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[Page 105]
November 8
5.30 a.m. – One long rumbling of big gun fire.. suddenly opening from slow speakings along the line. Shrapnell over Ypres.
Anzac Bulletin, Sept. 26 – from the C.M.D.S… Two of the first of Will Dyson's official drawings, "Main Dressing Station, The Fourth" coming out. ! A finely suggestive sketch of Veaux M.D.S. during the Bullecourt stunting last May – before the station was "shell'd out" and "Memorial to the 4th Battalion, A.I.F." at Pozieres, a sketch that drafts well the barren nakedness of the place, and the few remaining stumps of trees.
Photographs in the number include a fine one of a Batt. studying a contour map of the Messines area – a similar map to the one of the ridge before Passchendaele, by the Devonshire Lines, Ouderdom. There's a notice in the number that copies of official photographs are obtainable at 1/- each.
November 8
113.
To leave Belgian Battery Corner today at 2.30, per foot.
November 9
C.M.D.S. Dickebusch
114.
Beat the Bearers down by 5 minutes: in A. Section Bearers Marquee. Arrived here yesterday – per lorry – at 2.15.
So far I've not joined up the gilded aristocracy: till we leave here, I'll keep with the Bearers: then join A nursing when I have to.
[In margin] Postage 3.60!!
Parcelled up for posting Seeger's 'Poems' and "Certain Noh Plays of Japan" – to Mrs. Hadley. From her yesterday's mail brought two photographs – one of Mother and one of Betty: neither do them justice: they're badly finished. It was very decent getting them and very thoughtful of Mrs. H… We hear of all our Christmas mail to Australia being sunk – in the channel: all parcels posted between Oct. 15 and 20th so I lose my "City of Fear" and Drinkwater's "Poems" and the presents to Mother and Nat. "Letters of a Soldier" too? The 27th Batt. passed the station about an hour ago – about 9 a.m.
Fourty miles by bus: starting Sunday morning… Fourty miles to no-one knows where. One rumour says 17 kilos from Rouen!. Another, a big reorganizing camp by Abbeville. It seems fairly certain though we'll be out of the line for a good month, then back again to a new front.