alexandria.