Branches Book

BRANCHES

great excitement on board this morning at 8.30 when the news reached us. The band played a few lively tunes and there was a real clatter of voices on deck.” This was the first fire that Reggie saw in the Great War. From there Reggie travelled through the Suez Canal, and caught a train to Cairo. He was stationed in a camp in Zeitoun which was four miles out of Cairo. He often complained about his new living conditions in Egypt writing, “The Arabs make a devil of a noise, shouting all the time they are carrying the coal. We are situated on the border of the great Sahara Desert, so we get plenty of walking about in the sand but you get used to it.” He wrote about the amazing sights he experienced. It must have been like landing on the moon for this country boy. “Well there is some wonderful sights in Cairo, such as the Dead City Heliopolis, and the great pyramids which people come from all parts of the world come to see. I will send you a picture to let you see the way they stand. They consist of great square blocks of rock or granite built 400 feet in the air and cover 10 acres of ground – the largest one does. You would wonder how people 4000 years back could carry them such a height in the air. I got a guide to show me in the middle of the big one where there is two chambers one where the King was buried and the other where the Queen was buried before they were moved to Westminster Abbey.” This is where Reggie was trained, in the shadow of pharaohs. Reggie’s training consisted of simple jobs like guarding stores and marching on patrol. He followed simple orders and was not at all prepared to be thrust into the crucible of war. ANZAC Day: Lest We Forget (22 March, 1915) On 25 of April, 1915, seventeen thousand New Zealand soldiers stormed the beach at Gallipoli in Turkey and Reggie charged alongside them. In that first hour, nearly eight hundred would drown, be shot at, be blown to pieces by shells, or shredded by machine gun fire never to return home again. Reggie survived and lived to tell his landing tale of the Battle for the Canal. This painting below hung over the family piano at my grandmother’s house, and she said that her father never talked about the war, but did say that “I never run so fast in me life as when I was running down that gang plank.” We know more about his experience in Gallipoli from the letters that he sent to his brother. “I was at the landing of the Dardenelles on the 25th day of April 1915 and I will never forget that day as long as I live. It was terrible, dead laying all around you, some poor chaps with their legs off, some with their mouths blown open with the explosive bullets. The

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