CHAPTER VI
MUDROS, CAIRO, SUEZ Ca.n.a.l AND HILL 70 LINE.
In the early hours of the morning of 9th January the transports, which contained the troops which had left in the first party from Gallipoli the previous night, arrived at Mudros Bay. As explained in the last chapter the Battalion was scattered throughout several ships and the process of disembarkation was by no means easy. However, the Staff got busy and lighters were soon arriving alongside the transports disembarking the troops by divisions. The lighters then moved to different parts of the sh.o.r.e where each division had a place of rendezvous. The sorting out then commenced and with a certain amount of confusion the battalions were ultimately a.s.sembled.
The 52nd Division was allotted a camping ground on the south side of the bay, the camp being known as Sarpi camp. After the Battalion area had been pointed out, canvas was issued and the camp pitched. The only canvas available at the time consisted of a large number of hospital marquee tents which were to accommodate the men and about a dozen bell tents for the use of officers.
The baggage which had been sent off from Gallipoli a few days before the evacuation was found on our arrival at our camp, or rather a proportion of it. It was found that a considerable amount of it had been pilfered, and we were informed that the rest of the baggage had been sent direct to Alexandria.
Life at Mudros was a great change and a great relief after our months on the Peninsula. We were able to live above ground and walk about freely in the open without any fear of drawing the enemy"s artillery fire. It was difficult at first to realise that we were out of the fighting for the time being, but it did not take long to accustom ourselves to this, as after all it is the more natural life.
The weather on the whole was good, the days being bright and warm but intensely cold at night, with a certain amount of frost. The opportunity was taken to issue new clothing and in connection with this it may be mentioned how the Army Ordnance Corps unconsciously gave us a little amus.e.m.e.nt. Two of the battalions in the Brigade were kilted, and the other battalions wore trews. The Ordnance people seemed to forget this and issued to all four battalions the usual winter under-clothing which, as far as the lower garments were concerned, was not exactly suited to a kilted battalion.
While on Gallipoli the Commander of the 8th Corps, General Sir Francis Davis, had organised a Football Tournament for teams representing all units in the corps. The Battalion had been very successful in the preliminary rounds and had reached the final by the time of the evacuation. The team which they had to meet in the deciding round represented the Anson Battalion of the Royal Naval Division, and it was decided to play the tie while we were at Mudros. The day was an unfortunate one as it was blowing hard, with the result that the football was not of a very high order. The Battalion team did not succeed in beating the Anson Battalion, but it was a hard game and there is no doubt the better team won.
Those who played in the final match were, Pte. E. Hammil, "A" Company; Pte. J.B. Smith, "B" Company; Pte. A. Jardine, "D" Company; Sergt. D.
Smith, "D" Company; Pte. J. M"Cann, "A" Company; Sergt. J. Logan "A"
Company; Pte. J. Laird, "C" Company; Pte. T. Knight, "D" Company; Sergt.
D. Calder, "C" Company; Corpl. E. Stevenson, "B" Company, and Sergt. A.
Bain, "A" Company.
In connection with this tournament an incident occurred on the 19th December, during the Battalion"s attack. Captain Campbell had charge of the football arrangements. In the middle of the battle, while sitting more or less triumphantly in a captured Turkish trench, he received by special messenger word from the Division that the Battalion team must play the 5th R.S.F. the following day or be struck out of the tournament. A triumph of departmental work.
While living in camp at Mudros efforts were made to improve generally the feeding of officers and men, and as there were more canteens on the island with greater variety of goods for sale than we had been accustomed to on Gallipoli, our efforts met with a certain amount of success. One day while Major Neilson was scouring the countryside he came across several turkeys in one of the Greek canteens. One of these was immediately purchased and brought back to camp. The next problem was to find some one sufficiently skilled to dress the bird and prepare it for the pot. Lieut. Graham volunteered to carry out the work and really made an excellent job of it. The cooking was done in the lid of a camp kettle over an open fire and everyone who tasted the turkey that night at dinner voted it a great success.
About a week after our arrival at Mudros, Major Findlay left in charge of the Brigade advance party for Alexandria, and about a fortnight later Captain Buchanan, Captain Campbell and Lieut. Barbe also went on in advance. The day after Major Findlay left, orders were issued that the Battalion was to embark the following day, but as was very often the case under similar circ.u.mstances, when the camp was struck these orders were cancelled and it was not until the last day of January that the Battalion embarked on _H.M.T. Briton_, which also carried the 7/8th Scottish Rifles and the 6th East Yorks with Colonel Morrison as O.C.
troops.
Three days later the transport arrived at Alexandria, but did not dock until the following day late in the afternoon. About 8 o"clock that night disembarkation was carried out and a few hours later the Battalion had entrained and left Alexandria for Cairo.
The Brigade advance party had made all the arrangements for the camp at Cairo, which was pitched on the ground near the Egyptian Army Barracks at Abba.s.sieh. Life there was very pleasant and the joys of a town were very much appreciated by every one after our months of exile.
We were not left long however to enjoy ourselves, and after about a fortnight at Cairo we again entrained for a station on the Suez Ca.n.a.l.
Little did we then think it was the first move in our long trek into Palestine.
We arrived at Ballah West on the 17th February and got our first impression of what our life in the desert was to be like. The weather was very broken and not too warm, but moving about constantly in the sand was very tiring and depressing. We had had the experience of sand at Aboukir, but that was at the side of the sea where one is quite prepared for it, but at Ballah it seemed to be different. There was nothing but sand on every side except for the thin strip of water, the Suez Ca.n.a.l running north and south.
After about a week in camp on the west side of the Ca.n.a.l we received orders to move to the other bank and relieve the 31st Division, who at that time were occupying the ca.n.a.l defences. After some confusion which arose through the orders which had been given to us not having been issued to the 31st Division, relief was carried out and we saw the "Great Wall of China." This was a trench revetted by sand bags, running some miles to the east of and running parallel to the Ca.n.a.l. Its tactical uses we never could understand. Days were spent trying to clean up Ballah East; had Hercules been with us he would have diverted the Ca.n.a.l through the Augean camp.
On March 2nd the Battalion took over posts from Ballah to Kantara; the work was not arduous, being mainly to see that no unauthorised persons visited the Ca.n.a.l to put mines therein. Everyone bathed and one officer caught a mullet on a white sea fly, but no more; he always felt sure if he were to fish at the right time he would get a good basket, but his dreams were never realised.
Several officers who had been wounded or sick now rejoined us, including Captains Brand and Beckett and Lieut. MacLellan, also a draft of officers from the 3rd and 4th H.L.I., consisting of Lieuts. Parr, Strachan, T.B. Clark, Burleigh, Grey, Buchanan, A. Le G. Campbell.
On Sunday, March 12th, the Battalion was transferred in barges up the Ca.n.a.l to El Kantara, where "A" Company was already on detachment.
Kantara was the starting-point for the advance across the Sinai desert into Palestine, which was to occupy us for the next twelve months.
During this year we had no fighting to do, but it would be a mistake to suppose that we had an easy or a pleasant life. Undoubtedly people at home considered that we were much to be envied, and comparing our lot with that of those fighting in France, we willingly agree. But it is a mistake to suppose that we were simply having a good time. The Egyptian Expeditionary Force was a.s.sociated in the mind of the average citizen with the idea of Pyramids and flesh pots. For the first, symbolic pictures were largely to blame. There never was a design representing "Britain"s far flung battle line," which did not show a comfortable man in a sun helmet with a Pyramid in the background. Pyramids are so easy to draw. The artists were beaten by the flesh pot--because they had no very clear conception of what a flesh pot looks like. But the old Biblical phrase rose irresistibly to the mind mingled perhaps with recollections of some globe-trotter"s stories of the delights of shepherds. Both ideas are quite false. Our flesh pot was the dixie--and there was a great deal less to put into it than there was on other, more canteen-blessed, fronts--while many a man who joined us early in 1916 left for France in 1918 without ever having set eyes on a Pyramid. Egypt west of the Ca.n.a.l and Egypt east of it are two very different countries, and when transports took to hooking up beside the Ca.n.a.l banks at Kantara, and discharging their defrauded drafts there, it was only the lucky ones, who got a week"s leave or a cushy wound, who ever visited the true land of the Pharaohs at all.
Until the evacuation the defence of the Ca.n.a.l and of the eastern frontier of Egypt had depended almost entirely on the waterless nature of the 130 miles of country which separated it from Palestine. There were troops on the Ca.n.a.l, but their numbers and equipment forced them to remain strictly on the defensive, and Kitchener"s alleged question--"Are you defending the Ca.n.a.l or is the Ca.n.a.l defending you?" was a truthful, if rather an unfair, way of summing up the situation. There was no mobile force, no supply of baggage camels, and the desert, as it faded into the mirage to the east, was an unknown country in which Turkish patrols moved unmolested. One of "A" Company"s jobs as late as March 1916 was to accompany every evening along the Ca.n.a.l bank a camel dragging a heavy baulk of wood in such a way as to sweep and flatten a track in the sand, so broad that an agile Turk could not be expected to jump over it. In the morning this track was carefully scrutinised, and it was possible to see whether anybody besides the ants and beetles, who had a right of way, had gone across it during the night, and if so steps would be taken, as required.
But General Murray with troops at his disposal did not propose to allow this state of affairs to continue. The routes by which a hostile force could advance on Egypt from the east were limited, and the southern ones, through very difficult mountainous country, were unlikely if not impossible, especially when raiders or aeroplanes had destroyed the stores of water in the rock cisterns. The northern route lay close along the sea coast, through a desert of heavy sand, in which at many places water, which most horses refused, but which seemed good enough for a Turk, could be obtained by digging wells. This route bent south-westward from Romani and reached the Ca.n.a.l at Kantara, and it was this route that he determined to block by advancing eastward along it himself.
The Kantara of the spring of 1916 was very different to the great town of camps and metalled roads, lines of sheds and pyramids of stores, canteens, and Y.M.C.A.s, lorry parks and hospitals, real nurses and a cinema, which became familiar to hundreds of thousands of troops on their way up to Palestine in 1917-1918. Even the cemetery was only wired off during our occupation, and one remembers being somewhat ribald at the pessimism of the authorities who provided sufficient consecrated ground to contain the bodies of all the troops then garrisoning the place. As usual the authorities scored in the long run.
Its pre-war amenities were distinctly limited. On the west side of the Ca.n.a.l ran the line from Ismalia to Port Said, with a station and some square plastered houses occupied by native officials of the E.S.R. and Ca.n.a.l services. The Sweet-Water Ca.n.a.l, an insignificant ditch full of dirty water, divided the line from the big Ca.n.a.l, and the low trees, which grew along its banks, gave the only pleasing view in a desolate land. The euphemistically named "sweet water" contained a large number of Bilharzia parasite, an interesting little creature, whose ancestors have been found embedded in the Egyptian mummies. It begins its life in a water snail, transfers itself through the mouth and skin to the body of any human being it can, and there makes hay of his or her internal arrangements in a peculiarly distressing manner. All Egyptians are bilharziotic and seem to thrive on it; but we were strictly forbidden in our own interests to give the little beast an entree. Behind the line were salt marshes and sand. East of the Ca.n.a.l were two or three palm trees, a little mosque and a couple of Custom Houses--and that was all.
The beginning of the offensive defensive had built a road running eastward for a mile or two with a light railway parallel to it, while a little further to the north was the terminus of the broad gauge railway, on which the whole scheme depended. On the plans of Kantara which were issued on arrival this railway line was marked Kantara-Jerusalem Railway, which caused many an amusing remark regarding the possibilities of its ever reaching there. Little did we then think that many of us would travel to and from Jerusalem and beyond on that very line.
[Ill.u.s.tration: SUEZ Ca.n.a.l AT BALLAH.]
Our camp was a mile or so from the Ca.n.a.l, to the north of the road--first the officers" lines, then a s.p.a.ce for a parade ground, then the men"s lines. The sand was very heavy, but of a coa.r.s.e kind which did not blow about much. The tents were double and made a pleasant enough home for a couple of officers with camp beds, but were less attractive to from eight to a dozen men, lying in the sand with all their possessions. To the eastward was the cemetery and then the ground rose into one or two insignificant little bluffs, afterwards sinking to a small flat area of harder ground, on which most of our parades were held. Beyond this was the barbed wire and redoubt line of the Kantara defences, of which more anon. To the north joining with the lakes and marshes round Pelusium, lay patches of shallow salt water, inundated by cuts from the Ca.n.a.l as part of the defensive scheme.
The strength of the Battalion on arrival was little over 300. "A"
Company remained on detachment till 23rd of March a couple of miles off on the Ca.n.a.l bank, where they spent their nights in patrolling the eastern bank and their days in watching the shipping pa.s.s, bathing and attempting to catch fish from an ancient tub attached to the post. On one occasion they had the mild excitement of stopping a suspected tug which was reported from further south as steaming up at a time when it had no business to be out and refusing to answer signals. Furious commands to stop were disregarded, but a single rifle bullet across her bows had an almost magical effect, and the "boarding party" gallantly rowing out in the tub were harangued by a weeping Greek skipper in six different languages without a pause until the arrival of an official of the Water Transport Department, disguised as a very immaculate subaltern of Yeomanry. No one ever quite discovered what it was all about; but the skipper having at last become comparatively coherent in French, we put on board a prize crew in the person of the Yeoman, and let her go.
For the rest of the Battalion there were no such thrills. Parades were from 6.30 to 9.30 and for a couple of hours from 4.30 p.m. The companies were not large enough to be subdivided into platoons, and the nature of the country confined us chiefly to squad drill and musketry. The intervening leisure was spent in conversation--mercifully we have all got mouths and can continue to use them long after our stock of novel ideas is exhausted. There were also frequent bathing parades. The Suez Ca.n.a.l is not well adapted for bathing. It is extremely dirty, because every ship that pa.s.ses drains into it, and after a few feet of rather muddy shallow, it drops suddenly out of a man"s depth, so that the non-swimmer finds his range limited. But with a hot climate and very little washing water, one is not inclined to be exacting. Our drinking water was the less attractive for being so strongly chlorinated. It was supplied from the Sweet-Water Ca.n.a.l after a vigorous filtering, and we continued to patronise the same source right through the desert, and even when we were fighting in another continent in front of Gaza.
The authorities soon found us a job or two to occupy our leisure. The Egyptian Labour Corps had not yet arrived on the scenes and the digging of the Kantara defences consequently devolved upon the white troops.
This meant six hours" digging almost every day for almost every man, divided into a morning and an afternoon shift. Now sand is admittedly nice easy stuff to dig in, you do not need a pick, and can fill your shovel without exertion. But no trench in sand is the faintest use unless it is revetted. Our revetting material was matting on wooden frames, and these had to be anch.o.r.ed back to stakes driven in deep down, six feet clear of the parapet or parados, so that to produce a trench you had to take out six feet of sand extra on either side, hammer in your stakes and attach your anchoring wires to the matting and then fill in the whole again. Traverses had to be dug right out and then filled in again when the wall of matting was in position and secure. Progress was therefore not rapid, and especially on windy days when most of the sand was blown off your shovel before you had time to throw it and the wind silted it up in your excavation rather quicker than you could take it out. Still all this work, together with the wiring, was done thoroughly if slowly, and it was depressing to see next year that now that the war had been carried into the enemies" country, all our redoubts had been carefully filled in.
Other diversions provided for us took the form of unloading barges or loading trucks, and for some of these jobs it was necessary to cross to the western side of the Ca.n.a.l. On the outward journey there was never any difficulty about this, but on the homeward some such scene as the following was almost certain to occur. As the fatigue party--thirty men under an officer--reach the end of the pontoon bridge, after a hot afternoon in the ordnance depot, a cloud of natives hurl themselves upon it from either end and proceed to haul it in two halves under the whip-cracking of their own headman and the fatherly advice of an R.E.
corporal. Looking up the Ca.n.a.l the fatigue party, already late for their dinners, perceive a P. & O. liner about four miles away majestically crawling south. Their only hope is now the horse-ferry, an aged flat-bottomed contrivance wound across by a squad of natives and a chain. With the a.s.sistance of a friendly military policeman, the headman of this gang is discovered some hundred of yards away lying asleep with his feet in the Sweet-Water Ca.n.a.l, Bilharziosis doubtless entering at every pore. When aroused he breaks into a voluble flood of Arabic--the M.P., an Argyle in disguise, addresses him in Scotch at a similar rate, while the O.C. fatigue party speaks very slowly in English, French, and what he believes to be modern Greek, successively. At this game the gippy always wins, and it is only when, confessing their defeat, the opposition resorts to personal violence that he goes off weeping to beat up his team, having been fully aware from the first that that was what was required. The officer in premature triumph embarks his party in the ferry, into which enter also some horses, two camels and a motor bike.
The horses are naturally very frightened. The fatigue climbing to precarious footholds on the rails at the side, leave them the bottom of the boat to be frightened in. Then, screaming like a flock of sea gulls, the children of Pharaoh arrive, and their chief, looking wisely across the river, perceives a barge which he feels sure will be in our way. He therefore shouts to it, the officer--adding the voice of authority, shouts too--the men shout, the natives shout, everybody shouts. The barge crew shout back, but are finally out-shouted and haul clear. The foreman, seeing that he will now lose the game and have thus prematurely to take the party over, suddenly perceives the advancing P. & O., now not much more than a mile away. He draws the distracted officer"s attention to the phenomenon and leads him to understand that to start now would lead to an inevitable collision and a watery grave. The polyglot argument waxes furious, the men taking it up in their turn, when their leader falls out exhausted, and the Arab is still keeping up his end triumphantly when the great ship reaches us and slowly steams by, while curious pa.s.sengers eye us from her decks, their minds doubtless running enviously on flesh pots. After this, resort is again had to violence and the ill-a.s.sorted load slowly leaves the sh.o.r.e and commences its perilous journey, the horses still in paroxysms of terror and the camels supercilious and bored. Long before the other bank is reached all concerned have handsomely apologised to the headman for having doubted his statement that they could not have got across before the liner arrived. But at last they reach ground and so to their dinners, tired but cheerful still. The only time, by the way, that this accomplished Egyptian condescended to speak English was when a party of men returning at night from leave in Port Said, exasperated by his delays, had taken the matter into their own hands, and were working the ferry across themselves. He lifted up his voice and wept,--no one heeded him. Then again and again he cried the mystic words, "he drink water--he drink water." He was sternly adjured to be silent, until suddenly another voice was heard--"the ---- thing"s sinking." "Aiwa, aiwa," said the disregarded prophet--"he drink water"--and all hands pulled madly to get the boat back to the nearest side--of course the side from which it had started. Those who have studied the diplomatic wiles of our hero, are convinced that he had himself opened the sea-c.o.c.ks--or taken what other steps were necessary to scuttle his craft and save his honour.
Another fatigue, which was highly unpopular, took place in relays from 6 p.m. to 10, or from 10 to 2 a.m. The scene was the goods yard of the railway where trucks had to be loaded with great bales of forage, sacks of grain, or cases of bully and biscuit for the personnel at railhead.
s.n.a.t.c.hed from the tender care of their officers, the men were delivered over to N.C.O."s of an unknown breed, probably a cross between R.E. and A.S.C. and Ordnance Corps, with a highly technical jargon picked up in happier days in the goods yards of English railways. Great naphtha flares cast a blinding light, dispelling the friendly gloom on which every right-minded private relies, if unlucky enough to have to work at night. The still air is solid with dust, increased every moment as G.S.
waggons, each drawn by a team of maddened mules, enter the yard at a hand gallop, scattering all in their path. The atmosphere is one of strenuous profanity, most uncongenial to the unhappy infantry. At last the officer in charge--ironic phrase--determines that time is up and raises a feeble outcry amid the din. Fortunately the sheep know their shepherd, and will hear his voice. The men fall in and he listens to complaints and soothes the indignant. One man laid his tunic down and a mule ate a great bit out of it. Another cannot get his arm straight "after lifting thae bales." A still, small voice a.s.serts that a man has as much chance of doing what the R.E. wants, as a gnat has of fighting a ---- aeroplane. The sergeant numbers them off. There is of course one missing; but the officer, being certain that he is either a mangled corpse among the mules, or far more probably triumphantly asleep on a stack of tibbin, declines to search for him, and the party steps out for home, are challenged by a pessimistic sentry, dismissed, and, stumbling over their rec.u.mbent comrades, find an unoccupied corner of their tents, and sleep the sleep of the just till reveille--and after, if possible.
Such was life, broken by an occasional Sunday"s rest with the Divisional Band, or at any rate two men with cornets to help with the singing at Church Parade. Services were often held under difficulties, but one has heard of no sadder case than that of the Padre who went off to hold a parade for some transport men stationed near the railway line. He had no hymn books but, being an optimist, chose well-known hymns and one of the officers present sang them with him. During the second hymn a train load of natives came up, and, the signal being against it, came to a halt in close proximity. The Egyptian is a kindly soul, and judging that the white men were making a very poor effort in their rejoicings, the whole lot of them broke into one of their insane chants, stamping their feet and clapping their hands in time to the music and smiling encouragement on the indignant Padre the while. Hastily breaking off the hymn, the latter commenced an eloquent address, but the engine driver, a G.o.dless man, whose small mind was fixed on getting home to his tent, suddenly opened out his whistle and kept it going as a hint to the forgetful signal-man who was holding him up, and the sorely tried Padre, losing his nerve at this final outrage, "washed out" the Parade, and retired defeated.
Only too often Sunday was chosen for some form of frightfulness, which could not logically be called a fatigue, but which was really far worse.
It was on a Sunday that the whole Battalion, bearing on their backs every st.i.tch of their kit, repaired to the E.S.R. station, and surrendered their belongings to be placed in waggons and subjected to superheated steam. Not only were successive volunteers almost boiled alive in premature efforts to enter the waggons after the doors were reopened; not only was everyone"s kit mixed up with everyone else"s and the garments, when recovered, found to be creased and mangled in incredible ways; not only was the whole Battalion left standing at ease, dressed solely in boots and sun helmets, while the Port Said express moved slowly past them; but, when all was over, it was found that our little friends had considered the steriliser merely as a new form of incubator to help their offspring to hatch out.
The weather on the whole was pa.s.sable. In March there were days of strong west wind which were really chilly. In April it began to warm up, and the thermometer in the tents--and a tent with flaps gave us the best shade temperature we could find--reached 100 before the end of the month. The "khamseen," a south wind, hot as the blast of a furnace, bringing with it clouds of dust and flying sand darkening the sun, and making a fog in which we could not see half across the parade ground, smote us at irregular intervals in April and May. No words are bad enough for the "khamseen." People who live in Cairo in good stone houses with blinds and lots of ice regard it with horror. In the desert it was infinitely worse. One day early in May an officer"s tent was at 118, while the crowded homes of the men must have been far hotter.
About this time H.R.H. The Prince of Wales paid a visit to the E.E.F.
and was present as a member of the Staff of General Murray when the latter inspected the troops stationed at Kantara. Each battalion was drawn up by half-battalions in close columns of platoons in front of the camp, and although the inspection occupied a very short time, the delay was almost sufficient to cause three senior officers, the first of the battalion to be granted local leave, to miss the one o"clock luncheon express to Cairo. They caught it with difficulty and great effort, and it is reported that their lunch consisted largely of iced beer.
On April 23rd, Easter Sunday, the Turks raided the Katia oasis, twenty-five miles to the east of us, and cut up the Yeomanry who held it. Another body advanced to Dueidar, some ten miles nearer us, and were gallantly held off by a company of R.S.F. That evening the Brigade was moved out at short notice and marched to Hill 40 in the dark. Here we bivouacked, and spent a chilly night, while Anzac cavalry pa.s.sed through us and moved on the threatened spot, which was far out of reach of infantry. The next day the rumours that reached us left little doubt that it was no more than a clever raid by the Turks, but we spent the day, and a very hot one it was, without shelter in the sand, disturbed firstly by the information that we should be fighting hard by dawn the next day, and again by the message that the Turks were seen advancing in large numbers. This proved to be the Egyptian Labour Corps in hasty retreat from the neighbourhood of Katia. On the 25th we returned to our camp, which we did not quit again until May 17th.
The post at Dueidar was an isolated detachment garrisoning an oasis in which the Bedouin were in the habit of holding a weekly market. These gentry were rounded up after the Easter day disaster, but the oasis still needed a guard, because in the desert an area where drinkable water can be found is more valuable than Alsace Lorraine and the Saar Valley put together. The true infantry line of defence however was still further back. About eight miles from the Ca.n.a.l a line of redoubts had been built, spanning the gap between protective inundations and barring the way to Kantara. Half a mile further out lay a marvellous trench, the work of forgotten heroes, since transferred to France, a straight line of carefully sand-bagged fire bays and traverses which it would have taken a small army to hold, running as if laid down with a ruler across the desert without either support line or communication trenches. The redoubt system was far more economical in men and each separate redoubt formed a strong point well supplied with ammunition and water, which could give a very good account of itself.
To this line the Battalion moved on May 17th, taking over at dawn next morning from the K.O.S.B. The two main redoubts were at Hill 70 itself, where Battalion Headquarters lived with "A" Company and half of "C," and at Turk Top garrisoned by "B" Company. Three smaller redoubts were held by "D" and the other half of "C," and there were intermediate posts occupied by small detachments only at night. Life was more pleasant out here. We still had tents outside the wire in which we lived by day, manning the trenches at night. There was a good deal of work to be done on the redoubts, but it was work with an obvious purpose, and we were glad to be on our own and free from the clutches of those obscure magnates who detail divisional fatigues. Our digging we got through between stand down and breakfasts in the cool of the morning, or else in the late afternoon. At night we posted sentries and went on long adventurous patrols from post to post. There was no enemy; but the desert itself still had a certain amount of mystery and romance about it. It was less flat than round Kantara and dotted here and there with coa.r.s.e, green scrub, while a mile to the south of Hill 70 stood a little group of seven palms. Away to the east rose great hills of golden sand, very beautiful when the rays of the setting sun struck upon them. To show our unsophisticated att.i.tude at this time, it may be admitted that when a credulous machine gunner informed us--doubtless on Australian authority--that the trails of two "Arabian" lions had been found not a mile away, we more than half believed him.
The flies were bad, but we were getting used to the heat--the tent temperature was usually between 100 and 110 during the hotter hours,--and a northerly wind helped to keep us going. On the 20th a pair of 18 pounders were put into Hill 70 and another pair into the Turk Top Redoubt, and their gunners, of the 2nd Lowland Brigade R.F.A., came to live with us. The guns were well dug in, but there was a general feeling that if they fired, most of the trenches, which were only a few feet away, would inevitably collapse. At Hill 70 Captain Wightman and Captain Moir joined the Battalion, with very little to say in favour of the Egyptian climate and obviously feeling the extreme heat.
Early in June astonishing rumours began to reach us about a "change of air" camp at Alexandria, and soon it came to be known that the whole Brigade were for a week"s holiday there. The cynics scoffed, and the few who were anxious to display the fruits of a cla.s.sical education could quote a line about "fearing the Greeks even when they bear gifts in their hands," the Greeks to us being that inveterate foe of every right-minded infantry man, until he gets a chance of putting up red tabs himself,--the Staff. But for once the cynics were wrong, and on June 13th the 11th Manchesters arrived to relieve us, and we marched gaily back to Kantara--at any rate if not gaily--it was getting on for 130 in the sun quite early in the day--still with a good heart. We were even complaisant when we found ourselves crowded into one camp area with the 7th, and with most of the tents to put up. As the afternoon wore on--(we had been up since 3 a.m. and were still hard at it in different fatigues)--a tendency to disparage holidays was noticed in some quarters, and when the next day we found ourselves in for a resumption of training pending further orders, the cynics had their innings. It lasted a fortnight--of crowded tents and extreme heat--the thermometer failing to fall much below 90 all night. Reveille was at 4 a.m. and after three hours training, we came in for an eight o"clock breakfast, drenched in sweat, and regarding salt bacon with loathing. To add to the trials of the climate the entire Battalion was roused one night about midnight with orders to make all tents as secure as possible, hammer in tent pegs, etc., as the following message had just been received, "Typhoon proceeding north pa.s.sed Suez 9 p.m." Few if any of us had ever experienced a typhoon and with thoughts of very shortly being blown here and there like the sand we set to work with a will, but unnecessarily.
The great wind never came, and we learnt in the morning that the "Typhoon" that pa.s.sed Suez was a tramp steamer homeward bound. But the optimists were not to be disappointed. On the 26th an advance party left us, and on the evening of the 28th the whole Battalion, with the exception of some few of the later drafts, entrained and reached Sidi Bishr next morning, s.m.u.tty but hopeful.
Sidi Bishr rest camp was unlike anything that the oldest soldier can remember. It was run with the sole desire of making everybody happy. The tents were in the desert east of the town, half a mile from the sea. The men had no duties of any kind. No parades were allowed and there were special cooks and orderly men attached to each camp. On arrival the camp staff took the men over from their officers, who were told that they had no further responsibilities and could go off and enjoy themselves for a week. Every man was then given a pa.s.s into Alexandria, good up to 11 p.m. every night of the week, while for those whose finances could not stand this strain there were free concerts and cinemas in the camp itself, and a whole village of enticing restaurants and shops where fruit, drinks and souvenirs could be obtained. One need hardly say that the Battalion, keenly appreciating the kindness shown and the confidence reposed in them, repaid it by exemplary behaviour. There was hardly a case of drunkenness throughout our stay--no bad record for men who had been teetotal, through necessity and not through choice, for months--and were now exposed to the dangers of the vile though seductive liquor sold in the native bars.