The men bathe, but often pay too dearly for the bath. The bathing beach is a place notorious for good-humoured but successful "lifting." In the early stages there was mixed bathing of Colonels and lance-corporals, Majors and full privates. The Colonel leaves his boots on the sand; a private is sneaking off--"Hey! those ---- boots are mine!" ... All ranks go about ashore dressed alike, with the rank shown symbolically; distinguishing marks of rank become distinguishing marks for sharp-shooters too: you must know a Captain by his bearing rather than his clothes. Curious dialogues arise. The officers are in a garb which differs in many ways from their dress of the promenade at Shepheard's Hotel. There is little damping of spirits. Most men are happy. Pettiness is snubbed. All are bound by the common danger into the spirit of amity. There is growling day and night--the legitimate growling of the overwrought man, which means nothing. Little outbursts of the liver there are, but of a different quality from those civilian ventings of the spleen. CHAPTER IV SIGNALS The step is a far one from the signal-office of the first month in Anzac to that of December. The first crude centre of intelligence was like a Euclidean point--without magnitude, with position only. It was a mere location from which signals could be despatched, without any of the show of a compartment, and without apparatus. And the wireless station was a hastily scratched hole in the sand, where the operator supported himself on an elbow and received. Now in December this is all changed. The Army Corps Signal Office is a building, of sandbags and timber and galvanised iron, standing four-square, solid as a blockhouse, protected alike from wind and the entrance of rain and (by its branch-thatched roof) from the hawk-glance of the aircraft observer. Within there is an incongruous sense of civilisation. The staff is clean, neatly dressed, shaven--in a word, civilianised. The spirit of order presides. Except that the denizens wear a uniform, and that the walls are of sandbag, you might be in a metropolitan telegraphic office. They sit there tap-tap-tapping in their absorbed fashion. The shrapnel screams overhead and bursts to their north. They are too intent to hear it, mostly. All that has disturbed them, in the last month, is the cry of "_Taube!_" (colloquial _Torb!_). Anti-aircraft bring them trooping out to squint up at the swift, black, forbidding craft humming raucously across the position. They laugh at shrapnel, under the lee of the protecting ridge: no ridge makes immune from that whirring dove of peace up there!