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. Barbé 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 circumstances, 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 Abbassieh. 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 Canal. 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 Canal running north and south.
After about a week in camp on the west side of the Canal we received orders to move to the other bank and relieve the 31st Division, who at that time were occupying the canal 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 Canal. 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 Canal 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 Canal 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 Canal 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 associated 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 Canal and Egypt east of it are two very different countries, and when transports took to hooking up beside the Canal 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.