1st February 1915

The 1st Division Artillery on route march, February 1915.

[Courtesy of Australian War Memorial - C02128]

Mena Camp

Rout march today. We packed up our blankets etc. got them into the G.S. Wagon that wouldn’t fit on the guns or Amm wagon and we went out in full marching order.  There wasn’t enough room on the guns for all the gunners so we had to take it in turns to walk.  Our Battery was the first Battery in the lead.  First of all was the Head Quarters Staff then our battery (7) after that came the 8^th Battery then the 3^rd Brigade Amm. column then the 9^th, 10^th, 11^th and 12^th Battalions of Infintry with their Amm Vans and general service wagons and a Regiment of Light Horse and their Amm wagons and last the Army Medical Corps.  The whole lot stretched about 8 to 10 miles long.  We went along the Pyramid road to Giza and there branched off and went through about four native villages in the Nile Valley.  The route was over a rough raised road over gullies and canals.  We saw some of the finest cultivation anyone could wish to see.  It is a great place for bursense or lucerne, maize, oats, barley etc.  Tomatoes grow in abundance and big ones to.  Cabbages are the biggest I ever saw.  They have old style of doing things. Gardening is done now just the same as was done 2000 BC.  The old water wheels and the old wooden ploughs pulled by oxen.  But the way these natives live is terrible, they live in mud huts or old bag tents and corn stalks for a roof.  The ducks, geese, fowls, goats dogs, sheep and human beings all live together.  Dirty by hell, its awfull.  Half naked and deformed mongrels.  They catch fish with a net in the bits of lagoons around here a sort of mud cod fish doesn’t grow very big is all I see them catching.  Our lead driver of the Firing Battery Wagon was as drunk as could be before he left camp and was getting in to trouble all the way.  At one bridge across a canal he nearly sent us all into the water below only for the wheel driver we would have had a swim for nothing.  We came round in a sort of circle in the Nile Valley and landed out on the desert a few miles up from our camp, there we unhooked and watered and fed the horses and had our grub.  Had a bit of a spell and then Gunners had to hook the drag ropes and help the horses pull the guns and wagons back to camp and it took it out of us, a lot of dam rot.

Monday 1st February

Route March very successful. Left at 9AM, reached camp about 3.30PM. The 3rd F.A. Bde eulogised by Gen Birdwood and Bridges also Colonel White. Turn out very good. Lecture to O.C. Batteries in the evening and officers generally by Col Hobbs in the 1st Brigade lines.

 

[Courtesy of State Library of New South Wales - Sir Charles Rosenthal diary]