SPARE KIT ABANDONED

Wanganui Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15127, 23 January 1917, Page 7

SPARE KIT ABANDONED

GIGANTIC WARDROBE. EFFECTIVE OVERHAULING. DANGEROUS SOUVENIRS. (Commonwealth Official—Copyright.) LONDON. There is in London a certain huge depot crammed to the roof with the private property of the Australian Army. At the beginning of this war, men, when they left their last training camp for the actual front, left behind them a kit bag with a spare set of kit in it. The idea was that if they returned wounded, or if at the front they were ever in sudden need of a new kit, these kit bags would he sent up to them, either to the hospital or to some place behind the front, and there was their new outfit all ready for them. It was not; a very good idea at any rate, for a war like this. No kit bag would ever be sent up to the front in the middle of this armageddon—it is far easier to send a thousand brand new' tunics or pairs of boots or caps or anything else up to the front in bulk and issue them out there. The idea of the spare kit broke down at once. That left goodness knows how many, thousand pounds worth of Government property lying useless in great dusty sheds in Alexandria while the woollen mills could not keep up with the demand for tunics, shirts, and trousers for the front. The tunics, shirts and trousers epecially intended to replace the first kit when it was worn out, were being carefully guarded in the kit .bags along with the little private photographs, letters, hooks and the remains of parcels from home, which the soldier stored in his kit hag also before he left for the front. c 4 eG ofthe odaf dtf dtfatr ftdtfadf GEAT SAYING EFFECTED, It was decided to take all Government property out of the kit bags and simply leave the private property in each, storing it at the base in one great central depository. It has been a gigantic job. Already they have restored between £300,000 and £500,000 to the State—--24,368 breeches, 10,982 tunics, "over 36.000 shirts, 4573 pairs of boots, mostly quite new, nearly 27,000 pairs of socks 25.000 pairs of pants, 7500 cardigans—just imagine how these were received by authorities anxious to hurry winter clothing to Franoe—and so on down a list of over fifty articles in the regular outfit of the soldier. When I saw them, forty thousand kits had been in the store some time, and forty thousand had just newly come iu—so that the figures by the time this letter is finished, for all I know, may be doubled. X A THOUSAND SHELLS AND BOMBS.

In tHese stacks .of kits in London there have been found already, at the time ivhen I saw them, a hair-raising selection of souvenirs. One thousand shells and bombs—not empties ,or exploded ones, there ,were thousands of those also, but live shells—were taken from the kit bags. Charges of cordite, the complete gun ammunition done np ready for firing—were not in one kit bag, but in a number. It is common knowledge how cordite deteriorates and becomes dangerous if kept in. certain temperatures, and these particular charges had been probably maturing for months at the bottom of a huge heap of kit bags under midsummer heat in Egypt. They were shaken out and carefully burnt in the yard. '