Australia in Arms / A Narrative of the Australasian Imperial Force and Their Achievement at Anzac

by Phillip F. E. Schuler

AUSTRALIANS COMING INTO CAIRO FROM THE CAMPS.

To face p. 68.

I turned back from the hill, dotted with whooping Australians, to watch another battalion march into camp, one of the New South Wales regiments of Colonel M'Laurin, and saw the wheeled transport drawn by mules (the horses, of course, being yet unfit for use after so long a sea voyage) almost stick in the sand, until shoulders were put to the wheel and they got the heavy vehicles to the lines. The whole camp had been laid out by the engineers on the Staff of the General Officer Commanding (General Sir John Maxwell) the week before. It must be remembered that barely a week's notice was given of the landing of the great overseas force, and it was one of the happy features of the troops' arrival in Egypt that they found arrangements so far advanced as they were. I remember walking along the white road, which a couple of steam-rollers were flattening, into the desert. The stone was being brought on a string of camels from quarries in the hills. Lines of small white stones marked where the road was going to lead right through the centre of the camp. It was a rectangle at that time, branching off from the Mena road through an orchard belonging to the Mena House Hotel, where the main road ended abruptly at the foot of the Pyramids; hard it was, too, as any cement, and each day lengthening, with cross sections sprouting out further into the desert. A loop of the electric tramway was being run along by one side of it, a water-pipe by the other, to reservoirs being constructed in the hills. Nevertheless, I cannot help commenting that the site of the camp lay in a hollow between, as I have said, two rows of hills running south into the desert and starting from a marsh in the swampy irrigation fields. Later on, the follies of such a site were borne out by the diseases that struck down far too high a percentage of the troops during their four months' residence there.

Day after day, enthralled, I watched this encampment growing and spreading out on either side of the road, creeping up the sides of the hills, stretching out across the desert, until the furthermost tents looked like tiny white-peaked triangles set in the yellow sand. The battalions filed into their places coming from the seaboard, where twelve ships at a time were discharging their human cargoes; while each day ten trains brought the troops up 130 miles to the desert camps. After the men came the gear, the wagons, the guns, the horses. For this was the divisional camp, the first divisional camp Australia had ever assembled. It was, also, the first time that Major-General Bridges had seen his command mustered together. With his Staff he took up his headquarters in a section of Mena House for use as offices, with their living tents pitched close by. This was the chance to organize and dovetail one unit into another, work brigade in with brigade, artillery with the infantry, the Light Horse regiments as protecting screens and scouts. The Army Service Corps, Signallers, Post Office, all came into being as part of a larger unit for the first time. The troops became part of a big military machine, units, cogs in the wheel. They began to apply what had been learnt in sections, and thus duties once thought unnecessary began to be adjusted and to have a new significance.

Of course, it could not all be expected to work smoothly at first. For some six weeks the horses were not available for transport work, and so the electric tramway carried the stores the 10 miles from the city, and brought the army's rations and corn and chaff for the animals. Donkeys, mules, and camels were all to be seen crowding along the Pyramid road day and night, drawing and carrying their queer, ungainly loads.

Besides Mena Camp, two other sites had been selected as training areas for the army corps, which, as I have said, was commanded now by Lieut.-General (afterwards Sir William) Birdwood, D.S.O. One of these was at Zeitoun, or Heliopolis, some 6 miles from Cairo, on directly the opposite side of the town—that is, the south—to the Mena Camp; while the other was situated close to an oasis settlement, or model irrigation town, at Maadi, and lying just parallel with Mena Camp, but on the other (eastern) side of the river, and some 12 miles distant from it. Zeitoun was the site of the old Roman battlefields, and later of an English victory over an Arab host. In mythology it is recorded as the site of the Sun City. The troops found it just desert, of rather coarser sand than at Mena, and on it the remains of an aerodrome, where two years before a great flying meeting had been held. For the first month, only New Zealanders occupied this site, both their infantry and mounted rifles, and then, as the 2nd Australian and New Zealand Division was formed, Colonel Monash's 4th Brigade (the Second Contingent) came and camped on an adjacent site, at the same time as Colonel Chauvel's Light Horse Brigade linked up, riding across from Maadi. Then into the latter camp Colonel Ryrie led the 3rd Light Horse Brigade.

As sightseers I am satisfied that the Australians beat the Yankee in three ways. They get further, they see more, and they pay nothing for it. Perhaps it was because they were soldiers, and Egypt, with its mixed population, had laid itself out to entertain the troops right royally. It must not be thought I want to give the impression that the Australian soldier, the highest paid of any troops fighting in the war, saved his money and was stingy. On the contrary, he was liberal, generous, and spoiled the native by the openness of his purse. Some believe that it was an evil that the troops had so much funds at their disposal. It was, I believe, under the circumstances—peculiar circumstances—that reflects no credit on the higher commands, and to be explained anon. It would be out of place just at the moment to bring any dark shadow across the bright, fiery path of reckless revelry that the troops embarked on during the week preceding and the week following Christmas. It was an orgy of pleasure, which only a free and, at that time, unrestrained city such as Cairo could provide. Those men with £10 to £20 in their pockets, after being kept on board ship for two months, suddenly to be turned loose on an Eastern town—healthy, keen, spirited, and adventurous men—it would have been a strong hand that could have checked them in their pleasures, innocent as they were for the most part.

In all the camps 20 per cent. leave was granted. That meant that some 6,000 soldiers were free to go whither they wished from afternoon till 9.30 p.m., when leave was supposed to end in the city. Now, owing to lax discipline, the leave was more like 40 per cent., and ended with the dawn. Each night—soft, silky Egyptian nights—when the subtle cloak of an unsuspected winter hung a mantle of fog round the city and the camps—10,000 men must have invaded the city nightly, to which number must be added the 2,000 Territorial troops garrisoning Cairo at the time that were free, and the Indian troops, numbering about 1,000. The majority of the men came from Mena and from the New Zealand camp at Zeitoun. The Pyramids Camp was linked to the city by a fine highway (built at the time of the opening of the Canal as one of the freaks of the Empress Eugénie), along the side of which now runs an electric tramway. Imagine officials with only a single line available being faced with the problem of the transport of 10,000 troops nightly to and from the camps! No wonder it was inadequate. No wonder each tram was not only packed inside, but covered outside with khaki figures. Scores sat on the roofs or clung to the rails. Generally at three o'clock the exodus began from the camps. What an exodus! What spirits! What choruses and shouting and linking up of parties! Here was Australia at the Pyramids. Men from every State, every district, every village and hamlet, throughout the length and breadth of the Commonwealth, were encamped, to the number of 20,000, in a square mile. An army gains in weight and fighting prowess as it gains in every day efficiency by the unitedness of the whole. Now, the true meaning of camaraderie is understood by Australians, and is with them, I believe, an instinct, due to the isolated nature of their home lives and the freedom of their native land. When the troops overflowed from the trams, they linked up into parties and hired motor-cars, the owners of which were not slow to appreciate the situation. They tumbled ten or twelve into these cars, and went, irrespective of speed limits, hooting and whirring towards the twinkling city. And when the motors gave out, there was a long line of gharries (arabehs), which are open victorias, very comfortable, and with a spanking pair of Arab steeds, travelling the 10 miles to the city.