SAPPERS
its cellars into dug-outs, build huts on its lawns? If
you are a soldier you will have no other architects,
surveyors, electricians, or plumbers than the R.E.s.
'When the waters were dried an' the Earth did appear,
("It's all one," says the Sapper),
The Lord He created the Engineer,
Her Majesty's Royal Engineer,
With the rank and pay of a Sapper!'
The little house, set in the French countryside,
where dwells the Engineer-in-Chief, the Grand
Master of all the R.E.S, shelters an infinite diversity
of specialists. Side by side with the Geologist, who
possesses a perfect knowledge of that part of
France, its strata and its resistance in various places:
who even in peace-time was visiting the region in
which he is interested with the foremost geologists
of France, dwells the Camouflager who, tirelessly
checking his own intuitions with aerial photography,
has come to know from experience what is seen and
what is not seen. He it is that studies a photograph
and has a too dangerous camp evacuated. He it is
that can differentiate between the tracks of the
harmless beasts of the field and those that are
vehicle-made. And it is he that puts false trenches
beside the real ones, false block-houses beside real
block-houses, mock guns beside guns: and patiently
begins all over again until no photograph can
distinguish between the true and the untrue. It is he
that camouflages camouflage.