ARABS AND AMMUNITION.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 258, 31 October 1929, Page 31

ARABS AND AMMUNITION.

"CASUAL" AUSTRALIANS.

"Askari" writes: In a paragraph the other day. from London, talking about the modern rifles and ammunition possessed by the Arabs in Palestine, the writer mentioned that the Australians were most casual during the war, leaving rifles and ammunition lying round. The rifle business is probably somewhat exaggerated, but I can vouch for a whole sackful of .303 in mint condition which I'm afraid was abandoned by our cousins across the Tasman. Our crowd was camped at Talaat ed Dum, which was the sort of half-way house between Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley sduring the operations of 1918. The New Zealand Brigade, moving down to relieve the Aussies, would etay a day or two at Talaat ed Dum, and the same coming back. It is a cheerless spot in the wilderness spoken of in the Bible. It is composed of first-class rock and sand, and in summer (when we were there) _ te about two degrees below boiling-point. The only good thing about that flyinfested camping ground was that one could wash one's thick riding strides, lay them out on the ground, and in a quarter of an hour they would be bone-dry, which was a consideration when one had only a single pair. Wandering up one of the nearby wadis (dvy watercourses) one day I came on a sack of .303 abandoned. When I told the sergeant about it he said it could stay there. He hadtold the quartermaster of a similar incident a few weeks before, and was told to take a walk; no one wanted to be bothered with such a trifle; the brigade had all the ammunition it wanted, and the trouble of explaining the finding of abandoned stuff was too much with the thermometer away up on the roof. So that sackful at least probably found its way into the tribal arsenal. Why should there be a loose sackful lying about, you may ask. After a "scrap" the troops would return with more or less ammunition to spare, and a man had quite enough to carry in that stifling country, especially as one had to carry in addition to army gear hie own supply of firewood, salvaged, purloined or whatnot. The only thing that made life bearable in that inhospitable land was the "boil-up," which means billy tea, and was the one form of dissipation possible.