CHAPTER VII

EVACUATION

There will be a leavening of Egyptian in the Australian vernacular

after peace has broken out. It will persist, and perhaps have a weighty

etymological influence--at any rate on the colloquial vocabulary.

"Baksheesh" will be a universal term, not confined to sketches of

Oriental travel. "Baksheesh" is merely one of the many grafted Arabic

terms, but it will be predominant. "Sae'eda" will be the street

greeting (varied by the Sikh "Salaam, sahib"). "Feloose kiteer,"

"mafish," "min fadlak," "taali hina," "etla," and the rest of them,

will be household words. Other phrases, not remarkable for delicacy,

will prevail in pot-houses and stable talk. Forcible ejection from a

company and polite leave-taking will both be covered by an "imshee";

there will be "classy" "imshees" and "imshees" that are undignified.

Such an evacuation as was effected at Anzac was distinctly "classy."

When first the notion of evacuation was mooted there was misgiving.

We were with our back (so to speak) to the sea, hemmed in in a narrow

sector of coast, with no ground whatever to fall back upon. There

was no one who did not expect disaster in evacuating a position such

as that; the only debate was as to degree. What would it cost us in

lives and money? And there was a greater fear unspoken--the hideous

reflection that an evacuation would make almost vain the heavy losses

of eight months' fighting. Everyone hoped against a giving-up. But

soon there was no mistaking the signs of the times--the easing off in

the landing of supplies, the preliminary and experimental three days'

restraint from fire all along the line, the added restriction upon

correspondence--in especial the order to refrain from any reference to

the movements of troops either present or prophetic, and either known

or surmised; the detailing of inordinately large fatigues to set in

order once more the last line of defence.

The most obtuse soon saw his worst fears realised. Notice to quit was,

in general, short. On Sunday afternoon, the 12th, the O.C. came panting

up the gully. "Fall in the unit at once." They were given an hour and a

half's notice to have all ready for transport to the pier. Notice was

in many cases far shorter, resolving itself into minutes. But an hour

and a half is brief enough. Then there was bustle and feverish stuffing

of kit-bags. The dug-out which had been as a home for four months was

dismantled and left in dishevelment in a half-hour. It's hard to leave

a dug-out--your shelter from shrapnel and the snowy blast and the

bitter Turkish frost. It's here that you have smoked the consolatory

pipe for so many months--consumed the baksheesh steak and marmalade,

read the home letters and the local sheet of home from Australia,

played nocturnal poker, yarned with a fellow-townsman, and spread the

frugal late supper. It has been home in a sense other than that you ate

and slept there; it was home indirectly--by virtue of home mails, home

talk, home memories, visualisations nurtured under its shelter in the

night watches. Home because it was in Turkey, and that way duty lay.

Now, in a few desecratory minutes, it was rudely stripped, bunks

overturned, the larder ratted, the favourite prints brushed from the

hessian in the bustle. The vultures from neighbouring dug-outs flocked

round for the spoil; the men who yet had no notice to evacuate came

for baksheesh. With a swelling heart you disgorged your little stock

of luxuries, that you would have taken but had no room for. It breaks

your heart to give over to the hands of strangers your meagre library

amassed during a quarter's residence, your little table, your baksheesh

butter and strawberry jam, potatoes and oatmeal, surplus luxuries in

clothing, the vital parts of your bunk, the odds and ends of private

cooking utensils that have endeared themselves by long and frequent

service at the rising of the sun and at the going down of the same, and

late at night. Though the life of a soldier is checkered, without any

abiding city, shot with hurried moves by flood and field, yet we had

had so many months in Anzac, in the one spot, that we had broken with

tradition and had made a sort of home in a sort of settled community.

And this was the rude end of all.

We took a hurried snack as the mule-carts were loaded. The cooks made

merry (cooks, somehow, always contrive to have a convivial spirit at

hand), calling on all and sundry to drink a farewell with them while

they scraped and packed their half-cold dixies. Nevertheless--for

reasons explicit and subconscious--it was a melancholy toast. We

followed the transport to Walker's Pier--taking the sap, though,

without exception. This thought was uppermost; "What if Beachy Bill

should get us now?" To a man we took all the cover there was. No one,

at such close prospect of deliverance for ever from that shell-swept

beach, neglected precautions.

Round at Walker's the beach was thickly peopled with units awaiting

embarkation. The bustle and shouting were almost stupefying. The unit

"pack up" had been this in a small degree. That was bad enough. Here

our own little preparation was both magnified and intensified. It

was growing dusk. A whole brigade was waiting with all its Cæsarian

_impedimenta_. Impromptu piers had been run out, and were lighted

by smoking flares. Pinnaces and barges moved noisily between them.

Military landing-officers and naval transport-officers, and middies and

skippers of trawlers, bawled orders and queries and responses. On the

beach the men lay about on their baggage. Non-commissioned officers

marshalled and moved them off. Mule transports threaded a way amongst

the litter of men and kit-bags. Officers who knew their time was not

yet stood in groups chatting and joking. The men, always free from

responsibility, played cards and formed schools of two-up, dipped into

their haversacks, and munched and raised to their lips vessels which

were not always mess-tins, and did not always contain cold tea only--or

even cold tea at all.

We waited. The hour of embarkation was postponed from six to nine. At

nine most of the excitement had subsided, and the men lay quiet--except

where they revived themselves with a dark issue-liquid. There was

melancholy abroad--more than that of weariness in physical exertion.

As the hour of embarkation drew on (it was now postponed to ten) its

significance came home to their bosoms. The rifles cracked on the

ridges, the howitzers spoke, the din of bombs came down the ravine.

There were those fellows in the trenches being left to see the last

of it, and to get off if they could. Not the most resolute optimist

could look towards the bloodless evacuation which the event has shown

to an astonished world. Every flash of the guns in the half-moonlight,

every rifle fusillade, called up the vision of a last party attempting

to leave, and perhaps failing fatally to its last number. "If I could

get drunk," said a man wearing his equipment, "I would--blue-blind

paralytic. I never felt so like it in my life."

We lay about another hour and a half. Then the order came suddenly to

go aboard--so suddenly that the half of the equipment had to be left.

The first load was got down; a return was being made for another.

"Can't wait," roared the N.T.O.; "leave your stuff or get left. The

barge is leaving now. Cast off, for'ard. Go ahead, cox'n." This was not

bluff. There was a scramble for the barge. There up in the sap lay the

cooks' gear, and half the private kit, to be despoiled (so we said)

by some barbarous Turk. "Put that match out. No talking." We puffed

out otherwise in silence, into the Ægean darkness. Liberty to talk, to

smoke, would have been a boon. There was talking in whispers--worse

than nothing. Cigarettes were quenched--and the spirits of that

unhappy, close-packed, silent load of silent men. The spent bullets

sang overhead in a kind of derision, getting lower and more intimate as

we moved on. Soon they were spitting about us and tapping the barge,

coming unreasonably near to tapping skulls and chests.

But we got to the side of the darkened transport untouched, after long

wandering and hailing of many ships in the darkness. There was complete

exhaustion at the end. The men dropped down against their kits and

slept fitfully (it was bitterly cold) till the dawn. This was the last

look on Gallipoli; it had been a penultimate sight we had of it in the

dusk of the previous Sabbath evening, though we knew it not. For a

time we could only see the great grey mass flecked with an occasional

spurt of flame, where the guns were still belching. Then the glorious

sun slowly uprose, and threw up the detail. There were the old and

well-remembered and well-trodden heights of Anzac, and lower down we

came abreast of all the positions we had known, afar off, and now saw

more clearly than ever before. We looked along the deadly Olive Grove.

There lay the Beachy Bill battery, which every day had rained screaming

hell over the Anzac Beach, and was even now speaking sullenly in the

early morning glow.

Achi Baba rose up to the south in a sort of soft splendour; how

different from the reality! That rosy tipped mountain, could we have

seen its detail, would show looming bastions, high forbidding ridges,

and galleries of guns, and rugged ravines that had well-nigh flowed

with the blood of our storming parties. Now it stood there, sloping

gently down towards Helles, behind the high, quiet headlands and

the bays of the coast. Soon we were abreast of Helles, then of the

multitude of shipping in the Straits mouth, and so on down behind

Imbros and under Tenedos, and away over the freshening sea to Lemnos,

a pale cloud, bigger than a man's hand on the starboard bow. And by

mid-day we lay in the quiet waters of Mudros Bay, looking over the

canvas-clad slopes.

BOOK III

BACK TO EGYPT

CHAPTER I

LEMNOS

After many delays we landed, and after many wanderings arrived at a

camping-ground, and went supperless and tentless to bed--too tired to

remark, rolled in our blankets, either drenching dew or stony ground,

but not so weary as to be unconscious of the absence of shell. Our

Last Post for many months had been sounded by bursting shell (for

many a man it had been Last Post indeed); the massed buglers of the

battalions seemed now a voice from the land of spirits. There were men

(they are to be believed) literally wakened by the stillness in the

night, restless through the sudden deprivation of the midnight shriek

from the flank and of our own roar of discharge from above. For the

nocturnal crack and whistle of bullets, here was the distraction of

utter quietness. For a week it was disconcerting.

The _réveille_ which wakened you at dawn was hard to place in the

first few moments of semi-consciousness. "Am I dreaming? Back in

camp at Melbourne?" The flood of consciousness sweeps off that sweet

delusion--however sweet this island of rest may be.... A woman's voice

draws you blinking to the tent door--"_Vashung! Vashung!_" It has a

Teutonic gerundial flavour. But it's only the Greek ladies soliciting

in the mist the soiled garments of soldiers. They move about the camp

until the sun is well transmuted from that dull-glowing ball into the

mist-dispelling Day's-Eye, stripping the whole landscape down into

stony detail and making those volcanic peaks in the north to glow.

Before breakfast is well on the women have amassed their huge bundles,

and the 'cute Greek boys, in pantaloons and soldiers' cast-off tunics,

have sold you a day's store of oranges and chocolate.

The days are easy. We know we shall move to Egypt (or "elsewhere")

incontinently, and will take the leisure the war-gods provide us while

we may. Only the fatigues necessary to camp cleanliness and to eating

mar the day. Most of it is spent lounging, reading, smoking, yarning

reminiscently of Anzac, and scrambling. Write letters we may not at

this stage. The general order prohibiting letters dealing with the

evacuation and with movements of troops either known or surmised has

never been revoked; and has been reinforced by a prohibition against

correspondence of any sort--except upon field-service cards--those

"printed abominations" for which correspondents at home "thank you very

much indeed for sending me."

"What'll we do to-day? Go to the village or to Therma or to the

stationary hospital?--to the Greek church or the monastery?--or on a

voyage of discovery nowhere in particular?--or just have a loaf?--or go

and see if there's any mail in?"

The Australian general hospitals claimed a high average of visits from

those men who made friends there. They lay across the water. The Greek

ferry-men transported passengers in their gaily coloured craft for as

much as they could get. A fare was "laid down," but the Greek is as

inveterate a bargainer as your Egyptian, and the Australian's hobby is

to elude a fleecing. So that the burden of the conversation on the way

over lay mostly upon fares, conducted in as good Grammar-School Greek

as could be resurrected: which was not very good. But the cardinal

numerals were all that was really necessary: gesture and other physical

complementaries did the rest.

The stationary hospital is a township, downright, with canvas blocks

and a main street and side-roads. Hospital _marquees_ of the larger

sort always convey a sense of permanency. But when pitched in such

numbers and with a view to such a lengthy sojourn as these Lemnian

hospitals anticipated, they gave an impression of stability not

ordinarily associated with even a base. The huts of the Sisters'

quarters, dental huts, canteen shacks, X-ray huts, and so forth,

deepened the impression. And the furnishings took nothing from it: the

matting, the iron beds, the chairs and lounges, the lockers, tables,

medicine-chests. The blue suits of convalescents were in sympathy, too,

though they smacked rather of the permanence of the penitentiary. And

the traffic in the motor-lorries sometimes added the _quasi_-roar of

street traffic.

The Sisters entertained friends at tea in their recreation-tent--a

luxurious red and yellow snuggery, one of the largest _marquees_,

furnished in a way quite adequate to the tone of a vice-regal

garden-party. Distinctions in rank were deleted. Privates, and officers

of the General Staff, hobnobbed as though in mufti. The recreation-tent

was a great leveller; there a sergeant presumed with impunity to argue

the point with a Colonel from Headquarters. It was the most democratic

assembly active-service had yet produced. The common bond may have

been the dainty afternoon-tea--the fine china; the tiny sandwiches,

furnishing half an active-service mouthful; the fine linen of the

table-cover; the gentle tones of the hostess's voice: all these were

as unaccustomed to the Brigadier-General as to the Private on the

Peninsula. There was here the sweet half-delusion of a tea-party at

home, which broke down, for a couple of hours, barriers of rank. You

can conceive the exquisite contrast of the whole thing (you who rail

at afternoon-tea conventions--deliciously absent here, though!) with

the enforced boorish ruggedness of Anzac. And there was the walk after

along the ridge of the Peninsula on which the hospital lay, commanding

the fine harbour both ways: on the south bulwarked by precipitous hills

rising sheer as from a Scottish lake, and to the north checked by the

gentle slopes of that rich-hued country, volcanic to the core, from

which the afternoon sun drew out the warm, unnatural colour; and the

purple of the peaks lay beyond by the seaboard. "Is there a war on?"

The question recurred again and again, audibly, and was answered, not

by the company, but by the blue-clothed figures hobbling painfully upon

the broad road or lying helplessly in the warm December sun.

One of the finest churches stands on the border of Portianus, the

village that was nearest to our Sarpi camp. It is richly decorated

with a profusion of Apostles, Saints, and scenes from Biblical history

on walls and roof. The altar stands beyond a screen as wide as the

building, fairly overcrowded with symbolic paintings. The sanctuary

was filled daily with soldiers, who placed baksheesh in the plate as

they emerged past the old priest, smiling a Benediction at the door.

Those who could make anything of it crowded round the fine black-letter

vellum Greek Bible at the reading-desk--a treasure indeed. The rest

made an attempt at transliteration of the titles daubed beneath the

pictures of the Saints. (Most men on Lemnos acquired at least a

nodding-acquaintance with the Greek alphabet.) The old priest had

little English, but he was very willing to make a shot at exegesis upon

the Biblical pictures. There was an enormously large group of them at

the door of exit. He liked best to explicate, in his broken English,

a painting of the Last Judgment--God, a stout and irascible-looking

old gentleman sitting aloft upon the bench, with the Head-Saints about

him, suspending above a mortal the scales of Justice; on the right

the gaping mouth of hell, belching flame, and Satan uprising from the

heat; on the left the golden gate of heaven, with St. Peter graciously

admitting one of the approved, and a condemned wretch cowering

towards Hell.... The realism of it appealed to the priest's powers of

exposition. The others he passed over with a mere cursory indication

of the subject. He was a genial old man--genial even when he took us

out to the sepulchral yard behind the church and showed the vaults of

departed parishioners, with the bones deposited upon the slabs.

Christmas came upon us in Lemnos. There was leisure to be unreservedly

merry, and that was much. The Billies came a couple of days before. No

one who does not remember well the unloading of Christmas stockings

can have a notion of the merriment that was abroad. Santa Claus is

not dead. Had the evacuation been timed a little later he would have

visited the trenches. As it was, he came out of the mythological past

as another Greek god to Lemnos. And the Greeks, in the whole gamut of

their worship, never evolved a deity more beneficent. Psychologists

may debate the point whether Santa Claus, had he visited Australians

in the trenches, would have brought a keener zest of enjoyment with

his gifts than in the quiet of Lemnos. But the luxury of appreciation

of all things Christmas was upon the Australians at rest on this

beautiful island, and what is certain is that had the blessed donors

seen the distribution and the opening-up they could have had no more

precious reward. The Peninsula would have offered a sharper contrast of

enjoyment, but less leisure to enjoy. On the whole, it was probably a

good thing that we got our Billies during a respite.

The letters enclosed mostly assumed the men in the trenches on

Christmas Day. Other assumptions were made, notably that in the

cartoon, on the Billies, of a conquering kangaroo and the inscription:

"This bit o' the world belongs to us." That hurt.

Soldiers are children the world over--that is to say the best and the

worst of them. In the throes of Turkish toil and peril they had read in

the mailed newspapers of the initiation of the Billy-can scheme. Enemy

submarines were uncommonly active at the time. Hypothetical philippics

used to be launched at night against the submarine that might yet sink

the transport conveying the Christmas mail. Men threatened to desert to

the Navy for purposes of revenge in any such event.

Nothing was lost through the mundane fact that the Billies were a

regimental issue--like bacon and jam and cheese. We forgot that. For a

half-day (they came in the afternoon) the camp went mad. We masqueraded

in fools' caps, swapped delicacies--and swapped (above all) letters.

Whatever may have become of the age of chivalry since Edmund Burke

mourned it in Europe, the age of sheer kindness-of-heart is vouchsafed

to us for ever since reading the letters in our Billies. Those letters

stand worthily beside the finest utterances with the indelible pencil

from the trenches; for, after all, true heroism resides as much in

those who wait and work in quietness at home for their men as in those

at war. Some day an anthology of those letters should be made and

published to correct selfishness and churlishness on the earth. For

that there is no kind of space here. But it may be well to say, in all

moderation, that no such fillip had before been given to the men in the

war zone as came with those missives which lay beneath the treasures in

the Billies. This was not Christmas at home; but it brought us near to

it, and proved again unanswerably (if proof were needed) that intrinsic

values in the gifts of this life are very little at all.

The revelry of Christmas had hardly subsided when embarkation orders

came again. In the mist of a December morning we struck camp and moved

out from the stone pier to the waiting transports--wondering, most of

us, when embarkation in the service would cease to recur, and how long

it would be before embarkation would come for that long voyage across

the Pacific to a Christmas under the Southern Cross.

CHAPTER II

MAHSAMAH

"The ----th and ----th Divisions will move from ---- to ---- in flights

of ---- thousands daily. Two hundred and fifty camels will be allotted

to each flight for baggage-transport. Mahsamah will be the end of the

first stage.... You will proceed to Mahsamah, taking with you ----

thousand rations, establish a depôt, and issue rations to the flights

for twenty-four hours."

So ran the order. Confound the flights! Why can't they train it?

Mahsamah's out of the world. These camps in desert places are ghastly.

We shall be enforced hermits. Entraining, they could get the whole

thing over in four days; this way it'll take fourteen. The weather's

getting midsummer. The battalions have just had a fresh boot-issue.

They'll be sore-footed and sick and sun-stricken. What's the game with

Headquarters--to harden the men or impress the natives?

What's that to you? You've got to go, whatever garbled motives

Headquarters may have. So get your supplies aboard, and your men, and

leave in the morning.

So we found ourselves sweeping over the desert at 9 a.m., with tents

and camp equipment in the guard's van and half a dozen trucks laden

with supplies trailing behind. The sweet-water canal tore beside us,

and patches of irrigated land emerged at intervals into the field of

vision, and the low sand-dunes standing away towards Ismailia grew

higher; and before the canal fir-groves could become more than a blur

in the east we halted and got down, and had our trucks detached, and

the train moved off canal-wards, and we set about looking for a site on

which to build.

And there was no time to waste. The first flight had left Tel-el-Kebir

that morning, and any moment their advance-guard might loom up on the

heat-hazed horizon and come in soliciting grub.

A permanent camp of Royal Engineers close at hand lent a fatigue. By

three o'clock the virgin depôt was well established.

At four, through a cloud of dust, the advance-party (mostly Staff

Officers on horseback) rode in very hot and very thirsty. Brigade

Majors boast a thirst at any time and in any weather. Aggravated now,

it had first to be assuaged. The Battalion of Pioneers who followed us

by train had mapped out the plan of camp on paper, and now proceeded

to conduct battalions; for they followed close in the heels of their

staffs, dusty and sweating under their packs, and dragging a weary

way through the yielding sand. Lucky Majors rode, and surveyed their

perspiring men from the cool and luxurious height of a horse. The

battalions plumped down in the sand and the sun where they stood.

The camel-trains followed, plonking along with their flat-spreading

feet and aspiring noses and loads of ration, blankets, tents, tables,

and general camp _impedimenta_. Their Indian "dravees" led them by

the nose. They gurgled with the heat, and foundered on very slight

provocation indeed.

By five the whole flight is established in bivouac lines. For a couple

of hours there is feverish bustle at the supply depôt. Half the issuing

is carried out by lamp-light. The battalions settle down to sleep with

the sun, and there is little energy left for horse-play, though there

is a good deal of singing, and even concerts improvised.

But the whole camp is quiet by nine; the men are sleeping in the sand

under the moon; there are no lights except in the two tents erected for

Staff Officers.

You're wakened at four the next morning by the camp astir, to be off at

sunrise. But they have their ration, and you don't get up, but thank

Heaven you're a part of no flight.

A part of nothing--for the moment. That's the beauty of this mission.

You're subject to nobody. You've brought your own supplies, built

your own depôt, and can dictate to Staff Captains and Colonels and to

all the tin-hats who may approach you for ration. A supply officer is

deeply respected, _ex-officio_. Though he be a mere Subaltern, it is

known he holds the distribution of fleshly favours. The officer drawing

ration who is incivil is in danger of being the worse for it; only the

respectful get baksheesh.

The Fortress Company of Anglesey Engineers camped permanently, who had

lent an emergency fatigue, turned out to be a boon and a blessing.

It took less time than usual to penetrate the admirable English

reticence surrounding their companionable qualities. The penetration

began with a neighbourly invitation to their regimental sports, held

conjointly with those of a detachment of Hyderabad Lancers camped at

Mahsamah for patrol purposes. They united in a half-day's competition

in foot-racing, football, jumping, tug-o'-war, cycle-racing, and the

rest of the athletics common to Indians and Britishers. Beside, the

Hyderabads gave exhibitions in horseback-wrestling, tent-pegging,

cleaving the lime at the gallop, and allied exercises, in which

Englishmen do not compete. The Captain of the Lancers was a young

Indian aristocrat who spoke English faultlessly, and was a regular and

interesting member of the Anglesey mess.

The English gentlemen who drew him and the Supply Officer were in no

way roughened by a six months' campaign at Suvla Bay. Gordon was an

Irishman from Trinity College, Dublin, who had preceded his course

in engineering by reclining in Arts three years and browsing richly

and refraining resolutely from cram--an engineer balanced ideally

between the world of mere mathematical horse-sense and a gentle

other-worldliness, and rich in a fitful and whimsical Irish humour

that was good to live with; a man devoted to duty (when any was put

in his way, which was seldom), otherwise exercising himself genially

upon self-appointed surveys, geological rambling, artful shooting,

photography, and banter. No tongue in the mess was a match for his;

he emerged from argument with ease and credit always, and left his

opponents floundering. A fearless, tender-hearted, courteous Irish

gentleman, modest to the point of self-effacement and able to the point

of genius. His mother was a friend of Edward Dowden and his circle,

and Gordon had in store a rich fund of anecdote relating to academical

Dublin.

The Medical Officer--"Doc," familiarly--was a Scotchman with a

burr and a subtle uncaledonian quality of humour, and a sparkling

intellectuality quite out of harmony with the traditional Scotch

lumbering cerebration. Doc was lovable; and a butt through his

popularity, though not a butt who took it lying down. But he was never

a match for Gordon, though he usually routed the Captain--also a

Scotchman--whose hobby was the facetious discussion of ways and means

to getting a competent M.O. attached. The Doc's duties were purely

nominal, the care of any who might fall victims amongst the Angleseys

to toothache, boils, vermin, colds, gashes--any ills, in short, to

which men in a desert camp might be liable. For the rest, he shot

with the mess, dawdled with "films," perused his Scotch newspapers,

improvised schemes in sanitation, dabbled in canal parasites and

mosquito larvæ, and forged jokes.

Seymour was a highly-intelligent animal (taking seven-and-five-eighths

in hats), who argued with a kind of implacable ferocity, and when he

sat down to bridge would never stop before two or three. But all his

argument was for mental exercise and not from conviction, and his

fiercest encounters were wont to end in a thrust of bathos at which the

mess roared. He was a fine intellectual and physical animal, as keen in

riding and shooting and bathing as in dialectic.

The Captain was a diminutive, ceremonious Scotchman, commanding

deference out of doors, bullied to death in the mess by his Subalterns.

The contrast between out- and indoors was striking. The last letter of

the law in discipline and ceremony was observed outside the mess, but

at table no Australian officers' mess was ever more informal. Barriers

of rank were thrown down, and none but surnames tolerated by the least

even unto the greatest.

That mess was as luxuriously appointed as a civilian home. Easy-chairs,

writing-tables, messing-tables and their appointments, punctilious

servants, matted floors, made one forget for a few hours daily that a

war was in progress. For the man who makes himself at home on service

you are commended to the English officer. And in a permanent camp such

as this he excelled himself. Eating was delicate, glass and silver

shone and prevailed. Hours for meals were late and irregular: breakfast

at 8.30; lunch light, and at any time; dinner at any hour between 8 and

9.30, and long-drawn-out, so that you generally rose from table between

10 and 11, and sat back for pow-wow after.

It was a rare day there was not game in the mess. Adjoining the

sweet-water canal was a lagoon, reed-fringed and with reed-islands

where you could row a mile and believe yourself in Australia; no sand

to be seen. Three times a week we shot. There were duck and snipe and

teal. The Sheikh of the village furnished half a dozen shot-guns and as

many boats and boatmen, and came himself, carrying a gun (and proud he

was of his shooting--and justly so).

One man one skiff was the order. We would set out at 4.30, after tea,

and return at 8. The danger was to forget the duck in the still beauty

of the evening. As you watched the reddening west over the reeds, the

birds coming across the ruddy ground would recall you to business.

Shooting was easy, so we got a lot. The place was untrammelled. Except

for an occasional General who came up for a day's sport (the Staff

had got to know the Mahsamah Lagoon), there was little shooting done,

and the water had not yet become a scare-area. The Sheikh did a little

on his own account. The underlings he provided knew their work, and

would ejaculate and advise in Arabic: _Talihena! Bakaskeen kebir!_

(snipe--big one!)--in a hoarse, excited whisper, as the birds rose

on the breeze. _Aywah_, you mutter, making ready. They would strip

and go into the reeds waist-deep for birds fallen there. _Quaiys

kiteer!_ (fine), greeted a hit; and if you missed, a consolatory

_Malish!_ (never mind), _Bukrah_ (perhaps to-morrow), uttered with a

gentle ironical intonation. Rowing back there was always baksheesh in

cigarettes or cartridges--or both; and some, with their skins wet and

muddied from wading, deserved it. Some did not.

The natives fished the lagoon systematically with nets, at night. You

encountered them as you pursued duck. They regularly exported crates

of fish to Cairo and Zagazig. When the nets were spread they would

"beat-up" the fish with tomtoms in the boats. You might hear their

solitary cries and their rhythmic tattoo on the water all night.

They fished with lines, too--to order. If you gave them an order at the

camp for a dozen they would have them back in half an hour, wriggling

on a string. They were proud of their craft, and would throw you a

triumphant glance, as who should say, "Let's see you do that!"

The Arab village lay on the banks of the canal. Comely villagers they

were, with well-featured women and men with a continent, contented air,

living by fishing or growing of crops. The camera they funked, and

that distinguished them from the raucous, dissolute denizens of Cairo,

who delight to ape attitudes for the photographer. They showed all the

best qualities of the fellaheen. There was no obsequiousness in the

men, as in the capital. There is no crowd more cowardly and villainous

than the Cairene mob. But the men at Mahsamah, when the sojourning

Australians attempted to commandeer their canal-ferry, pushed them

incontinently into the stream. This was conduct unprecedented in the

Egyptian. A town-and-gown fight ensued. Skulls were cracked, and the

Australians had by no means the better of it. There was a dash of

the old fighting Bedouin blood in these fellows. There was to be no

bullying here; and there was none.

Only the station-master had forfeited his independence of spirit. He

alone of the whole village was in habitual contact with "the public."

It had wrought in him a fawning plausibility the more contemptible by

its contrast with the sturdiness of the surrounding natives. He lied

by habit; the fictitious way was more natural with him than the way

of truth. In official dealings he lied first, and afterwards modified

it into truth. Regardless of consistency, he said invariably what

he thought would please. Railway time-tables with him varied with

the estimated temper of the inquirer. This seems incredible, but it

is true. He was the only village inhabitant who ever invited you to

take coffee; and he (the potentially dignified station-master) alone,

in all the village, was ever known to solicit baksheesh--an oily,

yellow, perennially-smiling, small-bodied, altogether small-souled

railway-official, in him seemed incarnated the slavish spirit of

officialdom in all Egypt.

Bathing in the Canal was forbidden along its whole length. There lurked

a parasite that played Old Harry with livers. It ravaged the natives in

rare cases, though, having drunk and washed in the canal from infancy,

a sort of immunity was claimed for them. But there were victims to the

parasite to be seen amongst them--no pretty sight.

A favourite walk at sundown was the canal-bank. The reed-shot lagoon on

the east, traversed by sporadic, crying duck; the gentle wind, blowing

warm off the Libyan Desert, drifting the silent dhow; a solitary

fellaheen on his ambling beast; an Arab doing his devotions in the

tiny praying-crib on the water's brink; the west darkening behind the

palm-tufts over the illimitable sand. There was a peace here little

known in our other halting-places in the Delta.

CHAPTER III

CANAL ZONE

At Serapoeum, sprawled upon the Canal-banks just above the Bitter

Lakes, you are sufficiently far from Cairo to be delivered from the

hankering after the city such as gnaws you intermittently at such

a place as Tel el Kebir. From the old battle-ground you may run up

in a couple of hours; from the Canal the length of the journey is

trebled, and encroaches seriously upon your _feloose_, and that is

a consideration which ought not to--which will not--be despised on

service. And beside the fact that the rail journey is trebled from

the desert camp, there are some miles of dismal sand-plodding between

you and the railway-station, and the desert has inspired you with the

Sahara lassitude and an unfevered frame. You feel, in this waste of

brown sand, the incipiency of the mood of the contemplative Arab, to

whom the whirl of the metropolis is anathæma; but only its incipiency,

because there is still in your blood the subconscious resentment of

eight months' enforced inactivity on Anzac. Compulsory monotony,

whatever its form, raises a temperamental hostility: whether the

monotony of geographical confinement, limited vision, shell-scream,

innutritious food, inescapable dirt and vermin, or that of wide and

sand-billowed outlook, delicate messing, tranquil sleeping, luxurious

Canal-bathing, heat, and flies. Cairo is Cairo. The Peninsula, as

comfortable as this, would have been far less intolerable. But so long

as it is something less than the trackless Ægean that divides from the

glamour of Egyptian cities, you clamour for leave.

This is unintelligible--this _blasé_, surfeited mind of the Australian

soldier, in Cairo. "Never want to see it again! I'm fed up with Cairo!"

is a judgment strangely prevalent in the army of occupation. How

any land and people so utterly strange to the Australian can become

indifferent to him is incomprehensible. Every Cairene alley is a haunt

of stinks and filth--but a haunt of wonder, too. Cairene habits that

are annoying and repulsive are at the same time intensely interesting.

To get behind the mind of this people and hazard an estimate and a

comparison of its attitude towards life is an occupation endlessly

amusing.

But you may clamour for leave here with little effect. Divisional

orders have minimised it to men going to Cairo on duty. Duty-leave is

a time-honoured slogan that has been accustomed to cover a multitude

of one's own ends. But the added stringency of leave regulations which

preface a projected move of the division scrutinise very closely all

that is connoted by the term "Duty-leave," and lop away a good many of

its excrescences. So that, on the whole, you end by settling down in

the great sand and feigning a lively response to the call of the desert.

You do respond. You must. Anyone would; but not ardently.

We are on the Sinai side of the Blue Trough which colours richly

between its shores of light sand. We also are colouring richly. It's

far too hot for representative uniform clothing. Yet the clothing is

uniform--uniform in respect of a discardment of tunic and cap and a

ubiquity of shirt. The broad-brimmed hat and the gauze shirt and the

half-bared thigh for us; and the daily bathe.

The soldier is very busy indeed--too busy to live--who cannot get time

to trudge over to the blue water, doff, and disport himself in that

cool, tideless limpidity, which recreates (we are gross, material

creatures) his world. The banks swarm with brown, deep-chested nudes;

the water is strewn thickly with smooth-haired, colliding Australians,

elated by the bodily change almost beyond belief. Desert livers, desert

lassitude, and desert shortness of temper, cannot persist in this

medium. And the rest of the day is transmuted by it. The Canal adds to

efficiency.

Ships of all nations pass daily, and ships of all classes at Lloyd's.

Those are reckoned A1 which bear women-passengers. Raucous warning to

those men who are back to nature on the bank is given as the mail-boat

creeps up. Everyone who is wearing his birthday garment plunges and

swims out. The ship is surrounded by a sea of heads, and greeted with

all the grafted Arabic phrases that Australians have acquired--no,

not all; but with all those suited to polite society. The facetious

cry for baksheesh rises with a native Arabic insistence (but is

responded to with a freedom not customarily extended to natives):

"_Sai-eeda!--Baksheesh!--Gib it!--Gib it baksheesh for the baby!--Gib

it!--One cigarette!--Gib it tabac!--Gib it half-piastre!--Enta

quies!--Quies kiteer!--Kattar kairak!_" as the shower descends: tins

of cigarettes and chocolate, and keepsakes that are not edible.

There is as much excitement on deck as in the water. There is monotony

of sea-travel as well as of desert life; the same encounter interrupts

both. And apart from that, one can believe that these peoples are

genuinely glad to see each other. The soldiers have looked in the face

of no woman for far too long, and the admiration of the women for the

fellows is not necessarily feigned. They throw over greetings with the

other baksheesh luxuries, and these are returned in kind. The girls are

sports in the Australian sense, offering suggestions to come aboard,

and go tripping with rather more freedom than they would probably

use were there any possibility of an acceptance of the invitation.

Inevitably there is one woman (never a girl) in fifty who spoils it all

by a touch of Jingoism--calling them brave and noble fellows to their

faces, and screaming "Are we downhearted?" in a way Stalky would have

disapproved. This is volubly resented in responses to that oratorical

question which have no direct reference to the state of their spirits.

The boat moves on, fluttering with handkerchiefs, to the transport

staging, always crowded with men, who are not nude. The shower of

baksheesh is flung over again. Women are not notoriously good shots.

For the packages that fall short the men leap in, clothes and all,

and scramble, and reckon themselves well repaid. One afternoon the

largest package for which clothes were wetted proved to be a bundle of

_War-Cries_ and allied journals, dropped either by some humourist or

by one sincerely exercised for the spiritual welfare of the troops.

The latter was the inevitable assumption. The donor was greeted by the

dripping warriors with a chorus of acknowledgments that could leave no

doubt as to their spiritual needs. Soldiers have a religion, but they

are not accustomed to make it explicit.

The passing ships lighten the dulness. They bring a whiff of the great

British civilian world that is otherwise so unrelentingly far removed,

and which Cairo (when one does get there) brings very little nearer.

The Canal is crossed at Serapoeum by pontoon ferry, row-boat, and

pontoon-bridge. Take your choice. But that is not always possible.

Sometimes the bridge is swung open for hours on end to allow liners,

tugs, dhows, and launches to pass. It was built for vehicular and

animal traffic--for the transport of supplies, in fact, from Egypt to

the troops in Sinai. When open it therefore bears a constant stream of

G.S. waggons loaded with army stores. It's one stage of the journey

of beef from the plains of Queensland to the cook's "dixies" in the

Sinaian desert trenches. Supplies are disembarked at Suez and Port

Said, entrained to Egyptian Serapoeum, transported by waggon across

this bridge to the desert railway terminus on the opposite bank; they

are trucked out to railhead beyond the sandy horizon, and thence Canal

trains bear them to the desert outposts for final distribution. And

that is the chequered career of the Argentine ox, who never dared

hope for himself any such distinction as that of contributing to the

efficiency of His Majesty's Forces in the Peninsula of Sinai.

The miniature desert railway is no despicable contrivance, puffing

there and back-firing from its nuggety petrol engine. It can make

fifteen miles an hour with fifteen trucks of supplies lumbering behind.

Sometimes it leaves the somewhat flimsy track; sometimes it runs down

an unaccustomed Arab in a desert dust-storm; and sometimes it "sticks"

quite as annoyingly as any petrol-driven vehicle can do. Whatever the

nature of the obstacle--mangled Arab or jibbing engine--there is lusty

swearing; for the business of the desert railway is of more urgency

than that of most links in the lines of communication. For instance,

it--and it alone--can furnish with anything approaching expedition the

daily water-supply of the advanced trenches in the April Arabian sand.

It was during the first day of the _khamseen_ that the engine-wheels

became clogged with the remains of a man whom the whirling dust

prevented from seeing or hearing anything of engines. The violence of

the annual April _khamseen_ is incredible by those who haven't suffered

it. The initial days of the _khamseen_ period the Egyptians celebrate

in the festival of _Shem el Nessim_. They go out into the fields of the

Delta (of the Delta, mark you) with music and with dancing. There's no

disputing about taste--if, that is, the _khamseen_ is blowing "up to

time." Nothing more distressing you'll meet amongst desert scourges.

It's the _khamseen_ which kills camels in mid-desert by suffocation.

That is a fair test of the driving and dust-raising powers of the storm.

It begins with a zephyr for which the uninitiated thanks Allah in

the first half-hour. By the end of an hour he is calling upon Allah

for deliverance. At the end of a day he speculates upon his chances

of seeing the morning. At the end of the second day he calls upon

Allah to take away his life. The _khamseen_ this year lasted two days

without intermission. It began at dark without further warning than

that of a leaden sky and a compression of the atmosphere. But these

are indications that are, in Egypt, so often indicative of nothing,

that they lose significance altogether. On the 20th of April they

proved to have been highly charged with meaning. In forty minutes the

gale had reached its height. And there it stayed. Men expected relief

momentarily; but it never came that night--nor the next day--nor the

night following. "Such violence cannot last," said the Australian. In

twenty-four hours he was not sure it might not last for ever. Few tents

stood the strain longer than an hour. Men grumbled and turned in with

a half-sense of security from the tempest without. They hardly looked

for their house to come tumbling about their ears before midnight.

But few escaped that; the others spent the night under fallen canvas.

Sinaian desert sand cannot be expected to bear an indefinite strain

upon tent-guys. Those tents which stood at sunrise (if sunrise it

could be called) were kept up only by the frequent periodicity of the

mallet's application in the thick night. As soon as one tent-peg left

earth, the beginning of the end was come unless the inmate crouched out

and replaced it and strengthened the others. He came back with ears and

nose and eyes clogged and face stung painfully. At the third attempt to

keep his home up he said: "I'll go no more! Damn it! Let it come!"--and

it came.

The morning showed no sun--showed nothing farther than six yards away.

Men showed a face above demolished canvas and drew back hastily, stung

and half-choked by the driving grit. In those tents still standing

the furniture could not be judged by appearances. Thick dust covered

everything as with a garment. Regimental office tents that had fallen

before the gale had lost documents that could not be replaced or easily

recreated. Food in the mess was inedible; no one ate except to satisfy

the more urgent demands of hunger. The outdoor work had to proceed. You

couldn't see more than in a North Sea fog. Collisions were inescapable.

You couldn't smoke; you couldn't speak, without swallowing the gale.

Men got disgusted with continuing to live. On the third morning the

desert smiled at you as though nothing had happened. The quiet and

the purity of the air were like release from pain. Men set to work at

cleaning their hair and alleviating a desert throat.

Anzac Day came upon us at Serapoeum--the first anniversary of the

day of that landing which has seized and fired the imagination of

the Empire. No doubt there are other empires than the British which

marvelled at the impetuousness of that maiden proving of Australian

temperament; for it was temperament that carried us up. The world had

no sound ground for being surprised at success on the 25th of April,

except in so far as the world was ignorant of Australian temperament.

Yet surprise contended with adoration in the newspaper headings

which announced our success in planting a foot on Turkish ridges.

But inaccuracy in a use of terms is a quality not inseparable from

journalistic headlines in times of public excitement. The fact is that,

notwithstanding the world's expectation of the fatal elaborateness of

the Turkish preparation to receive us, there was no call for surprise

at the event in people that knew Australian conditions of life and

resultant Australian character. And, granting that as known, the fact

that we were fleshing virgin swords was no legitimate further ground

for surprise, though it was commonly published as such. It should

have been anything but that. People knowing Australians would be due

to recognise that, in all the circumstances, they would fight better,

under the eyes of the world, in a probationary struggle calculated to

establish their reputation than would experienced soldiers who knew

more than they of what the task exacted and of its possibilities.

Ignorance of warfare other than theoretical was in no sense a handicap

to men of Australian temperament: to such men it was material aid. In

a word, Australians could not help themselves at the Landing. Were

it otherwise, our troops would not have overstepped requirements to

the extent of unorganised and spasmodic pursuit of the routed enemy.

Success at the Landing was the inevitable result of temperament rather

than the contrived result of qualities deliberately summoned up on the

occasion....

The supreme charm of the desert resides in her nights. Long purple

shadows spread over the sand-tracts before evening. This gives to the

sand-sea an appearance of gentle undulation which is virtual only, but

none the less grateful for the delusion. The distances are shortened; a

crushing blow is dealt by the peace-loving evening to the desert curse

of monotony. The Suez hills transform to rich purple masses, splendid

in the depth of their colour. The Bitter Lakes sleep in the south. The

Canal settles down to gleam stealthily between its amorphous banks.

The fir-groves on the shore thicken; the dancing daylight interstices

in their meagre ranks are filled by the on-coming darkness until you

feel there are acres of thick plantation; they moan quietly in the

dusk in relief from the pitilessness of these burning days. The little

rivers of water scooped about their roots are filled, and the delicious

absorption begins.

Down-stream the coolies are chanting together in response to an

improvised wail unerringly consistent with the rhythm of their chorus.

You will hear nothing more pathetic than this song removed by distance.

The solo comes down the water in the cadences of desolation. It may be

the irregularity of the cadence that gives the sense of lamentation;

it may be because the enunciation is never full-chested--nor even

full-throated. It is as though extorted by a depth of desolation of

spirit that cannot stoop beneath the dignity of rhythmic utterance.

Near or far, the coolie choruses bear the same import of pathos; and,

indeed, there is little happiness amongst the Egyptians: nothing

buoyant (their climate forbids it); nothing approaching French vivacity

of spirit. There is a profound solemnity in the heart of the Egyptian.

It sometimes finds exaggerated vent in an unnatural but curtailed burst

of merriment, which quickly repasses into the temperamental sombreness.

The folk-songs and chants of a people are a safe index to temperament:

nothing more consistently pathetic than this will you hear without

travelling far.

The chant ceases as the bow searchlight of a vessel turns out of

the Lakes into the Canal channel, and illuminates it like a walled

street. There are ships that pass in the night, and they light their

own way with a brilliancy that takes no risk of collision. The tiny

wind-ridges in the banks are in relief; for a mile ahead the minutest

floating object is discovered. The coolies hail her as she passes. The

night-gangs at work on the barges that bear supplies from Suez and

Port Said interrogate hilariously, out of harmony with the still glory

of the night, but consonantly enough with the brilliant illumination.

There is not much dialogue. Most of the hailing is from the shore

alone.... She moves on. The banks close blackly about her stern. The

lanterns swing again about the barges.

CHAPTER IV

ALEXANDRIA THE THIRD TIME

It's like returning to visit an old friend--rushing towards the sea

of masts behind the sea of white towers glittering beside the sea

of Mediterranean blue. At the first glimpse of that multitudinous

shipping you lose interest in the sea of green delta through which

you are rushing; the mud-walled village-islands rising from it lose

charm in anticipation of the big city you know so well. You remember

it with a sort of yearning for its nobility. For noble it is. There

is no nobility in Cairo, except seen from the fringe of the Mokattam

Hills as you stand on the Bey's Leap at the Citadel looking down on the

busy expanse under its wealth of minarets. Cairo is more interesting,

because more truly Oriental; it has the charm of utter strangeness.

Alexandria is better built, more stately, less evil-smelling; it's the

charm of a well-ordered European city that holds you; and there is

always the loveliness of that Mediterranean outlook from the clean,

generously-broad esplanade. The sea about Cairo is true desert-sand,

unending, which is not lovely, except at the dawn and sundown, when the

colour leaps up about the far horizon.

For three hours, since leaving Cairo, you have been scouring the

green plain in a train of the Egyptian State railways, which bears

comparison well with most other rolling-stock that a limited knowledge

of the travelling world has given you. The Delta is unnaturally rich

and almost unnaturally green. Many centuries of Old Nile depositing

of fat mud have seemed to concentrate within that Nile Valley all

the richness that is in the soil of Egypt. Nor is it a green that is

ultra-rich by contrast with a desert background, for as far as you see

either way there is no sand; you're in the heart of the crops. There's

a monotony of level cultivation which tires you in the end, however

rich; a monotony broken only by a monotonous succession of out-cropping

palm-groves, sleeping canal, white creeping sail, mud-walled village,

and dilapidated mosque. You tire of the regularity of recurrence.

There is a hankering after the quiet stir and variety of the city of

Alexandria quite as strong upon you as Johnson's fervent passion for

the atmosphere of London.

There is a simple crudity in the man who persists in being an

Englishman to the backbone in the land of Egypt. The Australian enters

much more aptly into the spirit of the country--worms his way into

the intricacies of the bazaars and markets, and talks much with the

Alexandrian denizens, if only in pantomime. He "does as they do" far

more consistently than the restrained Tommy--even to the extent of

consuming their curious dishes, riding on their beasts and in their

vehicles, tasting their drinks and smoking their pipes. The Englishman

tends to call always for English beer and for roast beef, and sticks

tenaciously to his briar.

Alexandria has changed, too, at the quays. The transports are no longer

lading noisily, nor, when they are lading, taking in ammunition.

Mostly they are lying out quietly in the harbour, waiting. In March of

last year the harbour was alive with barges bearing fodder and supplies

and ammunition, and with motor-launches rushing to and fro carrying

officers of the General Staff. Now an occasional Arab dhow drifts

lazily, bearing nothing in particular, and the quay-sides are noisy

only with a sort of civilian bustle.

And the ubiquitous nursing-sister was not ubiquitous last year; she

was rarely to be seen in the streets; then she was like the motor-car

twenty years ago: you turned round and looked until her gharry was

swallowed in the traffic. Now she is, in twos and threes, in the cafés,

the Oriental shops, the car, the post office, the mosque; on the

esplanade, on the outlying pleasure-roads of Ramleh, the golf-links,

the race-course; the Rue Cherif Pacha teems with her, shopping or

merely doing the afternoon promenade. She is sprinkled among the

tea-parties at Groppi's; her striking red and grey adds colour to the

Square of Mahomet Ali, the Rue Ramleh, and the Rue Rosette.

Do not infer, gentle reader, that there is nothing to be done in

hospital. There is; but less. Gallipoli wounds either are healed or

sent to Australia to heal in the fine St. Kilda air. It's mostly sick

in hospital now, and sick requiring merely routine attention. And,

beside, there are more hospitals than a year ago. Since the Turkish

fight began they have been increasing; and now it's over, the Lemnian

hospitals of the advanced base have sailed back, and, in cases where

they are not yet re-established, their Sisters are running about the

capital unchained, revelling in a well-earned respite, with the Ægean

roses blowing in their cheeks.

Of hospitals there is no end, in the airy suburbs. The splendid

houses of rich Beys fly the Red Cross at unexpected stages of the

ride to Ramleh. An amazing number of private houses are in use thus.

The convalescents wander over the lawns and through the shrubberies

and perch on the balconies. There is evidence of the havoc played by

Turkish weapons and Turkish sickness on all hands. The impression is of

Alexandria's having been hard put to it to find hospital accommodation.

In these respects Alexandria has changed, but not in itself. It has the

same well-bred appearance as a city. There is the same absorption of

its regular population in business or in pleasure. The Bourse, the hub

of the city, is as animated as ever with bearded, gesticulating French,

Italian and Greek financiers taking their coffee on its verandah

looking down the Square. The Rue Cherif Pacha is as close-packed as

before with the carriages of rich French dowagers and pretty French

aristocrats. They have their coachmen in livery, and they know how to

dress irresistibly. There are not many finer human sights in this world

than is made by a young French mother, gowned and toileted with an art

that conceals art, reclining in the barouche with her daughters in the

Alexandrian winter afternoon sunshine. The Melbourne "Block" brags of

its reputation for beauty, but here is a fine essence of beauty such

as Paris at her best would own, which Paris, one suspects, actually

does flaunt in the summer. The best beauty of Paris, Milan, and Athens,

winters here. So does much of England. At present it is chiefly the

wives of officers; and they are no mean stock.

That Place Mahomet Ali is endlessly interesting and endlessly

picturesque. The gamut of the city's life is run-over here any

afternoon. It's a stately Square: stately in the buildings that

surround it--Stein's and the majestic Bourse and St. Mark's and the

best hotels. There are the rows of well-kept gharries and well-groomed

horses--kept as well as most private carriages. The two well-planted

islands stand green and quiet in the midst of the gentle roar and

moving colour, and the fine equestrian statue of Mahomet Ali looks with

dignity down upon it all. It's perhaps the most cosmopolitan crowd

in the world that moves about the Square. The typically Arab quarter

is segregated--lies in a labyrinth of bazaars in a well-defined area

off the Square. Cairo is flooded with the life and business of the

Arab in every quarter. Cairo, too, is compassed about with so much of

Ancient Egyptian relics as to distract you from the occupation of first

importance: looking upon the living. They are of more import than the

dead. In Alexandria the ancient monuments are few, but those few are

well preserved and mostly confined within the walls of the Classical

Museum. You may watch the life of Alexandria undistracted by any

subconscious urging to be out stooping and panting through the Great

Pyramid for the fifth time (that nothing be lost), or wandering among

the silent Tombs of the Caliphs.

A right good sight in Alexandria is the broad, mansion-skirted

promenade of the Rue Rosette on a Sunday morning. The French "quality"

of the city seems to reside there, and the best of it all is to watch

the dainty little French girls going to Mass in the pleasant sunshine.

They promenade that street in groups for two or three hours until

all are retired into the residences for the mid-day meal. There is a

delicacy of beauty in these little girls that affects one strangely

after eight months from the haunt of woman and child.

The Rue Rosette in the morning, or the Quai Promenade Abbas II.,

fronting the lovely Crescent of Port Est: this is the place to laze

away a morning, hanging over the broad stone wall on the water's edge,

or lounging in the open cafés behind the smooth road. There is that

generous expanse of glittering sea heaving gently between the horns

of the bay. The Fort Kait Bey lies brown on the western lip and Fort

Sel Sileh on the east, half embracing the blue. A rich mellow colour

they have, and a richer blue it is for that. And the white piles of

Alexandria thrust up all about the bay's brink, fringing the clear

basin with a sort of stately splendour. It's fine, too, the comfortable

laziness of the red-tarbushed fishermen on the wall, smoking and

fooling away the morning in the soft landbreeze blowing sweet off the

city. The only movement is with the Arab boys racing along the parapet

or the quiet motion of the fishing-smacks lying off. An old Russian

aristocrat is taking the air in a gharry; the nursemaids are out with

the babes; the well-dressed unemployed Egyptians (they throng the city)

are sipping their morning coffee in the glass-walled cafés. Alexandria

often gives the impression--except in the Square--that there are no

livings to be made. There is a luxurious spirit of idleness abroad in

the place, which appears on the balconies of the houses, in the cafés,

in the carriages of the suburbs. The idle rich--who are largely not

the vulgar rich--are here, whole battalions of them. There is nothing

like the studied idleness of Edinburgh Town or of Naples--nor of Cairo.

There are plutocrats who know how to dress and how to take their ease

without boredom, and to pursue pleasure without apparent _ennui_. All

these things (you feel) have they observed from their youth up; they

practise none of them crudely. They are well schooled in a placid and

luxurious enjoyment of life.

The Alexandrian night begins about 9.30. It is for that hour the opera

overture is timed; then cafés and music-halls begin to be thronged.

At one in the morning it is at its height. The opera may conclude at

two; and after that is the supper, and after that the drive. Far the

best way to see it all is to sit up in the diggings of your friend

overlooking the brilliant Rue Ramleh from twelve on toward the dawn.

There are sacred pipes and Alexandrian fruits, and other things; they

include the conversation of the man who has lived in Alexandria a year

and looked about him not casually, and who realises the import of all

he sees in the pulsing street below.

This is the fine side of Alexandrian night life. There is the sordid

aspect, not good--_i.e._, pleasant--to look on nor to relate.

Alexandria cannot compare with Cairo in lasciviousness. Perhaps no

place on earth can, nor any under earth. For crude carnality you

are to be commended to the Wazzia of Cairo; there the flesh-pots of

Egypt are seething and steaming. Apart from the temperately-conducted

biological friendships of the leisured French and Russians and

Italians, the carnal traffic of Alexandria is limited very closely.

It does not clog the alleys, as in Cairo, on every hand. Indeed, it

is rather the pot-house and the tavern, where the sole business of

the waitresses is to bring traffic in beer, that is the scourge of

Alexandria. Their blandishments mostly are content with coquettish

inducements to "fill 'em up again"; to achieve that they will perch

on the knees of the soldiers and stroke their visages in a fashion

not just maidenly, but effective in the eyes of the beer-boss. These

taverns are at close intervals in all the poorer streets. There is

always a piano, at least, and an employed performer; sometimes there

is an embryonic orchestra--harp and fiddle--whose _répertoire_ is

Tipperary and another--or perhaps two others. There is a continuous

fierce roaring, which subsides only when a Tommy rises to sing. The

pianist ramps out an improvised accompaniment. No pianist has ever been

known to decline to make an attempt. Everybody joins in the chorus.

By the time the chorus of the fifth stanza is under way, there is a

rare drunken hullabaloo, and spilt beer and broken glasses. Ogling

girls and flushed, embracing Tommies, yells for more beer, and drunken

miscalculations of the score and feebly thundering band--all are

checked with a parade-ground suddenness when the red-caps appear with

their roars of _Nine o'clock!_ And the pot-house, so to speak, closes

with a slam.

The picquets are irresistibly strong and numerous. They parade in

squads in half-sections, each under an officer. The Provost-Marshal,

with a scrape o' the pen, has placed out of bounds most of the

danger-zones which a year ago were open territory to the soldier.

The Arab quarters are at their best at midnight. They have their

music-halls, blatant and raucous and evil-smelling. The star performers

are usually confined to one bloated, painted woman who screams an

Arab rhythm at intervals under the influence of hasheesh, to the

accompaniment of an orchestra of pipes and drums whose performers

are elated by the same familiar spirit. Arab music is strident to a

degree that sears the nerves. No drunkenness in the audience ever

drowns _that_. It soars like a siren above the frantic mirth of the

drinkers. Applause breaks forth at unprovoked intervals. The lady is

never perturbed. She is reinforced occasionally by the brazen-throated

orchestra, which is chorus too. The din is unimaginable when they are

working in concert. The Arab sense of rhythm is unerring. Their rhythms

are irregular and without consecutiveness in their habits, to the

European ear that is not closely attentive; drawn out, as it were, into

irregular strands--totally unsystematised, it seems--with the intervals

at cross-purposes. They despise the Western mathematical rhythmical

"groups" and the regular Western recurrence of stresses and intervals.

English rhythm is as much unlike it as the characters of a London

morning sheet differ from the gracefully irregular type of the native

Egyptian press; the difference is as striking as between the tortuous

Eastern mind and the British downrightness; as between an English tweed

suit and the Arab flowing robe. Yet in this rhythmical maze no member

of the orchestral chorus ever loses his way. There is perfect agreement

in the disclosing of the scheme, which, after half an hour's turbulent

listening, begins to show its shape through the rhythmical murk. And

you know before you leave that though English music may make a sweeter

sound than this, the Arab mastery of rhythm is mastery indeed. And that

knowledge is, of course, deepened if you'll stop any day and listen to

a group of Arab workmen chanting at their job.

So long as you withstand the glad-eye of the serpent of Old Nile (who

descends now and then from the boards and collects baksheesh piastres)

and keep to coffee, you will find these Egyptian music-halls absorbing

enough. There are never women in the audience. The Egyptian woman--at

any rate in the lower and middle classes--is never a "theatre-goer,"

as far as can be judged. She earns most of the living. All the

_feloose_ would seem to go into her lord's mighty hand, which does the

spending--mostly on himself. Night after night he comes there in his

red tarbush and sees the evening out with liquor and vociferous talk.

Somewhere in the small-hours a gharry comes for the lady, and the hall

noisily gets emptied. And as you climb up to your room in the hotel

opposite, you can hear the dispersing throng in argument and criticism

far along the emptying street. Standing at your balcony door, it merges

imperceptibly into the subdued murmur of the city, broken by a belated

wailing, street-cry.

In the morning you wake at some hour later than _réveille_, and gloat

for a time that is indefinite over the luxury of a spring-mattress

and of a day's time-table that is of your own framing--that shall

be when you summon up energy sufficient to begin upon it. The city

wakens almost as late as you. By the time you have bathed and dressed

at exaggerated ease and meandered round to the Italian restaurant

it is ten o'clock. Exotic Italian dishes are good for all their

strangeness.... Across the peopling Square you get a car to Pompey's

Pillar, towering above the Arab cemetery. The green mound bearing that

granite column is an oasis in the desert of squalor about it. From the

crest of the hillock you see Lake Mareotis spread out like a cloud in

the morning mist--those shores now waste that grew the wine beloved of

Horace.

The old municipal guide totters up the slope and offers you below,

through the Catacombs. You have seen the other Catacombs, beside the

Lake, which alone are really worth seeing. He shows you the Roman

mortuary-chapel in sandstone at the entrance to the galleries, lights

up his candle-lamp, and you traipse after him through the labyrinth.

The niches in the wall are robbed of their mummies; all epitaphs are

long since gone--assuming there ever were any; there is hardly anything

to be seen that is even symbolic. The old fellow mutters continually in

a lingo quite unintelligible, except in short and isolated fragments.

The linguistic accomplishments of many of the official attendants on

the ancient monuments of Egypt are deplorably shallow. You notice it

far more at places that are of far more historical importance than

the Catacombs. The tombs of the Sacred Bulls at Sakkhara afford the

most striking instance. A relic so bound up with the ancient religion

as is the Serapoeum ought to be in charge of an attendant who not

only can speak English fluently, but is beside alive to the import of

his subject. The old dotard at the Serapoeum has no further English

(obviously) than: _Sacra' Bool! Sacra' Bool!_ and _Bakshish_ and _T'ank

you, Sair!_

The Catacombs _par excellence_, lie along the Rue Bab-el-Melouk south

of Pompey's Pillar; but since we've been there before rather more often

than once, they must be passed over.

And so must a great deal else.

The Greek and Roman Museum hard by the Rue Rosette is hard to find,

retiring into a side-street with a true classical unobtrusiveness. It

is less famed than the Egyptian Museum at Cairo, but more interesting.

Most people have at least a nodding acquaintance with the history of

the classical occupation of Egypt--and here are the relics of it;

whereas Egyptian history is not popularly read, even in a cursory

fashion. In any case, for the inveterate Egyptologist there is a small

mummified Egyptian section. The Cleopatra relics are well preserved,

and especially a magnificent bust of the Siren. Mural and portal

decoration of Roman and Greek houses are there in fine fragments, and

there is a legion of vases and other ornaments from the living-rooms.

Probably the most significant specimens, historically, are the coins;

of them there is an enormously large collection. And the priceless

papyri lie near at hand. Of sepulchral emblems there are a great many,

but none beautiful except the laurel-crowned cinerary urns.

The museum is small but highly charged with meaning. There is a

courtyard attached for the preparation (and restoration) of specimens,

and it has some Roman monuments and gateways too huge for the interior.

The faithful Soudanese are the janitors and the conductors. Here,

again, they are ignorant and English-less, and you sigh for a

well-informed, well-paid, and intelligible informant. Only within

the last fifteen months has a catalogue been compiled; and that is

in French--though in that there is hardly any legitimate ground for

complaint.

Most Australians at home will have heard of the Nouzha Gardens lying

along the Canal Mahmoudieh: the gardens in whose café their men have

sat listening to the band and drinking afternoon beer and watching the

youngsters romp--and even joining in the sport; and finding a welcome,

too. But few Australians will know of the Jardin Antoniadis, beyond

Nouzha, and only half as large; but finer, which is a bold saying. It's

the garden of a rich Greek Bey who has attained almost the splendour of

the Hanging Gardens. He employs sixty men. In theory, you cannot enter

without a pass--to be obtained, Heaven knows where; perhaps "at the

warehouse." But five piastres in the palm of the trusty _sa'eda_ at the

gate passes you through, and you wander amazed for a couple of hours

amongst those flowers and lawns, fountains and nymphs, ghouls and fauns

and satyrs and dryads, and centre about the master's palace buried in

the heart of the garden. It is gardening on a scale of magnificence

and ingenuity--so it is said. Any public map of Alexandria will show

the Jardin Antoniadis in bold letters. The afternoon we paid a visit

we were puzzled to know the motive which could have obliged a dozen

stalwart gardeners to stand at intervals of a dozen yards beating tins

and howling at the sky. When questioned, they pointed alternately at

the heavens and the freshly planted lawn, and we thought they must be

calling primevally upon the water-gods for rain. But on consideration

the unromantic conclusion prevailed: merely scaring birds or locusts

from the springing grass.

The fine drive is from Nouzha round the shore of Lake Mareotis and

back to the Square by way of Ramleh--the Toorak of Alexandria. You

are defied to conceive a suburb better bred. To drive through it in a

gharry is to put yourself in the dress-circle.

If you are back in time--that is, by 6.30--you may perhaps go to the

weekly organ-recital at St. Mark's. Nothing will bring Home before

you more vividly than the tones of a pipe-organ. But you must close

your eyes, for almost everything else in the church tears you back to

war. There's more khaki than tweed in the pews, and most of the women

present are Sisters from the hospitals. And the organist is a private

who plays at an Edinburgh church when peace is on, and the soloist (and

well he can sing) is an A.M.C. Sergeant. The "Gyppo" hired servant is

even here--as he is everywhere--creeping up and down the aisle in his

incongruous colours: none the less incongruous for his brushing against

the Cambridge graduate's gown of the Assistant-Chaplain, distributing

programmes. Music of Handel and Bach sends you aching back to your

hotel. That night you do not want to go into the Arab quarter.

CHAPTER V

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.

That was a Sunday morning. The Anglican parson at matins later tried

lamely to reassure a sparse congregation by preaching futilely from the

text: "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night." The latter

end of his discourse was drowned in the pitiful _Zaghareet_ raised by

the Egyptian women next door: they had lost a man in the night. Their

shrill, ear-splitting wail submerged the sermon. There was an end of

reassurance--even supposing it had ever begun.

The raid had come close on the heels of the Casino dance. The Casino

is the best hotel in Port Said, which is to say a good deal. Every

Saturday night the Casino "gives" a dance to the quality of the

Port. There you will see the best. It's always worth going to. Quite

half the European population of the town is composed of the British

Government officials and their wives and daughters, English visitors

from the mail-boat _en route_, the French Canal Company's officials and

their families, and the wives of British naval and military officers

stationed here. There is probably as pure a quality of European beauty,

well-breeding, and accomplishment as you'll meet outside Britain and

France. The women and the naval officers know how to dance. So much

cannot be said of the Army's representatives. They consist chiefly in

stout Colonels and somewhat young and frisky Subalterns. But apart

from that, they may not carry with them the ballroom gear that a naval

officer can stow in his quasi-permanent home. A valise or a kit-bag

is another thing from a sea-chest, nor is a moving tent a snug and

cupboarded cabin. Especially the French flappers, with their delicate

transparent beauty, dance with an exquisite grace, and the French

dowager-chaperons sit at an end of the room far less sedately than

British duennas. The English Subalterns who can speak French find the

flappers rising easily to the level of their spirits in the intervals

on the dimly-lit piazza; and they probably are not ungrateful that the

fear of a nocturnal bombardment from the sea has extorted from the

authorities an order obliging the proprietor to subdue his sea-front

lights.

They're great nights. There's no such stuff in anybody's thoughts as

Taubes. Yet on that Sunday morning many a girl and many a dowager could

hardly have put head to pillow before the first bomb crashed. A little

earlier timing on the part of Fritz, and the sound of revelry by night

would have been far more rudely hushed than was that of Brussels long

ago by the distant gun on the eve of Waterloo. The period of this war

is surcharged with dramatic situations more intense than were held by

Belgium's capital then. But there is no Byron to limn them.

The Casino denizens you will find in the surf before the hotel any

morning after eleven. The girl who was so charming last night is no

less charming now, as she moves across the sand. She wears almost as

much this morning. All that this means (whatever it may seem to imply)

is that her bathing-dress is ultra-elaborate. There is a great deal of

it; and it includes stockings; and is so fine in texture and harmonious

in colour that you wonder she has the heart to wet it. But there--she's

in. You wait till she comes out, and marvel that she hardly has

suffered a sea-change.

The surf between eleven and one any day; the Eastern Exchange open-café

from eleven to five on Sunday; and the de Lesseps Mole from three to

six on a Sunday afternoon: it is there and then you will see Port

Said representatively taking the air--or the waters. The Eastern is

the heart of the City; to sit sipping there during a pleasant Sabbath

afternoon is the equivalent of doing the "Block" in Melbourne. The de

Lesseps Pier will reveal the utterly cosmopolitan character of the

populace: all classes promenade it. And the great bronze engineer

towers over them and points his scroll down the mouth of his handiwork;

and embossed boldly on the pedestal is his own boast: _Aperire

terram centibus_. The gigantic de Lesseps is a landmark of the whole

sea-front. He faces, and points the way to, every East-bound ship that

enters his Canal. There is a sort of pride in his bearing.

The streets are tree-lined and over-arched, and the tables are set out

beneath the boughs; and there is singing and dancing in the open air

at every café. There is a finely fashioned and adorned Greek church.

Nothing expresses the cosmopolitan nature of the floating populace

better than the extraordinary notice on the inner wall of the Roman

Catholic Cathedral: _Proibito di sputare in terram_.

There are two cabarets--Maxime's and the Kursaal--where wine and

fornication is the business, driven unblushingly, as one has come to

expect in any part of Egypt. As these things go in the land, Port Said

is amazingly clean. It was not ever so. A deliberate campaign was

lately organised to purge. The segregation of the Arab quarter did much

to effect that. Five years ago the Port was the carnal sink of Egypt.

Now Cairo is.

We were hurried back to Serapoeum for the move. This had been pending

any time the last two months: the Turkish feints beyond railhead

had delayed it. But it had come now. We were in the desert a bare

thirty-six hours. We entrained in the scorching afternoon. The

_khamseen_ was whispering potentially, but not menacingly. We moved

out in the cool of the afternoon. Nefisha was passed, with its hordes

of bints and wales hawking chocolate, fruits, and fizzy drinks--and

hawking successfully ... on through Ismailia cooling off under her

fir-groves beside the delicious lake ... up through Mahsamah, where

the flights to the Canal had made their first footsore halt ... on and

on, taking our last look on the soft evening desert, and keeping the

placid sweet-water Canal. We felt we were seeing it all for the last

time. And we hoped we were, though now it looked inviting enough. But

it was not the desert normal, and well we knew it; we had seen too

often this seductive evening gentleness turn to relentless blistering

heat in the morning.... On through Kassassin, always--since reading the

Tel-el-Kebir epitaphs--the scene of that "midnight charge" ... up to

Tel-el-Kebir itself, its miles of tents darkening beside the hanging

dhow-sails ... through Zagazig in the late dusk, with its close-packed

houses and its semi-nudes in the upper stories ... and so on into the

night, with snatches of sleep, until we were wakened at 2 a.m. by the

sudden stop and the bustle at the Alexandrian quays.... The three

hours' embarking of men and baggage, and so to bunk, and white sheets

and yielding mattress and the feeling of a _room_ about one--and to

sleep.

There were a few hours' leave next day, when we took a last

affectionate perambulation about the well-loved, well-bred city. And as

we breakfasted next morning we were moving out of the inner harbour.

By ten we could look back at the brown towers, and see the place as

a whole from the low strip of Mex, away to the eastern sand-dunes at

Ramleh. Alexandria had been good to us, and it was hard to leave her,

whatever the exaltation of anticipating the new field. Egypt as a

whole, despite its stinks, its filth, its crude lasciviousness, its

desert sand and flies, heat and fiery, dusty blasts, had charmed and

amazed and compensated in a thousand ways. It was our introduction to

foreign-ness, and, as such, had made an arresting impression that

could never be deleted. France may cause us less discomfort, and may

hold a glamour and a brilliance of which Egypt knows nothing; but the

impression left by France can hardly be more vivid than that of Egypt,

our first-love in the world at large.

BOOK IV

FRANCE

SECTION A.--A BASE

CHAPTER I

ENTRÉE

You can conceive the sense of exaltation with which one would enter the

South of France in June, after five months in Egypt. You can conceive

better than describe it. So can the writer. In a moment it comes

back from this distance, with a reality that elates; but it defies

description. The universal sand of Egypt: the timbered heights and the

flowered valleys of the Riviera; the stinks of the Egyptian cities: the

June fragrance breathing down from the hills of Marseilles; the filth

and deformity of the Cairene denizens: the fair women of France and the

lovely grace of the little children; the searing heat of the desert:

the tempered sunniness of this blossoming land. If you can make these

things explicit to yourself, you may know something of the high sense

of emancipation with which we left the ship. For we had been looking

on Marseilles and sniffing the air from the harbour for two days. And

in the last hundred miles of the journey by sea we had skirted the

Riviera coast, gazing absorbedly on verdure and perching _château_, and

nestling, red-topped village and silver sand-strip. Then the cliffs of

the harbour mouth--that hide the city--uprose, and we threaded a way

beneath them and about the titanic rocks towering in the bay; and a

sudden turn to starboard threw all Marseilles into the field of vision

in five minutes--red tiles along the water's edge in great congested

blotches; thin red patches straggling back in the green up the hills;

and in the near, high-reared horizon, grey scarred cliffs overlooking

all; and on the main harbour headland Notre Dame de la Garde, dazzling

gold in the setting sun, gazing benignly over the city.

We looked and pondered till darkness came on, and in the morning were

on deck early to see it all by the eastern sun. But they wouldn't let

us land. So we spent two days explicating the detail with glasses.

We moved in suddenly and entrained at once. By the goodness of Heaven

we were detailed to proceed by a slow passenger-train, as distinct from

a fast troop-train. A troop-train rushes express, and is crowded; ours

stopped at every station, and gave room to sleep. At the big towns we

stayed as long as four and six hours. For all this we were commiserated

by the French: "_Ah! trois jours dans la voiture!_" But we could have

wished it would last three weeks.

Think, patient reader! Three days across France from Marseilles to

Rouen in the gentle French midsummer; and time to look about you at

every village.

Four impressions will always remain: the desecration by war of this

beautiful land; the inescapable evidence that the last fit man in

France is in the field; the ravages upon these quiet civilian homes

by death in the front line; the incontinently affectionate welcome of

Australians by the French girls.

It was, above all, pitiful to know that somewhere to the east Teuton

shell was ravaging country such as this. You found yourself saying:

Is it such a valley as that in which the trenches are dug? Are German

shell (and French shell, too) changing the whole topography of a

province such as this?--smudging the sleeping landscape and tearing up

the smiling crop. Is it in such a grove that the sacrilege of the guns

is perpetrating itself? "Gad!" you would hear, "this country's worth

fighting for!"

In Egypt it's another thing. It is less unnatural that the godless sand

of the desert should be stained and erupted; but this is different. And

the old consolation comes--that has always consecrated the sacrifices

of Gallipoli--that the ideals in question are more precious than any

land, however fair.

In the fields of the provinces it's women and bent old men who are

working--and boys. They wave pathetically as the train rushes on. And

in the towns there is not an eligible man to be seen--except in uniform.

Seven in ten women are in mourning at any stage of the journey. One

attempted at first to be consoled by the notion that the French

temperament would put on mourning for a second and third cousin. But

conversation with Frenchmen soon corrected that. Six in ten of these

women wear weeds for a son or a brother or father or lover fallen in

the two years that are past.