Series 03: John Brady Nash letters, January 1914-December 1915 - Page 194
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[Page 194]
some of his friends. The faces of the pyramid of Cheops, that is the centre of the picture, are the North & West, the former facing the Chalet. The same faces of Kephren. Note at the top of the last named the remains of the alabaster casing, which, it is said, aforetime gave a smooth surface over the whole of the sides of the pyramids. Mena house is round the corner behind A, midst the gum trees, which are just below the telegraph posts crossing the ridge. The plantation in the corner of the picture are, nearest the Mena house gum trees & farther away the date palm trees which dot or form groves [throughout] the cultivated lands of the Nile valley. Between C & D is an area of dessert which is being excavated by a Dr Reisener from Harvard University, U.S.A. He has been working here for twenty years, and in that time has turned over much sand, stones & rock. E.E.E. Medical camps, over one of which Dr Newmarch presides. F. The Y.M.C.A. building in which Father McAuliffe says mass on Sunday morning.
21-3-15. 9-15 a.m. Our unit is being badly broken up by daily happenings. Why? I know not, nor does anyone here. Nurses are being sent off in many directions. Doctors during the passed two weeks have been loaned to other hospitals in Egypt. This morning six surgeons are ordered, each to a transport at Alexandria. To go whence, none knows. Whence?
We hope to be reunited some day to work as one body somewhere. To a reasonable mind it suggests a waste of good energy and working power to divide a working unit of specialists, and to my mind betrays either want of foresight at the head or serious happenings somewhere in the great war, which are greatly to our disadvantage. The telegraphic accounts lately to hand are to me signs of disasters to our side which are being concealed. Not the great
[Lieutenant Colonel, later Colonel, Bernard James Newmarch CMG CBE VD, 1856-1929, medical practitioner of Macquarie Street, Sydney, was appointed to form and command the 1st Field Ambulance at the outbreak of WWI, and sailed with it to Egypt from Sydney on 20 October 1914 on HMAT A14 Euripides. He was attached to the 1st Australian General Hospital in Cairo, Egypt, in June 1915 and appointed to command it on 1 January 1916, following administrative problems that had resulted in the removal of its director, Lieutenant Colonel William Ramsay Smith. Colonel Newmarch later commanded the 3rd Australian General Hospital in France and returned to Australia in 1920.]