Trooper Bluegum at the Dardanelles

RUMPETER"-A LITERARY COINCIDENCE-ON HISTORIC GROUND-THE

Jonah?" Tha

uck!" That w

th the ship!" most of us felt that he sho

But we were steering straight for Ceylon, and looking forward with keen anticipation to a few days of the picturesque Orient. Some of the impressionable young subalterns were singing "Cingalee, Cingalee, I ha

with "tea in the morning, tea in the evening, tea in the afternoon." Early in the morning of January 12 we got word that a special squadron of three

ugh at the other chaps if we could have first smack at the unspeakable Turk. So by the time the bugle sounded for the usual inspection, we were all in high good humour again. The three liners swung out from the convoy a

. In an hour we were abreast of it-Minikoi, surely one of the islands of the blessed; how green it looked after the everlasting blue of the Indian Ocean; from end to end it was covered with cocoa-nut palm. A long line of snow-white surf beat upon the sandy shore. Gleaming in

en. Curious it is how Britain has secured all the great strategical points of the world-Gibraltar, Suez, Aden, Singapore, Thursday Island, the Cape of Good Hope, and the rest. And one has only to s

lling like demons in wild anxiety to sell their wares. Then the colliers came alongside and proceeded to coal. Scores of thin, undersized, but wiry A

all Western. Arab dhows float across the harbour and steam tugs scurry hither and yon. One section of the town has thatched roofs; the other is all galvanized iron. And one of the natives sang us "Songs of Araby." T

e transport-"a little thing, but our own." If it lacked news it did not lack reporters whose imagination made up for the deficiency. We were all reporters for The Transport Trumpeter. Even I. And I am wondering to this day about a certain curious coincidence connected with one of my painstaking efforts. I wrote on December 28, 1914, a sk

here! What a quest we have set o

French and British. Great names are sprinkled over the pages of Egypt, from Menes, the first king, and Rameses the Second, down to the present day. Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander the Great, Constantine, Saladin and Napoleon, Mohammed Ali and Kitchener have all left their mark on the Nile Delta. What history!

d any of us, know

pyramids. The first beams of the sun in this land tip the cones of the age-old pyramids, and soon these drab giants shine like molten copper. Then the sky turns all gold, and the scene is duplicated in the placid bosom of the ancient Nile, which skirts our camp. In the murky distance the desert is shrouded in a misty haze which has th

se giant triangles sharply silhouetted against the red horizon. They looked

but there were some with us who said it was not hot at all. They spoke of the sun-baked Western P

e also had the oasis of Ma'adi on the other. The irrigationist has caused the desert hereabout to blossom as the

there one finds other touches of old Australia. I went out one day to Sir Alexander Baird's beautif

hese met us at every turn. Especially grateful did we feel for the warning one Cairo shopkeeper gave us: "Don't go elsewhere to be cheated, Australians. Come here!" Nor shall we

ng till night we distributed largess. It was baksheesh everywhere and all the time. Whichever way we turned we found somebody dangling something in front of our eyes-ready to sacrifice it for our sake. Even Trooper Newman, who previously had expressed his best wishes to the ship, comes up to me wit