"DON 3"

Goat Island Groan, Volume 1, Issue 5, 11 October 1941, Page 5

"DON 3"

Short Story by :

T Bdr. Tim Riley, Boss of the Battery Staff of the 444th Battery,N,73 a : in action near the shattered .and completely shell demolished j.?. t c.la town of Zournalake, during the month of July, 1918, was in a quandary . His B.C. had very tersely informed him that morning just what he had thought of the fact that Riley’s carefully laid O.Pip line had not lately functioned properly ?{hen it was*wanted, and suggested that "lie Rd' i? s future prospects depended omliim discovering what it was that caused the said B.C. to have to borrow other people’s lines when he had a job of spotting to do, . . Riley was a very thorough and game ;l,ittie bloke and knew his lines ware all hunkey dorey except for cuts due to Hun shelling, but the fact remained that for several days past he had not been able to . maintain a line when the old man wanted it* It always went dead just as "Percy” - the old man - got good and ready to blow Heil out of some Fritzy target* * ' . . , Riley took a spook named (...among his cobbers as "Spike”) Muldoon into his confidence” and arranged thaVHext timd Percy wanted to shoot, he and Spike would patrol the line. ’-4 7 . The result of this decision found the pair of them contentedly teed into the line behind a shattered pill box, some 500 yards behind where Percy was sitting in his O.Pip anticipating a glorious strafe, such as bad been denied him for some days. The line was perfect and the two spooks were having a quiet fag and swopping lies about their■ last visit to the waggon lines and the red headed mademoiselle in the first house round the corner from the B.S.M.’s billet. . Suddenly a blast of sulphurous language shook Riley out of his composure. The old man’s lan guage* was hot enough to shrivel up an imp P in Hell, let alone a Bdr. Spook in a. snow and frost bound swamp area like their present home away from home.— Poor old Tim didn’t care to risk any remarks o£ his own as the old man was not supposed to know that the pair of them had taken it upon themselves to more or less shadow him to the O.P. "Spike", said Tim, "the line’s bust behind us, or we couldn t hear Perrv consigning us to Hell-fire and worse’J , "But dammit Bom. There hasn’t been so. much as a bloody wizz bang go over from Fritz. If the ruddy line’s broke back to the Battery, S ° m "That^s r all right Spike", says Tim, "but who in the hell would there be to cut our wire? There’s none of the P. 8.1. nearer than those blokes back there by the dressing station and the line doesn t go any S. n Ww e ”;"d better get the Hell out of here before Percy comes tearing back, or we'll get blown out for bein’ here without ° rd Thi’’two thereupon set off back along their line looking for faults or whatever it was that caused .the sulphurous explosion of Percy. Suddenly, as the approached a broken’and shattered farm which had been used once by the Hun as a machine gun nest. Spike saw a movement amid the ruins, and, thinking it probably.one of the rats which usually infested such places, let drive with a Mauser pistol he had recently purloined from a very dead Hun. To their utter surprise, the shot brought an answer and two very alarmed spooks took a header pff the duckboards into the mud. A very P careful stalk of .the old farm then. took place. Tim, armed with nothing but a small reel of wire and Spike- with a Don 3 and his s ' lS Reaching the pill box of concrete and rubble, no sign of anyone ,- vld be found, but tKei^fefi¥l? laid line had- a big chunk cut out of ■t where it had been laid through the buildings to keep it clear of a time they wondered if they had been shot at, and were about to replace the damaged wire and . get along « hi =l Percy and „S S t attend ant spook arrived and demanded to know.what the blank blank they ■ j - p mucking about there for, and so forth, . , Percy was so interested in their story that he decided the ruins '■■l T-p worth a further investigation. , . . n +. p Tn one corner of what had once been a tool and implement shed f ..oris an upturned pig swill tub and a 'bundle of old chain and 7v,-'dering sacks, or other rubbish, caught Tim's eye. •"’non moving over to have a look-see in that particular corner he noticed the unmistakeable sign of muddy footprints go up to the ,; ' lb oi?nrijng P o7er to where Spike stood,' Mauser in hand, watching the -’/man rooting ab°”t. no whispered the news of his discovery., ■' Yr to Pet the old man into the discovery as he n.-0.. a IvoBcr; "as might be nseftm ..i f

Accordingly, four figures returned to the tub and Tmm, with a. heave, tried to spin the tub aside. However it proved to be fixed in W sol way. ' ' • - After a bit of mucking abort it lifted, together with a section of the old rubbish, onl£ to be dropped Like a hot spud as a fusilade ci shots ripped up past their ears. 'The old man cooly produced. from one of those, sack-like pockets officers like to affect, a perfectly good Mills bomb and muttering twat ”no sanguinary Fritz was going to get away with that p’ told the others to duck and’ threw the bomb over in the general direction of the swill tub. Tie customary five seconds brought forth the usual result and the swill tub, heap of rubbish etc., departed in some haste and many frag ti ent s , , . A moment or two after,; an investigation disclosed a perfectly dry potato cellar occupied by two stunned Hun telegraphists, the end of a cable stretching no doubt via some buried route through the once Gorman occupied ter itory to another.similar ; .. station, ~<ar morse key and sounder attached to the : cable'and a : second set -to an obviously overland line / . . , ■• \ Subsequent investigations led a party of Signal Corps blokes to an abandoned cellar in a small farm not far outside the gaunt hollow city of ’’Wipers”, where some courageous. enemy agent had transmitted to his . friends at the end of the cable, such information x as he could gather and his rickety, patched, overland line was repaied f om either end by the bits and pieces cut from any such, lying about the wastage of that drear and horrible war zone, Tim and Spike solved their mystery, two enemy telegraphists were sent to live in the comfort of a prison. camp and a perfectly good cable was used to feed in to the ‘Him Divisional Command - ’’Fried News”, . P • ; •*> ■ ■ Watch for another one of these interesting stories by Mr,Budish - brought to you through the courtesy of: