A Camel Convoy.
[To face p. 144.
We used to wonder sometimes whether the people at home knew there was an army at all in Egypt and Palestine; an army, moreover, longing wistfully for the merest crumb from the table of appreciation, just to show that our "bit" was known and recognised. Even the rugged Scotsmen and the independent men from Australia and New Zealand liked a mead of praise, or at least encouragement, once in a while; and when men have spent two years on end—as most of us had—in a desert land, with no one to speak to save their own comrades, nothing to look forward to beyond their daily, deadly monotonous work, they need a little encouragement, if only to save them from melancholia.
The only means of getting to civilisation, of knowing again the decencies of life, was to "go sick" as it is termed, and be sent down the line for a spell in hospital; and no one but a congenital idiot took more liberties with his constitution than his work made necessary; the climate alone was more than sufficient for any ordinary man to tackle.
But what about leave, you say? It worked out on the average to four men per battery per week—per-haps; the proviso being that no "show" was imminent, when all leave was stopped. As a "show" usually was imminent, it took about eighteen months, with luck, to work through a battery; and other units in proportion. Leave to England was all but unobtainable. Though your father died sorrowing that his son should be in distant lands, though your wife committed the supreme indiscretion, it was regretted "that owing to lack of transport this application cannot at present be considered." Urgent financial reasons—and they had to be urgent—sometimes provided the coveted ticket. There were men who, despairing of legitimate means, "wangled" leave; I did myself see an application which would have wrung scalding tears from the eyes of a stoat, whose moving theme originated entirely in the fertile brain of one of the man's comrades. The letter was sent home, copied; the copy was sent to Palestine as a genuine tale of woe. The man obtained his leave!
Sometime in 1917 a wag in the House of Commons announced unctuously to a somnolent assembly that all men with eighteen months' service, or over, in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force had been granted, or were in process of being granted, leave to England. He was an optimist; or else he looked on the Veiled Lady through smoked glasses.
The first part of this cheerful statement was ludicrous; the latter part was true, but the process was so lengthy that the war ended leaving it still incomplete! What actually happened at the time stated was that a return was demanded from the various units in the E.E.F. showing the numbers of men with eighteen months' service, or over, in the country; this with a view to granting leave. As practically the whole army sent in its name, with a pleased smile of expectation, the return suffered the fate of most returns: it sank into profound oblivion.
Perhaps this optimistic gentleman, together with the majority in England, had accepted the view of the arm-chair critics, that having reached the Promised Land by easy stages we were continuing the "picnic" begun in Egypt some two years before; and on this account, therefore, we did not mind waiting an indefinite period for leave.