THE LAST OF EGYPT
The map shows Port Said dumped at the end of a lean streak of sand flanking the Canal. For half the distance from Ismailia the train sweeps along this tract. There is the Canal on your right, rich-blue between its walled banks and foiled by the brown heat-hazed world east; and on your left are the interminable shallows exuding the stink of rank salt, and traversed drearily by fishing-craft. Port Said at the approach much resembles Alexandria: the same brown, toppling irregularity, and the multitude of masts protruding.
The Canal at its city mouth is fretted with rectangular berthing-basins crammed with craft, very busy and noisy. A network of railways threads the quays. The green-domed Canal company's offices tower above the smoke and din, redeeming them; they make a noble pile. All the shipping is on the west bank; the east is bare, but for some sombre stone houses and a Red Cross hospital in the sand, and a self-contained Armenian refugee camp south of the city-level. The Canal mouth is stuffed with cruisers and commercial ships anchored between the two stalwart stone sea-walls. They protrude two miles into the Mediterranean, keeping the channel. That on the west is crowned by the de Lesseps monument.
The lean sand-neck that you traversed by rail from Ismailia takes a right-angled turn at the head of the de Lesseps mole and runs seven miles west into the Mediterranean. It begins with a fine residential quarter standing behind the firm beach and the horde of bathing-boxes; west still, and safely segregated from the decency of the city, is the seething Arab quarter, of enormous dimensions and smelling to heaven; and beyond Arab Town the promontory bears the city's burial-ground, lying desolate in the sand-neck; and then peters out dismally in the shallows.
A new-comer takes in the straightforward geographical scheme of the place at a glance. It's a small city, lying, as it does, midway on the sea-road linking the East and West worlds. Its atmosphere is intensive rather than extensive. It is highly charged with busyness. The little area of the city is thickly peopled with every nationality (excepting German and Austrian), promenading or sitting at the open cafés. The shipping is congested to a degree that is apparently unwieldy. And the period of war has taken nothing from the atmosphere of bustle. This is the main supply base for the whole of the Canal defences and for a good deal of Upper Egypt too. An enormous levy is made daily on railroad and on Canal barges for transport of Army supplies. The supply depôt has commandeered half the Quay space and receives and disgorges day and night without intermission.
For that reason (as well as because shipping is thick in the Canal mouth) the place is good game for hostile aircraft. The morning after our arrival Fritz came over before breakfast and dropped six bombs and left two Arabs stretched on the quay. Anti-aircraft guns let fly, and innumerable rifles. The din of bombs and guns and musketry took one back for a vivid twenty minutes to Anzac—for the first time since leaving that place of unhappy memory. No damage was done—to the raiders. But the two coolies lay there, and the rest (seven hundred strong) fled like one man to Arab Town, and neither threats nor inducements would bring them back. For forty-eight hours the work of the depôt would have ceased had not the Armenian refugees been requisitioned—a whole battalion of them. They were glad to come, and they worked well. It was better for them than being massacred by Turks: and they got paid for it.
The second raid happened a week later, at three in the morning, under a pale moon. Four 'planes came with sixteen missiles. This was more serious. Our guns could shoot only vaguely, in a direction; and ten to one the direction was at fault. Four bombs dropped in the main street. The terror by night seized the civilians. There was a screaming panic. The populace poured into the streets in their night garments and rushed about incontinently. So a few who would perhaps otherwise have escaped met their end. A night raid over Anzac when the guns were speaking without intermission was hardly to be noticed. But this onslaught upon civilian quietness in the night watches was heart-shaking. The deadly whirring of the engine in the upper darkness; the hoarse, intermittent sobbing of the missile in descent—none could say how near or far; the roar of explosion checking the suspense momentarily, but only until the next increasing sob touches the ear; the din of our own wild and random fire and the crackle of the sentries' rifles; the raucousness of the sirens, the piercing screams of the women, and the cries of little children in the extremity of terror; the misdirected warnings and the disorganised directions of the men—these all combined to make an impression of horror of a kind unknown on Anzac.
The visitation lasted half an hour. That half-hour seemed to endure a whole night. Four were killed outright, five died soon of their wounds, seven were wounded who would recover.
Shooting a man from a trench is one thing; this potential and actual murder of women and little children is altogether another. One wishes it could be made to cease. It calls for reprisal, or revenge, or whatever it should be called; but not in kind.