So our gunner-poet—and in the main he speaks truth. But the "Road firm and true!" at any rate lived only in his imagination. One does not think that any infantryman would have written that line. Such as ride upon horses can afford imagination. If you walk you come down to facts.
The second stage of our Crusade began on October 12th, when the Battalion marched away from Katib Gannit, this time carrying packs. Officers were allowed 30 lb. valises. And in general our possessions were boiled down and the necessities of life became barer than ever. The first march, an easy one, was to Rabah, and was over by midday—the Battalion furnishing pickets for that night. At 6.30 the next morning we moved off again, reaching Atchan at 11, where a halt was made and tea issued. Off again at 1.15, we reached Abu Afein in a couple of hours, having covered twelve miles of heavy going with the "loss" of eighteen men, of whom ten had heat exhaustion and three colic. On the 14th we reached Bir el Abd.
We have inserted a large number of place names in this narrative, not because the names are famous or to be found in any but a very large scale map, nor because there was even anything at these places to justify their having names at all, but because each little group of cacophonous Arabic words will call up to those who were with us memories and mental pictures of incidents and scenes, otherwise forgotten. Beduin place names too have a charm of their own. Hod um Ugba for instance—officially translated as "the depression in the sand full of palm trees of Mother Ugba." When we visited it, it was almost equally full of dead horses. It was pathetic to think of old Mother Ugba squatting in a concentration camp on the Canal and dreaming of the obscure charms of her beloved hod! One hopes she is back in it by now with Fathers Hamra and Jeheira and the rest, and we at any rate will never disturb them more. Or was Mother Ugba some mythical heroine of those great days when the armies of Egypt and of Asia moved through the desert to fight and plunder—and the Beduin hung on their flanks and cut up the wounded on either side indiscriminately, just as they do now. Or did she lead her tribe in the host of Saladin against the Crusaders and let the Saracens down as treacherously as she ambushed the Christians. Old de Joinville in his thirteenth century Chronicle of the Crusades has much to say of the Beduin. "Their belief is," he tells us, "that no man can die save on the day appointed and for this reason they will not wear armour." Recalling Palestine in the summer one can think of other very good reasons for not wearing armour! Their place names do not seem to have had much attraction for the Crusading chronicler, but perhaps he felt rather doubtful of the spelling and he had no ordnance survey map to guide him.
Bir el Abd was much the same as any other bit of desert, save that the higher sand hills were lacking, the country consisting of rolling slopes of no great elevation well spotted with scrub. It boasted a fine breed of chameleon, and we also found a number of little tortoises, which were pressed into the service to give a bit of sport! Tortoise racing was a slow business, but eminently sporting, because the tortoise is so splendidly unreliable. On one occasion one of the competitors in a big sweepstake was discovered to consist of a shell only—the tortoise who had once dwelt therein having died and turned to dust. In consideration of this it was given a start of six inches, but long odds were offered against it. However, at the end of the time limit—eight minutes—no competitor had moved at all, so that the tortoiseless one was adjudged the winner amid great applause.
Soon after our arrival we took over from the 7th S.R. as a reserve battalion and on the 23rd we took over a section of the outpost line itself. Bir el Abd was now the most forward infantry post. It was half-way between Kantara and el Arish—so that the "spear head" of the offensive defensive was making good progress. It was defended by a great ring of outpost positions, each held by a platoon or so, usually with another platoon in support. Night after night we slept in clothes and boots, with our equipment on us, and woke at intervals to peer into the dark for an hour, or see that others peered—then two more hours' sleep and another turn of duty—and so on till we were called for stand-to—variously at three, four, five or six a.m., as the season changed. Then we all stood ready, rifles loaded and bayonets fixed, denied cigarettes or conversation, lest our positions be given away to an approaching enemy, who would not naturally be familiar with them as he would in trench warfare, while the horizon in front of us grew lighter, till at last the desolate world revealed itself, empty as ever and, to the jaundiced eye of a fasting man, utterly abominable. And all the time the nearest Turk would be a camel outpost twenty miles away. Of course they might have come. When utterly fed up we would remind ourselves of the R.S.F. and the Turks who appeared before their pickets in a misty dawn in April. But to us they never did come. And the effort to be always ready, with so little hope of ever having any reward, was a real test of discipline—continuing as it did month after month in a country where unrelieved monotony tempted us all to the slackness of utter boredom.
The men were extremely badly off for washing water, and dirty bodies and dirty clothes were neither pleasant nor healthy. But there was no help for it. Sometimes a prowling officer would discover a little used well in some hod within marching distance, where the well-guard—for in Sinai you do not leave wells unguarded for any chance comer to draw a bucket of precious water—was amenable to tactful suggestion, or to which the Brigade could give us the entrée by some mystic chit. Then we would go forth with our kits and letting down biscuit tins would draw up a supply of the brackish fluid, which we would pour into little holes dug in the sand and covered with a waterproof sheet. Then a leisurely undressing and a hopeless effort to soap oneself—soap will not lather in brackish water—and a delicious coolness as a comrade poured a tinful down one's back. Under garments would be rinsed and beaten out, and the party would hasten back to the bivouac, and let someone else have a go. But there were long periods when a man could do no more than save a canteen lid full from his water bottle to get a shave, and there is no doubt that the lack of washing water aggravated the septic sores which afflicted the great majority. Wherever the skin was exposed on face, hands, arms and knees, any little cut or abrasion would fester till a big and painful sore had risen from the tiniest scratch. And with many men, however carefully they were dressed and bandaged to exclude the flies, they would not heal—or if they did another crop sprang up to take their places. It was a real hardship to have to dig with hands thus marked, but one that the men put up with with surprising cheerfulness. In fact, however septic, dirty, dull, hot or tired they might be, they never failed to find something to laugh at, something to argue over, and something to hope for.
On the 27th of October the Brigade moved forward again to Salmana, just south of the great flat expanse of the dried up Lake Bardawil. Four hours' heavy marching brought each company to its position in a new outpost line, and we proceeded to dig positions with such effect that by nightfall 500 yards of trench were ready for occupation. Barbed wire and extra tools were brought up from Bardawil station by tired camels, and tired camels are if possible more exasperating than fresh camels, especially to tired men. On the 29th the Commander-in-Chief rode round our new line, which was by this time in good order, and the spear-head had again been pushed a mile or two nearer the Promised Land. It was at Salmana we received instructions issued by G.H.Q. and carefully passed on to battalions by the intermediate staffs to report immediately all submarines observed, stating time and direction proceeding. This put us on our mettle and the desert was carefully watched without success on our part, but a neighbouring unit was able to report a submarine moving north across Sabkhet Bardawil. The information was acknowledged with thanks and it was then stated we could relax our vigilance as the message was only for troops on the sea-coast.
On the 3rd of November the first heavy storm descended on us, sheets of rain with thunder and lightning. The only protection against this new, but henceforward all too common form of Sinaitic frightfulness, was the blanket bivouac, and a blanket thoroughly soaked by the deluge was a poor covering for the now chilly nights. Fortunately the storms were usually succeeded by sunshine, and if they came in the earlier part of the day there was a chance of things being dried again before dusk. If they came at night you could always look forward to the day.
The Battalion remained in the Salmana area, with several changes of camp, until November 21st, when it returned to el Abd with the 7th H.L.I, to take over the defences of that place, by now a railway depot of some importance. Local defences of all important points along the railway had always to be carefully maintained. There would be plenty of warning of a strong attack from the east as there had been in August. But a raid by men mounted on camels might have come unheralded from the south, and had such a raid succeeded in cutting the line, burning the stores, and wasting the water, say at el Abd, the British advance would have been greatly retarded. We therefore continued our nocturnal vigils on the ridges which encircled the station. The nights were now extremely chilly, but the flies had not yet succumbed. They swarmed everywhere, and the discovery of a dead camel an inch or two under the sand in "A" Company's bivouac area rejoiced their pestilential hearts. It is the immemorial custom of the desert not to bury dead camels or horses but to let them lie. Then you know where you are and the sun soon cooks the carcases till they become inoffensive. This is, however, repugnant to the tidy minds of European sanitary experts, who give orders for the burial of the deceased. The wiser Egyptian is overruled and has to do the burying. Now it takes a simply monstrous hole to hold a camel, and the result of the clash of English and Egyptian ideas is a very imperfectly buried carcase, just covered from the beneficent influence of the sun, but filling the surrounding air with its disgusting aroma.
It was during this second stay at Bir el Abd that the Bint joined us—rescued for fifty piastres from the unworthy hands of a Port Said native by Lieut. Agnew. It was always a matter of surprise to the present writer that so many failed to pierce the bizarre exterior of this amiable ape and to reach to the warm heart and sweet temper within. Perhaps a certain savagery of attack and brutality in the use of the teeth misled them. But what affectionate solicitude would she display as she minutely examined every inch of a human friend in an effort to exterminate those little typhoid carriers. What courage when she entered the tent of a General at el Arish and helped herself to a drink from the great one's basin. With what élan did she consequently rout a scandalised A.D.C. and with what skill, giving ground before reinforcements from the staff, did she fly up the biggest palm tree in the sacred enclosure. With what fortitude did she share our hard times when water was scarce or rations late. How sweetly, in a French billet, did she accept the offerings of the children—and how natural her ferocious attack on these same children after she had been extremely sick as a result of a mixed diet of chocolate and cherries to which they had tempted her. And did she not suffer indignities enough to sour the sweetest disposition. Think of being tied to the saddle of a huge and smelly camel, whose gait made her sea-sick, for a long day's marching. No wonder her piteous screams rent the air. And then when someone had loosed her from this uncomfortable eminence—think how cruel it must have seemed to her that friend after friend, sweating along in the sand, should repulse with evil words her amiable desire to add herself to the weight of pack and equipment for a ride on his shoulder, till she was forced to give in and hop along "on her own steam" in the hot dust. She did not always remain a front line monkey, but with the transport she went through all the fighting in Palestine and then accompanied the Battalion to France. At last, bereft successively by the chances of war of all her best friends, she somehow drifted to Glasgow and is now believed to be living in a travelling menagerie. We can only hope that she wears the war medal she has earned and is treated with proper respect, and we are confident that she still lives up to her great motto—Nemo me impune lacessit.