land?
Answers in the affirmative c/o The Censor, please. The convoy was winding about the endless mountains, intruding into a Chinese landscape. Mountains filled our view, heaps of them. Beyond each mountain, more mountains, thickly afforested. Clouds floated below us, lit by the early sun. Clouds and smaller clouds of dust. For wherever the mountains went, there too went the road, coiling tirelessly â and, for all its inexhaustible miles, covered with X Div vehicles. What an astonishing sight! My first experience of travelling mountainous country. We could see the road winding above and behind us; it was the way we had come. And there it all was to be seen and enjoyed. We were outdoors, and not sitting inside at desks, over boring lesson books.
Green, blue, gold, were the colours of the distance. Closer at hand, only the sandy grey of dust and vehicles. The trucks in their passage threw up dust over all the trees lining the way. Everything without wheels stood absolutely motionless, as if breeze had never been invented, as if the dust had killed off the jungle.
So we made our advance over that marvellous ____Road, across the mountains of Manipur and those of the ____Range, until wereached the more level ground on which our present site (no names, no pack-drill) stands. We are parked in a scraggy and ant-infested forest, while the division sorts itself out in order of battle and puts in maintenance on all vehicles.
Later. Sorry to go on in pencil, but Iâm now in the signal office. On duty but little traffic coming over the wires, so Iâll continue for a while.
Itâs hot. Iâm sweating.
The signal office is a 3-ton lorry, its flap at the rear raised horizontally to extend the floor-space. You climb into the lorry by a rusty ladder with three widely spaced wooden rungs. Inside, at the end nearest the cab, sits the Signal Master in all his glory. Heâs an officer (of course). He has a table with a field phone. Before him are piles of paper, code names, references, maps, diagrams, documents.
To one side of the lorry are two long narrow tables on which stand four Fullerphones. These chesty, unhappy little instruments play an important role in keeping the division in touch with itself and with other nearby units. On the floor are four piles of Fullerphone boxes, and on these the Fullerphone operators have to sit. They are translating the buzzings in their earphones into words on paper â as Iâm doing between scribbling to you.
A tarpaulin is attached to the outside of the lorry and extended so as to provide shade for the Counter Clerk. Heâs an important man. At the moment itâs our Corporal Pine. The Corp shuffles and sorts and distributes the endless stream of messages which pass through our hands, dealing them out to us operators or to various other lowly degrees of messenger.
With him sits the Superintendent, crooning times and cyphers into the ear of his phone. Here too sits our orderly, patiently waiting â at present itâs Steve. This morning it was old Gaskin. Steve smokes stylishly, cradling one elbow in the palm of his hand, relaxed until the counter clerk calls on him to take a message on foot to one of the local gods hiding nearby behind acronyms, ADMS, ARQS, CLAD, DELS, and the like.
A camouflage net covers this lazy yet busy scene. Flies buzz everywhere.
Oh, yes. Nearby is another tent, upon which snakelike lines of cables converge. Itâs our telephone exchange, a place of urgency, stuffed with winking lights and brass plugs. This is the tent whose ropes you trip over, swearing, in the dark.
Dispatch riders and cable-layers lurk nearby, somnolent as lizards. Only lizards donât smoke.
Bertâs my relief. Heâs working another Fullerphone. By now, I am pretty well accepted by the rest of âSâ Section. They respect the fact that I nearly fell off the truck one night, and that I was hauled up before the Censor (they mostly gave up
Answers in the affirmative c/o The Censor, please. The convoy was winding about the endless mountains, intruding into a Chinese landscape. Mountains filled our view, heaps of them. Beyond each mountain, more mountains, thickly afforested. Clouds floated below us, lit by the early sun. Clouds and smaller clouds of dust. For wherever the mountains went, there too went the road, coiling tirelessly â and, for all its inexhaustible miles, covered with X Div vehicles. What an astonishing sight! My first experience of travelling mountainous country. We could see the road winding above and behind us; it was the way we had come. And there it all was to be seen and enjoyed. We were outdoors, and not sitting inside at desks, over boring lesson books.
Green, blue, gold, were the colours of the distance. Closer at hand, only the sandy grey of dust and vehicles. The trucks in their passage threw up dust over all the trees lining the way. Everything without wheels stood absolutely motionless, as if breeze had never been invented, as if the dust had killed off the jungle.
So we made our advance over that marvellous ____Road, across the mountains of Manipur and those of the ____Range, until wereached the more level ground on which our present site (no names, no pack-drill) stands. We are parked in a scraggy and ant-infested forest, while the division sorts itself out in order of battle and puts in maintenance on all vehicles.
Later. Sorry to go on in pencil, but Iâm now in the signal office. On duty but little traffic coming over the wires, so Iâll continue for a while.
Itâs hot. Iâm sweating.
The signal office is a 3-ton lorry, its flap at the rear raised horizontally to extend the floor-space. You climb into the lorry by a rusty ladder with three widely spaced wooden rungs. Inside, at the end nearest the cab, sits the Signal Master in all his glory. Heâs an officer (of course). He has a table with a field phone. Before him are piles of paper, code names, references, maps, diagrams, documents.
To one side of the lorry are two long narrow tables on which stand four Fullerphones. These chesty, unhappy little instruments play an important role in keeping the division in touch with itself and with other nearby units. On the floor are four piles of Fullerphone boxes, and on these the Fullerphone operators have to sit. They are translating the buzzings in their earphones into words on paper â as Iâm doing between scribbling to you.
A tarpaulin is attached to the outside of the lorry and extended so as to provide shade for the Counter Clerk. Heâs an important man. At the moment itâs our Corporal Pine. The Corp shuffles and sorts and distributes the endless stream of messages which pass through our hands, dealing them out to us operators or to various other lowly degrees of messenger.
With him sits the Superintendent, crooning times and cyphers into the ear of his phone. Here too sits our orderly, patiently waiting â at present itâs Steve. This morning it was old Gaskin. Steve smokes stylishly, cradling one elbow in the palm of his hand, relaxed until the counter clerk calls on him to take a message on foot to one of the local gods hiding nearby behind acronyms, ADMS, ARQS, CLAD, DELS, and the like.
A camouflage net covers this lazy yet busy scene. Flies buzz everywhere.
Oh, yes. Nearby is another tent, upon which snakelike lines of cables converge. Itâs our telephone exchange, a place of urgency, stuffed with winking lights and brass plugs. This is the tent whose ropes you trip over, swearing, in the dark.
Dispatch riders and cable-layers lurk nearby, somnolent as lizards. Only lizards donât smoke.
Bertâs my relief. Heâs working another Fullerphone. By now, I am pretty well accepted by the rest of âSâ Section. They respect the fact that I nearly fell off the truck one night, and that I was hauled up before the Censor (they mostly gave up
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