January 27, 1916. 
LAND AND WATER 
THE SIGNALLERS. 
By Boyd Cable. 
" It is reported that . . . " — Extract from 
OiiiciAL Despatch. 
THE " it" and the " that" which were reported, 
and which the despatch related in another three 
or four Hnes, concerned the position of a forward 
line of battle, but have really nothirig to do 
with this account, which aims only at relating something 
of the method b}/ which " it was reported" and the men 
whose particular work was concerned only with the report 
as a report, a string of words, a jumble of letters, a huddle 
of morse dots and dashes. 
The Signalhng Company in the forward lines wa-; 
situated in a very damp and very cold cellar of a half 
destroyed house. In it were two or three tables com- 
mandeered from upstairs or from some houses around. 
That the one was a rough deal kitchen table and that 
another was of polished wood, with beautiful inlaid work, 
and artistic curved and carven legs, the spoils of some 
drawing-room apparently, was a matter without the 
faintest interest to the signallers who used them. To 
them a table was a table, no more and no less, a thing to 
hold a litter of papers, message forms, telephone gear, and 
a candle stuck in a bottle. If they had stopped to consider 
the matter, and had been asked, they would probably have 
given a dozen of the delicate inlaid tables for one of the 
rough strong kitchen ones. There were three or four chairs 
about the place, just as miscellaneous in their appearance 
as the tables. But beyond the tables and chairs, there 
was no furniture whatever, unless a scanty heap of wet 
straw in one corner counts as furniture, which indeed it 
might well do since it counted as a bed. 
Towards Midnight. 
There were fully a dozen men in the room, most 
of them orderlies for the carrying of messages to and from 
the telephonists. These men came and went continually. 
Outside it had been raining hard for the greater part of the 
day and now, getting on towards midnight, the drizzle 
stiil held and the trenches and fields about the signallers' 
quarters were running wet, churned into a mass of gluey 
chalk-and-clay mud. The orderlies coming in with 
messages were daubed thick with the wet mud from 
boot-soles to shoulders, often with their puttees and 
knees and thighs dripping and running water as if they 
had just waded through a stream. Those who by the 
carrying of a message had just completed a turn of duty 
reported themselves, handed over a message perhaps, 
slouched wearily over to the wall furthest from the door, 
dropped on the stone floor, bundled up a pack or a haver- ■ 
sack, or anything else convenient for a pillow, lay down 
and spread a wet macintosh over them, wriggled and 
composed their bodies into the most comfortable, or 
rather the least uncomfortable possible position, and in a 
few minutes were dead asleep. 
It was nothing to them that every now and again the 
house above them shook and quivered to the shock of a 
heavy shell exploding somewhere on the ground round the 
house, that the rattle of rifle fire dwindled away at times 
to separate and scattered shots, brisked up again and rose 
to a long roll, the devil's tattoo of the machine guns 
rattling through it with exactly the sound a boy makes 
running a stick rapidly along a raihng. The bursting 
shells and scourging rifle fire, sweeping machine guns, 
banging grenades and bombs were all affairs with whicli 
the Signalling Company in the cellar had no connection. 
For the time being, the men in a row along the wall 
were as unconcerned in the progress of the battle as if 
they were safely and comfortably asleep in London. 
Presently any or all of them might be waked and sent 
out into the flying death and dangers of the battlefield, 
but in the meantime their immediate and only interest 
was in getting what sleep they could. Every once in a 
while tiie signallers' Sergeant would shout for a man, 
go across to the line and rouse one of the sleepers ; then 
the awakened man would sit up and blink, rise and listen 
to his instructions, nod and say " Yes, Sergeant ! All 
right, Sergeant ! " when these were completed, pouch his 
message, hitch his damp macintosh about him and button 
it close, drag heavily across the stone floor and vanislj 
into the darkness of the stone staired passage. 
A Journey in Darkness. 
His journey might be a long or a short one, he might 
only have to find a company commander in the trenches 
one or two hundred yards away, he might on the otiier 
hand have a several hours' long trudge ahead of him, a 
bewildering way to pick through the darkness across a 
maze of fields and a net-work of trenches, over and be- 
tween the rubble heaps that represented the remains of a 
village, along roads pitted with all sorts of blind traps in 
the way of shell holes, strings of barbed wire, overturned 
carts, broken branches of trees, flung stones and beams ; 
and always, whether his j ourney was a short one or a long , he 
would move in an atmosphere of risk, with sudden death 
or searing pain passing him by at every step, and waiting 
for him, as he well knew, at the next step and the next 
and every other one to his journey's end. 
Each man who took his instructions and pocketed his 
message and walked up the cellar steps, knew that he 
might never walk down them again, that he might not 
take a dozen paces from them before the bullet found liiin. 
He knew that its finding might come in black dark and 
in the middle of an open field, that it might drop him 
there and leave him for the stretcher bearers to find some 
time, or for the burying party to lift any time. Each 
man who carried out a message was aware that he might 
never deliver it, that when some other hand did so, and 
the message was being read, he might be past all naessagcs, 
lying stark and cold in the mud and filth with the rain 
beating on his grey unheeding face ; or on the other hand 
that he might be lying warm and comfortable in the 
soothing ease of a bed in the hospital train, swaying gently 
and hilled by the song of the flying wheels, the rock and 
roll of the long compartment, swinging at top speed 
down the line to the base and the hospital ship and 
home. An infinity of possibilities lay between the two 
extremes. They were undoubtedly the two extremes, 
the death that each man hoped to evade, the wound whose 
painful prospect held no slightest terror but only rather 
the deep satisfaction of a task performed, of an escape 
from death at the cheap price of a few days or weeks 
pain, or even a crippled limb or a broken body. 
A man forgot all these things when he came down 
the cellar steps and crept to a corner to snatch what sleep 
he could, but remembered them again only when he was 
wakened and sent out into their midst, and into all the 
toils and terrors the others had passed, or were to go into 
or even then were meeting. 
Hardly More than Shadows. 
The signallers at the instruments, the sergeants who 
gathered them in and sent them forth, gave little or no 
thought to the orderlies. These men were hardly more 
than shadows, things which brought them long screeds 
to be translated to the tapping keys, hands which would 
stretch into the candle-light and lift the messages that had 
just " buzzed " in over their wires. The sergeant thought 
of them mostly as a list of names to be ticked off one by 
one in a careful roster as each man did hjs turn of duty, 
went out, or came back and reported in. And the man 
who sent messages these men bore may never have 
given a thought to the hands that would carry them, unless 
perhaps to wonder vaguely whether the message could 
get through from so and so to such and such, from this 
map square to that, and if the chance of the messages 
getting through — the message you will note, not the 
messenger — seemed extra doubtful, orders might be given 
to send it in duplicate or triplicate, to double or treble 
the chances of its arriving. 
The night wore on, the orderlies !:lept and woke, 
stumbled in and out ; the telephonists clroned out in 
monotonous voices to the telephone, or " buzzed " even 
more monotonous strings of longs and shorts on the 
" buzzer," And in the open about them, and all 
