Well, on the day that me and my ‘troops’ got horribly lost, we managed not to kill anyone with the Bren Gun. But it was a heavy beast and ‘Boofa’ – the guy who had originally been assigned to carry it – got pretty sick of lugging it about, uphill and down dale, through the thick bush. So, the Bren gun got passed around all day – from shoulder to aching shoulder. Those shoulders included those of the guy who was holding the ‘highly accurate, highly sensitive’ prismatic compass (i.e. me.) A Bren Gun is a substantial piece of metal and – objects that at magnetised are attracted to substantial pieces of metal. A compass needle is a magnetised object. So, voila! While the massive bloody Bren Gun was hanging from my shoulder, all the bearings that I read from the compass were wrong – and massively so. Why did no-one bother to tell us this would happen? Buggered if I know. The people that thought this unimportant were probably the same people that decided that a Bren Gun was a good thing for a bunch of brainless kids to play with. In any event, why am I telling you all this? Is it just another digression by an old man whose mind is wandering? No – at least, not on this particular occasion. During the course of my squad’s misguided wanderings, we came upon a very ‘cool’ place. It was somewhere that, no doubt, the designers of the navigation course would have intended we avoid by a wide margin – if it were known to them at all - since it was definitely not marked on the topographical map. The ‘cool place’ was a long tunnel, a very long tunnel, driven into the side of a hill. Its collapsed entrance was now completely hidden by vigorous re-growth forest. If we had walked ten metres to either side, we would have missed it completely. Obviously, an old, disused mine is a dangerous place – and subject to further collapse at any time. It’s liable to trap and kill anyone foolish enough to enter it. So, did I order my squad not to go into it? Yes, of course, I did! Did they pay the slightest attention to my detailed, strident and urgent warnings? No. not a bit of it. So, very soon, we were all blindly wandering about inside a 100-year-old tunnel, deep inside the hill, Bren gun, useless compass and all.
My a wayt y fynnowgh ow gweres.langbot langbot