Part 6 (1/2)
CHAPTER VI
MUDROS, CAIRO, SUEZ Ca.n.a.l AND HILL 70 LINE.
In the early hours of the morning of 9th January the transports, which contained the troops which had left in the first party from Gallipoli the previous night, arrived at Mudros Bay. As explained in the last chapter the Battalion was scattered throughout several s.h.i.+ps and the process of disembarkation was by no means easy. However, the Staff got busy and lighters were soon arriving alongside the transports disembarking the troops by divisions. The lighters then moved to different parts of the sh.o.r.e where each division had a place of rendezvous. The sorting out then commenced and with a certain amount of confusion the battalions were ultimately a.s.sembled.
The 52nd Division was allotted a camping ground on the south side of the bay, the camp being known as Sarpi camp. After the Battalion area had been pointed out, canvas was issued and the camp pitched. The only canvas available at the time consisted of a large number of hospital marquee tents which were to accommodate the men and about a dozen bell tents for the use of officers.
The baggage which had been sent off from Gallipoli a few days before the evacuation was found on our arrival at our camp, or rather a proportion of it. It was found that a considerable amount of it had been pilfered, and we were informed that the rest of the baggage had been sent direct to Alexandria.
Life at Mudros was a great change and a great relief after our months on the Peninsula. We were able to live above ground and walk about freely in the open without any fear of drawing the enemy's artillery fire. It was difficult at first to realise that we were out of the fighting for the time being, but it did not take long to accustom ourselves to this, as after all it is the more natural life.
The weather on the whole was good, the days being bright and warm but intensely cold at night, with a certain amount of frost. The opportunity was taken to issue new clothing and in connection with this it may be mentioned how the Army Ordnance Corps unconsciously gave us a little amus.e.m.e.nt. Two of the battalions in the Brigade were kilted, and the other battalions wore trews. The Ordnance people seemed to forget this and issued to all four battalions the usual winter under-clothing which, as far as the lower garments were concerned, was not exactly suited to a kilted battalion.
While on Gallipoli the Commander of the 8th Corps, General Sir Francis Davis, had organised a Football Tournament for teams representing all units in the corps. The Battalion had been very successful in the preliminary rounds and had reached the final by the time of the evacuation. The team which they had to meet in the deciding round represented the Anson Battalion of the Royal Naval Division, and it was decided to play the tie while we were at Mudros. The day was an unfortunate one as it was blowing hard, with the result that the football was not of a very high order. The Battalion team did not succeed in beating the Anson Battalion, but it was a hard game and there is no doubt the better team won.
Those who played in the final match were, Pte. E. Hammil, ”A” Company; Pte. J.B. Smith, ”B” Company; Pte. A. Jardine, ”D” Company; Sergt. D.
Smith, ”D” Company; Pte. J. M'Cann, ”A” Company; Sergt. J. Logan ”A”
Company; Pte. J. Laird, ”C” Company; Pte. T. Knight, ”D” Company; Sergt.
D. Calder, ”C” Company; Corpl. E. Stevenson, ”B” Company, and Sergt. A.
Bain, ”A” Company.
In connection with this tournament an incident occurred on the 19th December, during the Battalion's attack. Captain Campbell had charge of the football arrangements. In the middle of the battle, while sitting more or less triumphantly in a captured Turkish trench, he received by special messenger word from the Division that the Battalion team must play the 5th R.S.F. the following day or be struck out of the tournament. A triumph of departmental work.
While living in camp at Mudros efforts were made to improve generally the feeding of officers and men, and as there were more canteens on the island with greater variety of goods for sale than we had been accustomed to on Gallipoli, our efforts met with a certain amount of success. One day while Major Neilson was scouring the countryside he came across several turkeys in one of the Greek canteens. One of these was immediately purchased and brought back to camp. The next problem was to find some one sufficiently skilled to dress the bird and prepare it for the pot. Lieut. Graham volunteered to carry out the work and really made an excellent job of it. The cooking was done in the lid of a camp kettle over an open fire and everyone who tasted the turkey that night at dinner voted it a great success.
About a week after our arrival at Mudros, Major Findlay left in charge of the Brigade advance party for Alexandria, and about a fortnight later Captain Buchanan, Captain Campbell and Lieut. Barbe also went on in advance. The day after Major Findlay left, orders were issued that the Battalion was to embark the following day, but as was very often the case under similar circ.u.mstances, when the camp was struck these orders were cancelled and it was not until the last day of January that the Battalion embarked on _H.M.T. Briton_, which also carried the 7/8th Scottish Rifles and the 6th East Yorks with Colonel Morrison as O.C.
troops.
Three days later the transport arrived at Alexandria, but did not dock until the following day late in the afternoon. About 8 o'clock that night disembarkation was carried out and a few hours later the Battalion had entrained and left Alexandria for Cairo.
The Brigade advance party had made all the arrangements for the camp at Cairo, which was pitched on the ground near the Egyptian Army Barracks at Abba.s.sieh. Life there was very pleasant and the joys of a town were very much appreciated by every one after our months of exile.
We were not left long however to enjoy ourselves, and after about a fortnight at Cairo we again entrained for a station on the Suez Ca.n.a.l.
Little did we then think it was the first move in our long trek into Palestine.
We arrived at Ballah West on the 17th February and got our first impression of what our life in the desert was to be like. The weather was very broken and not too warm, but moving about constantly in the sand was very tiring and depressing. We had had the experience of sand at Aboukir, but that was at the side of the sea where one is quite prepared for it, but at Ballah it seemed to be different. There was nothing but sand on every side except for the thin strip of water, the Suez Ca.n.a.l running north and south.
After about a week in camp on the west side of the Ca.n.a.l we received orders to move to the other bank and relieve the 31st Division, who at that time were occupying the ca.n.a.l defences. After some confusion which arose through the orders which had been given to us not having been issued to the 31st Division, relief was carried out and we saw the ”Great Wall of China.” This was a trench revetted by sand bags, running some miles to the east of and running parallel to the Ca.n.a.l. Its tactical uses we never could understand. Days were spent trying to clean up Ballah East; had Hercules been with us he would have diverted the Ca.n.a.l through the Augean camp.
On March 2nd the Battalion took over posts from Ballah to Kantara; the work was not arduous, being mainly to see that no unauthorised persons visited the Ca.n.a.l to put mines therein. Everyone bathed and one officer caught a mullet on a white sea fly, but no more; he always felt sure if he were to fish at the right time he would get a good basket, but his dreams were never realised.
Several officers who had been wounded or sick now rejoined us, including Captains Brand and Beckett and Lieut. MacLellan, also a draft of officers from the 3rd and 4th H.L.I., consisting of Lieuts. Parr, Strachan, T.B. Clark, Burleigh, Grey, Buchanan, A. Le G. Campbell.
On Sunday, March 12th, the Battalion was transferred in barges up the Ca.n.a.l to El Kantara, where ”A” Company was already on detachment.
Kantara was the starting-point for the advance across the Sinai desert into Palestine, which was to occupy us for the next twelve months.
During this year we had no fighting to do, but it would be a mistake to suppose that we had an easy or a pleasant life. Undoubtedly people at home considered that we were much to be envied, and comparing our lot with that of those fighting in France, we willingly agree. But it is a mistake to suppose that we were simply having a good time. The Egyptian Expeditionary Force was a.s.sociated in the mind of the average citizen with the idea of Pyramids and flesh pots. For the first, symbolic pictures were largely to blame. There never was a design representing ”Britain's far flung battle line,” which did not show a comfortable man in a sun helmet with a Pyramid in the background. Pyramids are so easy to draw. The artists were beaten by the flesh pot--because they had no very clear conception of what a flesh pot looks like. But the old Biblical phrase rose irresistibly to the mind mingled perhaps with recollections of some globe-trotter's stories of the delights of shepherds. Both ideas are quite false. Our flesh pot was the dixie--and there was a great deal less to put into it than there was on other, more canteen-blessed, fronts--while many a man who joined us early in 1916 left for France in 1918 without ever having set eyes on a Pyramid. Egypt west of the Ca.n.a.l and Egypt east of it are two very different countries, and when transports took to hooking up beside the Ca.n.a.l banks at Kantara, and discharging their defrauded drafts there, it was only the lucky ones, who got a week's leave or a cushy wound, who ever visited the true land of the Pharaohs at all.
Until the evacuation the defence of the Ca.n.a.l and of the eastern frontier of Egypt had depended almost entirely on the waterless nature of the 130 miles of country which separated it from Palestine. There were troops on the Ca.n.a.l, but their numbers and equipment forced them to remain strictly on the defensive, and Kitchener's alleged question--”Are you defending the Ca.n.a.l or is the Ca.n.a.l defending you?” was a truthful, if rather an unfair, way of summing up the situation. There was no mobile force, no supply of baggage camels, and the desert, as it faded into the mirage to the east, was an unknown country in which Turkish patrols moved unmolested. One of ”A” Company's jobs as late as March 1916 was to accompany every evening along the Ca.n.a.l bank a camel dragging a heavy baulk of wood in such a way as to sweep and flatten a track in the sand, so broad that an agile Turk could not be expected to jump over it. In the morning this track was carefully scrutinised, and it was possible to see whether anybody besides the ants and beetles, who had a right of way, had gone across it during the night, and if so steps would be taken, as required.
But General Murray with troops at his disposal did not propose to allow this state of affairs to continue. The routes by which a hostile force could advance on Egypt from the east were limited, and the southern ones, through very difficult mountainous country, were unlikely if not impossible, especially when raiders or aeroplanes had destroyed the stores of water in the rock cisterns. The northern route lay close along the sea coast, through a desert of heavy sand, in which at many places water, which most horses refused, but which seemed good enough for a Turk, could be obtained by digging wells. This route bent south-westward from Romani and reached the Ca.n.a.l at Kantara, and it was this route that he determined to block by advancing eastward along it himself.