THE FIGHT FOR THE SUEZ CANAL
Then against the black of night
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.
Most of these attacks seem to have been in the nature of feints to
discover whether there were any weak joints in the armour of the
defence, or to distract the attention of the defenders from the main
assault which was rapidly developing against the narrowest section of
the Canal, between Toussoum and Serapeum. Even here, however, the Canal
is over 200 ft. wide, and the problem for the invaders was how to span
that space, in face of gun and maxim and rifle fire, effect a landing on
the other side, dash up an embankment that rose to a height of 40 ft.,
and drive out of their trenches at the point of the bayonet thousands of
the hardiest and most coolly determined troops in the British Army. More
impossible-looking attempts have succeeded before now, but the Turks,
after sticking to it heroically for forty-eight hours, found that it
could not be done.
The nearest of the enemy forces were still several miles from the
farther shore of the Canal, and more and more of them could be seen
pouring over and down the hills in support of the advance-guard, when
the twilight gathered round them and then "at one stride came the dark,"
and unseen in the cloudy, almost moonless night they made their
dispositions, and before dawn the covering troops to be held in reserve
had dug themselves into the sand and were formidably entrenched. All
through the night teams of bullocks were dragging forward the steel
pontoons that were to bridge the Canal; gangs of toiling men carried the
pontoons on their shoulders through a gap in the bank down to the edge
of the water, where the engineers got to work with them, swung them
round into position one beyond the other, and by three in the morning
had pushed out nearly as far as mid-stream. The defenders might all have
been asleep for any sign of life that came from them; but keen eyes were
unceasingly searching the gloom and were quick to notice the growing
black line that was creeping stealthily out towards them on the dull
gleam of the water. They waited patiently and silently till they
considered it had been allowed to come far enough, then the word was
passed along the line, the company officers' whistles shrilled
startlingly, and the next moment a blaze of fire from machine guns and
rifles swept the doomed beginning of the pontoon bridge and left it
strewn with dead and wounded, and kept such a hail of lead pelting over
it as to render it untenantable.
Already the Turks had launched five boats and loaded them with picked
men, and as soon as they realised that they were discovered they flung
precautions to the wind, and made a rush across with these, purposing to
land and entrench them so as to establish a bridge-end in readiness for
the completed pontoon. Three of the boats were riddled and sunk, and of
the struggling, shouting mob that was flung into the water some swam
back and some swam pluckily on at the tail of the other two boats, which
dodged across desperately in the baffling darkness and were successfully
beached. As the first boat touched land, its occupants sprang out and
charged impetuously up the high embankment, but were shot down to a man
before they could reach the top. The second boatload, profiting by the
failure of their comrades, hastily dug themselves into the mud and sand
with hands and bayonets, and lay close in holes that sloped into the
ground and gave shelter against the relentless fire from the British
trenches. But the coming of daylight exposed their exact location and
made it so untenable that the few who had not been shot threw down their
arms and came out and were taken prisoners.
Though the Turks had thus failed at the first onset, they were a long
way from beaten–there was plenty of fight in them yet. Boat after boat
was launched in forlorn attempts to scutter over and land a small force
that should cover the landing of others, and the completion of the
bridge; but what had been impracticable in the dark was hopelessly
impossible after the sun was up. Every boat that put forth on this
mission was deluged with shot and shell and sent to the bottom. There
was a wild attempt made to manufacture and push across a bridge of
planks on empty kerosine tins, but this promptly went the same way of
destruction as soon as it began to get afloat.
All day the fighting continued along the whole front from Ismalia to
Suez. The Turks by now had brought their big guns into action and were
shelling the British posts and trenches; but one after the other these
guns were silenced by the accuracy of our gunfire, and when two or three
destroyers and a British cruiser steamed up the Canal from their
anchorage in Lake Timsah and, having casually shattered the remnants of
the pontoons, turned their guns on to the harassed lines of the enemy,
scattering and levelling the sandy hummocks and searching the holes and
trenches that were giving him shelter, he began to feel it was time to
go, and only waited for the dark to come and hide his doings before he
hastened to something of a rout the retreating movement he had
cautiously commenced by daylight.
Sniping was kept up all through the night of the 3rd February on both
sides, whilst this confused and headlong retirement was in progress; and
when the morning of the 4th dawned all the Turks had departed, except a
strong detaining force that was left behind in the trenches to cover the
retreat. A detachment of Britishers was dispatched across the Canal to
clear them out, and after a fierce resistance, surrounded and almost
annihilated them, the firing only ceasing when the exhausted survivors,
after futile attempts to make a run for it, dropped their rifles and
surrendered at discretion.
From the shore of the Canal to the distant hills, discarded stores and
baggage, broken carts and abandoned guns marked the tracks by which the
beaten army had fled. And all about the sands lay the Turkish dead. They
carried hundreds of wounded away with them, left hundreds of prisoners
in our hands, and had lost over a thousand slain, including their German
commander, Major von den Hagen.
The shipping on the Canal had not been delayed for much more than
twenty-four hours; in forty-eight from the firing of the first shot the
Turks were in flight, and by the morning of the 5th February there were
none of them, but the prisoners, within twenty miles of the British
chain of defences. The Australian Light Horse and the New Zealanders,
with English and Indian troops, crossed and went in pursuit, and there
were rear-guard actions fought around the sand-hills, and here and there
straggling parties of the enemy rounded up and captured. The elaborately
appointed, German-officered army of Turks that had marched out into the
desert prepared for a mighty struggle, but confident of victory, escaped
from its pursuers and got back with difficulty to Beersheba, a
disheartened and disorganised rabble.
For over a month they lay there inactive, and it was thought they had
abandoned their Egyptian enterprise for good; but about the 10th March a
flying column of 1,000 men made a twelve days' dash through the desert
again and put up a vigorous attempt to break the Canal defences at
Kubri. The bombardment of the Dardanelles had given rise to a notion
that troops had been sent from Egypt for the invasion of Gallipoli, and
that therefore the Canal defences had been weakened, but all the Turks
who were not shot or taken prisoners went back as hurriedly as they had
come, and must have been able to assure their German masters that the
Canal defences were as impregnable as ever. "Our officers told us," said
one of the prisoners (and their officers were mostly German), "that the
enemy here were not soldiers, but farmers and peace men from the British
Colonies, who had never been in battle and could not fight, but," he
looked his stalwart New Zealand interlocutor up and down, "they did not
know. Bismillah! if you are not fighting men, I do not want to meet the
others."
From that day to this, the Suez Canal has seen no more of war. The
warships swing watchfully at anchor in the bitter lakes through which it
flows, and the hundred miles of posts and trenches on the western bank
are still peopled with vigilant men in khaki who have held their own
there triumphantly and may be trusted to go on holding it till the
war-drums throb no longer and the German menace is a tale of yesterday.
In the first seven months of the war the sons of Australia and New
Zealand, fighting beside the soldiers of the homeland and of India, had
won a decisive victory and saved Egypt to the Empire; and before twelve
months were past they had crowned their names with a greater and more
terrible glory in the valleys of death and on the bloody heights of
Gallipoli.
7
THE EPIC OF THE DARDANELLES BEGINS
[Illustration: THE DARDANELLES–AUSTRALIAN TROOPS AT THE LANDING.]
[Illustration: AUSTRALIA'S SPLENDID CORPS OF MOUNTED AMBULANCE MEN.
The Red Cross wagons have scarcely arrived, when the bearers are seen
approaching them with wounded in the emergency slings.]
[Illustration: THE BRAVE AUSTRALIANS.
The Australian troops have done magnificently in the land fighting in
the Dardanelles. Typical Australian members of the expedition.]
[Illustration: AUSTRALIA'S SPLENDID CORPS OF MOUNTED AMBULANCE MEN.
Transferring the wounded to the wagons.]