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.