Two things the authorities at the base never troubled to send: clothes and boots. Apparently they were under the impression that we had taken to troglodytic habits and required none. Almost every man wore a patch; not like the tiny, black ornament worn on the face by ladies in the old Corinthian days, but a large, comprehensive affair more or less securely sewn on the shirt or the seat of one's riding-breeches. The quartermaster-sergeant complained bitterly over a shortage of grain-sacks: the reason for it was walking about before his eyes all day long.
It was dreary work at best, however, with only these uninspiring and never-ending fatigues to occupy our time. Even our little social haven, the canteen, did not stay the urgent need for something more active. The appalling thought came that we had been dumped down in this lonely desolate spot and left there, utterly forgotten, like Kipling's "Lost Legion."
There came a day, however, when our fears were dispelled by an urgent order to trek back to Alexandria. Apparently the war had broken out in a fresh place, and there was work to be done after all. Whatever the reason, there was joy in the camp. Tents were quickly struck and incinerators soon were working double shifts, for it is astonishing how things accumulate, even in the desert. Moreover, the army insists—and rightly—that camps be left clean and free from rubbish.
Rations, forage and water were the chief things to be considered—or rather, the problem of packing them on to limbers and in waggons—for they had to last us to railhead, some days' march away. Officially, once a unit is on the move, it ceases to exist till it reaches the next place on the time-table; and if rations or water are lost in the desert you go hungry, and, worse still, thirsty, for there are no more to be had.
Most of those who took part in it will remember that trek when others are forgotten. Rations were short, forage was short, everything was short, especially the ropes by which the horse-buckets were lowered into the wells; which last remark perhaps needs explanation.
All journeys in the desert are regulated by the distances between wells, which may be twenty, thirty, and sometimes more miles apart. At some of them we found the old-fashioned "shadouf," or native pump, which, clumsy though it was, helped matters considerably.
Usually, however, we had to rely on horse-buckets, and it was any odds that our ropes were too short to reach the surface of the water. The experienced driver would take a rein to the well with him, for lengthening purposes if necessary, but often some unfortunate wight, having found his rope two or three inches too short, would be seen struggling to hold his thirsty horses with one hand while with the other he endeavoured to unfasten his belt to make up the extra inches.
It was a maddening business, this watering the horses. Poor brutes! They would come in after a long day's trek, on short rations, with often a twenty-four hours' thirst to quench, and then have to stand round a well and wait perhaps for hours!
Even the quietest of them began to fidget and strain at their head-ropes the moment they scented the water.
As for the mules, there was simply no holding them. On one occasion—it was after a forty-mile march—a mule, frantic with thirst, broke away from his owner, and in a desperate attempt to get to the water, fell headlong down the well! A crowd of infuriated soldiers, with drag-ropes and everything that wit of man could devise, laboured for hours to get him out, while their comrades, equally infuriated, held anything up to a dozen animals apiece and made strenuous efforts to prevent them from following his deplorable example.