Rose a form, with visage white,
Clad in steel, and crowned with flame,
"Duty" was her awful name.
Victor J. Daley.
The hotels and bazaars of Cairo buzzed through the last days of December and the early half of January with portentous and growing rumours of a powerful Turkish force that was making ready for an overwhelming attack on Egypt. Men who went out on a day's leave from the camps at Maadi, at Sertun, or Menai came back from the city and spread the glad tidings that at last there was a possibility of their having something to do. It was all the flying talk of more or less irresponsible gossipers, to begin with, but before long definite statements were allowed to appear in the local papers; official information was cautiously given out; spies and scouts came flitting back from beyond the desert with detailed news that was as momentous as it was welcome, and it was known that an expedition of 20,000 Turks under German officers, and commanded by Major von den Hagen, was being organised and elaborately equipped and was coming to seize the Suez Canal–or to make an attempt to do so.
Cairo talked about it and was keenly interested, but quite unperturbed. The men in the camps would have felt no anxiety only it was said that there would be no need for most of them to be taken into action, and every regiment was anxious not to be one of those that were left out of it. They cheered the lucky battalions, told off for active service, that went singing down the long white road to the railway station in Cairo, whence they were to entrain for the fighting line; then they drifted back to their tents to discuss the hopeful possibility that the Turkish forces might prove larger than was anticipated and so make room on the war-path for all the reserves.
The Canal forts bristled expectantly; English, Australian, New Zealand, and Indian troops were entrenched all along the western bank; but the slow days passed and the visitor still tarried, though they were willing and eager to receive him and give him a warm reception. Every morning when the darkness began to lift and the sentries could see across the shining waterway, they peered expectantly into the dead sea of desert that stretched for miles from the opposite side and, in the far distance, billowed into rolling hills against the horizon–and there was never an enemy in sight. Every day Australian scouts and scouting parties of the camel corps were coming and going across that dreary, sandy plain; and to watch their gradual disappearance among or over the hills, or their gradual re-emergence from them, gave you a sense of being asleep and looking at quietly moving figures in a dream. Aircraft soared high into the dazzling blue and flew above the waste, and above the hills, and vanished beyond them, but came back time after time only to report that the Turks had not yet started from their base.
The long wait was getting tedious; except for the cutting down and clearing away of bush and scrub on the eastern shore, and the emptying and levelling of a village so as to leave the enemy as little cover over there as possible, there was nothing to relieve the monotony of things but the customary routine drills and military exercises and some little occasional work in further strengthening the fortifications. So that when at length an airman came racing back with tidings that the Ottoman Army was on the move a thrill of excitement and grim joy ran like a fire from trench to trench in the vast chain of them.
But the great hour was still some days away. The advance was slow and methodical; it was encumbered with heavy rafts and steel or zinc pontoons that were to be used in crossing the Canal, in addition to huge stores of munitions and the enormous supplies of food that were needed for a large army in a barren land where nobody lived. It was no easy matter to drag baggage wagons and artillery through the shifting, yielding sands, and in the teeth of intermittent whirling dust-storms; and if the Turk had not been a doughty and doggedly determined foeman, and one there was some credit in fighting and defeating, he never would have held on and brought himself even within firing range of the goal he was not destined to reach. Here and there he lingered for rest and repairs; here and there he halted for a day by the wells to replenish his stock of water; though he followed the charted caravan routes, he was finding the desert as difficult to cross as Napoleon and his army found it a hundred years ago. Presently our patrols were in touch with him, sniping him from the hills and steadily retiring as he advanced. But he plodded on, over the unstable flats, over line after line of crumbling hills, until, with only one more series of hills to negotiate, he set up his last camp at Katib-el-Kheil, some twelve miles from the Canal.
In the night of the 1st February and throughout most of the next day the Turks were busy there completing their arrangements for the attack. There were frequent small skirmishes between their patrols and ours, who were tenaciously hovering on their line, and it was not till evening was sending its swift shadows before that the last of our scouts came hastening in and crossed the water with word that the offensive had commenced. At about 6 o'clock the Turkish legions could be seen streaming down the hills at numerous points on a front that extended for eighty along the Canal's hundred miles of length, but they showed no hurry to get their guns speaking.