And so it runs from Putney to Port Said, and from Cambridge to Cairo. Soldiers are very susceptible gents, as the late Francis Bacon knew and so stated.
And while one big army has delved and dug and built on the canal and taken toll of Sinai, another force has chased the Senussi up and down the Western desert, and yeomen from the shires have watered their horses at the garden steps of the week-end villa at Matrush, where Antony entertained Cleopatra. This is no doubt foretold by one of the minor prophets whom Voltaire considered capable de tout. It is certainly a dramatic event for those who moralise on empires’ rise and wane.
Hardly less striking is the prolonged pursuit and charge of the Senussi by His Grace of Westminster at the head of the motor bandits—as the army will call the armoured motor-car—in that same Western desert. The hyacinth and the iris grew for a wonder on surface free from shifting sands, and the armoured car trick was brought off in a fashion and with a dash that its promoters could hardly have hoped for in their most enthusiastic moments.
War has brought many surprises and troubles to the desert and its denizens. In Sinai, where the Bedouin lives by the date palm, there has come starvation, and why? Because the female date must be fertilised by hand, and the male dates are few and far between. The date fertiliser is a skilled professional and lives in Egypt, and Turks in Sinai have meant that date trees go unwed. The which is a parable. There is no remedy save perhaps one similar to that suggested by the American mayor to the man who complained that the ‘wather had come into me back cellar and drowned all me hins.’ ‘Young man, I should advise you to keep ducks,’ and the Bedouin might grow the hermaphrodite date. In the country of the scarabæus it might well be found as Alexander’s soldiers left it on the Indus. If war has brought harm to some, it has in Egypt brought profit to the many, and the Greek is ever ready to trade, and merchants one and all have risen to the occasion and waxed fat. In Alexandria the Greek influence is very great and sympathy with the Allies considerable. The Greek will tell you they come of a northern stock, and will quote the body worship of the bel âge to illustrate affinity with the English, and that Greeks alone of all Levantine races or Latin races either have pronounced ‘th’ since time was like the English—which, be it true or false, all makes for good trade. The soldiery all the year are better than the Americans in the winter, and Young Australia has money to spend.
Another wonder of the ages is that Egypt from the Pyramids to Tel el Kebir should be the Aldershot of the Australians and New Zealanders, where Tommy Cornstalk learns to obey for a common cause and to let off steam in the process.
And over it all grin in the morning sun the Ethiopian lips of the Sphinx—noting one more trivial mark of chalk on granite, one more grain of sand in the hour-glass, one more struggle of the captains and the kings, one more grim grin at peoples rending themselves—perhaps the thousand-year-long grin sprang from the knowledge that it had only to endure long enough to see William of Hohenzollern show the world the way of peace, while the very sand mocked back again.
‘SWEET LAVENDER.’
BY GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM.
Was ever a name less appropriately given? I have heard of a Paradise Court in a grimy city slum and a dilapidated whitewashed house on the edge of a Connaught bog which had somehow got itself called Monte Carlo. But these misfits of names moved me only to mirth mingled with a certain sadness. Sweet Lavender is a sheer astonishment. I hear the words and think of the edgings of old garden borders, straggling spiky little bushes with palely, unobtrusive flowers. I think of linen cupboards, of sheets and pillow-cases redolent with very delicate perfume. I think of the women who wander through such gardens, who find a pride in their store of scented house-linen, delicately nurtured ladies, very gentle, a little tinged with melancholy, innocent, sweet. My thoughts wander through memories and guesses about their ways of life. Nothing in the whole long train of thought prepares me for, or tends in any way to suggest this Sweet Lavender.