With Our Army in Palestine | Page 7

the British Empire. Moreover, it was very difficult of attack, for it was defended by a range of exceedingly unpleasant and precipitous hills, the passes through which were held by the Turks. Hence the agitation of the authorities and the sudden importance of Ayun Musa as a defensive barrier to Suez.
It was to this lonely spot that we were ordered to proceed with the least possible delay. Having collected all the stores and camp equipment we could lay hands on, and after the usual circus in entraining the horses, we started for Suez. Incidentally, this was the last time we boarded a train as a complete unit for more than two years.
With Suez the last vestige of green was left behind us, and turning south after crossing the canal we entered upon that vast desert trodden by the Israelites thousands of years ago when they fled from the persecuting hand of Pharaoh.
It is to be admitted that we failed to observe, till later, the undoubted grandeur of the scene, for we were mainly concerned with getting our guns and overloaded vehicles along. Time after time they sank almost up to the axle-trees in the heavy sand and time after time did the sweating horses pull them out and struggle on again. One G.S. waggon, laden till it resembled a pantechnicon, was soon in dire straits. Originally starting with a six-horse team it acquired on the journey first one extra pair, then another--with a spare man mounted on each of the off-horses--and finally arrived in camp at the gallop with twelve horses and eight drivers.
Nobody saw anything funny in it. When you are dog-tired, hungry, and, worse still, when you arrive after dark in a new camp, nothing short of a cold chisel can gouge humour out of anything. All you want is a large and satisfying meal, after which your blankets.
In the morning we found that our usual fate had overtaken us: we were again pioneers in a new land. There it was, just our allotted square on the map, as flat and bare as a billiard-table.
Yet the country was not unimpressive. A thousand yards away to our right were the tamarisks of Moses' Grove, the only spot of verdure in sight; far in our rear and to our left ran range upon range of low, even-topped hills of unimaginable barrenness, the approach to which lay over a vast plain, broken by innumerable smaller hills, grand in its utter desolation; and in front of us stretched a level, shimmering expanse of sand as far as the silvery ribbon of the Gulf of Suez, beyond which, and dominating the whole scene, the gaunt, black mass of Gebel Atakah (Mountain of Deliverance) thrust its mighty pinnacle into the sky.
Such was the place destined to be our home for six torrid months; and we had to transform it into a fortified camp! Small wonder that we quailed at the prospect of work more punishing than any we had yet known, for literally everything had to be done; we had what we managed to bring with us, and that was all.
There followed days of unremitting toil. We turned our attention to road-making and with bowed backs and blistered hands shovelled up half the desert and put it down somewhere else; the other half we put into sandbags and made gun pits of them. We dug places for the artificers, kitchens for the cooks, walled-in places for forage, and but for the timely arrival of a battalion of Indian infantry we should have dug the trenches round the camp; we were mercifully spared that, however.
By way of a change we dug holes: big holes, little holes, round holes, square holes, rectangular holes; holes for refuse; wide, deep holes for washing-pits; every kind of hole you can think of and many you can't.
We never discovered for what purpose most of these holes were dug, but we dug them; and as a special treat we were allowed to dig an extra big hole, lined and roofed with sandbags, wherein to hide two hundred thousand rounds of S.A. ammunition lest the Turks in a moment of aberration should drop a bomb on it. All this in a temperature of over 100° in the shade at nine o'clock in the morning!
For summer was leaping towards us with giant strides, and it was one the like of which Egypt had not known for seventy-five years. Day by day the sun waxed stronger until work became a torture unspeakable and hardly to be borne. With the slightest exertion the perspiration ran in rivulets from face and finger-tips; clothes became saturated and clung like a glove to our dripping bodies; and if a man stood for a time in one place the sand around was sodden with his sweat.
Then, too, we had