The most obtuse soon saw his worst fears realised. Notice to quit was, in general, short. On Sunday afternoon, the 12th, the O.C. came panting up the gully. "Fall in the unit at once." They were given an hour and a half's notice to have all ready for transport to the pier. Notice was in many cases far shorter, resolving itself into minutes. But an hour and a half is brief enough. Then there was bustle and feverish stuffing of kit-bags. The dug-out which had been as a home for four months was dismantled and left in dishevelment in a half-hour. It's hard to leave a dug-out--your shelter from shrapnel and the snowy blast and the bitter Turkish frost. It's here that you have smoked the consolatory pipe for so many months--consumed the baksheesh steak and marmalade, read the home letters and the local sheet of home from Australia, played nocturnal poker, yarned with a fellow-townsman, and spread the frugal late supper. It has been home in a sense other than that you ate and slept there; it was home indirectly--by virtue of home mails, home talk, home memories, visualisations nurtured under its shelter in the night watches. Home because it was in Turkey, and that way duty lay.
Now, in a few desecratory minutes, it was rudely stripped, bunks overturned, the larder ratted, the favourite prints brushed from the hessian in the bustle. The vultures from neighbouring dug-outs flocked round for the spoil; the men who yet had no notice to evacuate came for baksheesh. With a swelling heart you disgorged your little stock of luxuries, that you would have taken but had no room for. It breaks your heart to give over to the hands of strangers your meagre library amassed during a quarter's residence, your little table, your baksheesh butter and strawberry jam, potatoes and oatmeal, surplus luxuries in clothing, the vital parts of your bunk, the odds and ends of private cooking utensils that have endeared themselves by long and frequent service at the rising of the sun and at the going down of the same, and late at night. Though the life of a soldier is checkered, without any abiding city, shot with hurried moves by flood and field, yet we had had so many months in Anzac, in the one spot, that we had broken with tradition and had made a sort of home in a sort of settled community. And this was the rude end of all.