大象传媒

Dad always used to say how much he admired the Royal Engineers, or "Sappers", as I believe they are known. He told me that they were ingenious at building things under harsh conditions, in extreme circumstances, often using salvaged materials. The following anecdote illustrates their resourcefulness.

In Dad's words, as he told it to me:

We pulled into this town after there had been heavy fighting there. It had been almost obliterated, hardly a building was left, all the trees had been destroyed and the road was littered with dead horses.
The sappers had been there ahead of us to lay the telephone lines, and had obviousely had difficulty in finding suitable uprights to attatch the cables to.
Their answer to this problem was to roll the dead horses onto their backs and string the cables around their up-ended legs.

Dad was an animal lover, particularly of horses, but he couldn't tell this story to me without laughing. He explained that "army humour" was often very different from the norm as the circumstances often forced you to either laugh or cry, and that it was better to laugh and get on with things.

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