by Fred Huckle

I was called up into service the day World War I was declared. I was put in a mobile unit and we were sent all over the battle area, France, Italy and the Middle East. We were sent wherever we were needed.
When I was with the unit in the Arabian Desert, it was impossible to tell exactly where we were because there were no maps. If one could get a Bible it sometimes saved lives, since we could use the maps of the Middle East to tell us where we were.

To pass the time away while we were travelling, we made up verses and songs. This excerpt is one of a thousand verses:

“Egypt is a pretty land full of wondrous sights,
but a bad place to spend your money and your nights.”

We used camels to travel and once we were travelling over the sand dunes, when we came to a wadi. We were counting on the water collected there, but to our surprise and dismay, we found it full of camel corpses and dead men. Perhaps they had been thrown in to pollute the water supply. We never found out why they were there. Our water supply unit was a day’s march behind us and we had very little water with us. We just had to tighten our belts and our thirst and go on.

When we got the best of that area, we went back to France and had our first home leave in two years.

Photo by Barb Woodley