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ABBASSIEH

We left the ship's side in a barge that might have carried twice our number without crowding. Every man of us had chafed at the confinement of the voyage, but not one did not now regret the dissociation from our unit, with all the chances it carried of never rejoining, and even, possibly, of never getting to Europe at all. Private friendships do not fall within the consideration of motives in the issue of military orders. Men were calling a farewell from the deck with whom we would have given much to go through the campaign. There was nothing for it but to cultivate the philosophy of the grin and simulate an elation at being free, at last, from the prison-house, and chaff the others about the bitter English winter they were sailing into, and claim we had the best of it. But in our hearts we coveted their chances of moving into Europe first. No part in the Egyptian army of occupation, with the off-chance of a fitful brawl with the Turk, compensated for that.

Baggage required but brief handling. We had little more than our rifles and equipment and kit-bags. By sunset we were entrained, and flying between the back-yards of Alexandria. A five hours' run was before us. There was nothing to be seen except each other, and we had had enough of that in the last five weeks. We cast about for something to eat (the ship's cooks' fatigue had bagged a sack of cold fowl before making their exit from the bowels of the transport), and composed ourselves to sleep. The cessation of motion at Cairo, at 2 a.m., awakened us. Half an hour afterwards we were at Abbassieh, tumbling out into the cold and "falling-in." A guide was waiting. The baggage was piled on the platform under a guard until the morning. A pair of blankets per man was issued, and we marched through a mile of barracks to the camp. The fuddled brains of those still half asleep had conceived a picture of tents and the soft, warm sand and the immediate resumption of slumber. This was ill-founded. We poked about for a place in which to sleep. Ultimately we stumbled upon a line of blockhouses erected for messing, wherein we crept, posted a couple of sentries, and disposed ourselves about the tables. It was very cold; had we been less tired, we should have been about before seven the next morning.

Abbassieh, except for its mosque, is nothing but a barrack-settlement. Barracks almost encircle the camp. Indeed, it would appear that the Regular Cairene troops are mostly quartered in this suburb. The eastern and northern barracks are for the Egyptian Regulars; the Territorials occupy those on the west. We see much of either. The Egyptians are impressive—very lithe and strongly built, but not tall. Alertness is the badge of all their tribe. The first impression they give is that everything in their training is done "at the double." As you turn in your bed at 5.30, you hear their réveille trumpeted forth from the whole barrack settlement; and that is significant. To a man, they bear about the mouth those lines seen upon the face of the thoroughgoing athlete. They love to fraternise with the Australians. The Turks they hate with a perfect hatred; more than one has lost a brother "down the Canal." If this is the type of man Kitchener had with his British, the consistent victories of his Egyptian campaign are quite in the order of nature. They show an individual strength, efficiency, and alertfulness which probably is to be seen nowhere else—except, perhaps, among the Ghurkas—in all the British forces now under arms. The best Australian or Territorial unit will have its weeds and its blear-eyed and its round-shouldered and its slouchers. Here you look for them in vain.

The Camp is busy enough at any time of the day, and the Army Service Corps which supplies it is almost as busy as any unit on active service. The difference is that it is not feverishly busy, and that it has a convenient and resourceful base from which to work—the city of Cairo, as well and variously stocked as the most fastidious army could wish. And an army which is merely sitting in occupation is in danger of growing fastidious—with shops of Parisian splendour and Turkish baths and cafés of the standard of the Francatelli within two miles, and opportunity of generous leave. In the first half of the day the camp supply depôt is animated with men of more than one race and beasts of many breeds. Long trains of camels and donkeys move in from the irrigation with their loads of green fodder and vegetables, and the high and narrow Arab carts, decorated fore and aft in quasi-hieroglyphic, bring in the chaff and grain. General service waggons, manned by Australians, are there too. The unloading and distribution is done chiefly by hired Arabs working under the superintendence of our men. The din is terrific; no Arab can work without much talk and shout. If he has no companion to be voluble with, he talks with and at his beast. But here is a crowd of a hundred of them, and it is with difficulty the superintendents make themselves audible, much less intelligible. All the heavy fatigue work is done by natives attached—splitting wood, digging drains and soakage-pits, erection of out-houses, removal of refuse of all sorts. Native labour is extremely cheap, and beside its official employment the men use it for such purposes as private washing; a native takes your week's soiled clothes and returns them next day, snow white, for a couple of piastres. During certain hours the camp swarms with Arab vendors of newspapers, fruit, sweets, cakes, post-cards, Arab-English phrase-books, rifle-covers (invaluable, almost indispensable, here to the right preservation of arms), clothing, tobacco and cigarettes. They easily become a bane if encouraged in any degree. Native police patrol the place day and night for the sole purpose of keeping them in check. This is no easy matter. They are slippery as eels, cunning as foxes, and impudent as they make 'em. They fight incessantly; bloody coxcombs are to be seen daily, and the men rarely hesitate to fan an embryonic fight into a serious combat as a relief from the lassitude of the mid-day; for the noon is as hot as the night is cold. To incite is the soldier's delight: "Go it, Snowball!"—"Well hit, Pompey!"—"Get after him!" ... until a couple of native police break in and carry off the combatants by the lug. Even then, they often break away and resume, or clear off into the desert. And a policeman in thick blue serge, with leggings and bayonet, is no match in a chase for a bare-footed Arab in his cotton skirt.

The Arab is intelligent, and in many cases has picked up decent English and speaks with fluency. Between the early parade and breakfast we often engage them in talk, partly for amusement, partly to improve our mongrel Arabic. They are good subjects for interrogation, with a nice sense of humour—indulged often at your expense—and a knack of getting behind the mind of the questioner. They excel, too, in the furnishing of examples in illustration of answers to questions about custom and usage in Egypt. The best conversationalists, by far, are the native police sergeants, who are chosen a good deal for their intelligence and mental alertfulness. Get a police sergeant into your tent after tea, and you have a fruitful evening before you. He readily discusses Mohammedanism, and Egyptian history and peoples, and local geography and customs, and is as pleased to discuss as you to start him. The intelligent Arab in British employ is a revelation in intellectual freshness and open-mindedness. He never speaks in formula, and is clearly astonished at the want of intellectual curiosity in many of his interlocutors.

The men sleep in bell-tents—some in the sand; others, more flush of piastres, on a species of matting supplied by the native weavers. Sand may be warm and comfortable enough in itself, but it breeds vermin prolifically, specialising in fleas. And at midnight you will see an unhappy infested fellow squatting, roused from sleep because of their importunity, conducting a search by candle-light, engaged in much the same business as his Simian ancestors; the difference is that whereas they were too strong-minded to be disturbed in their sleep by any such trifle, his search is mostly nocturnal—though not exclusively so; and, moreover, in place of their merely impatient gibbering, he speaks with eloquence and consecutiveness, often in quite sustained periods, logically constructed and glowing with purple patches.... The Medical Officer has got a paragraph inserted in camp routine orders about a bathing parade on Fridays, compelling a complete ablution. But what avails cold water, once a week? Most men, however, have been known to bathe more often.

The military Medical Officer in this country is as considerable a personage as the medicine-man amongst the American Indians. In a land where the rainfall is not worth mentioning, and the sun is hot, and the natural drainage poor, and sanitation little considered by the natives, he is a man whose word in camp is law. He speaks almost daily, through camp orders or through pamphlets of his own compiling, imperative words of warning, and in the daily camp inspection the Commandant is his mere satellite. "Avoid," says he (in effect) in his fifth philippic against dirt, "the incontinent consumption of fruit unpeeled and raw or unwashed vegetables. Therefrom proceed dysentery, enteritis, Mediterranean fever, parasitic diseases, and all manner of Egyptian scourges. Would you fly the plagues of Egypt, abhor the Arab hawker and the native beer-shop." Certain quarters are hygienically declared "out of bounds." They include "all liquor-shops and cafés, except those specified hereafter ..."; the village of Abbassieh; the village adjoining the Tombs of the Caliphs (the most squalid in Cairo). It is for other reasons than hygienic that the gardens of the Sultan's palace at Koubbeh and the Egyptian State-railways are placed out of bounds too.

Men scarcely need go to Cairo for the satisfaction of their most fastidious wants. The regimental institute receives camp-rent from grocer, haberdasher, keeper of restaurants, vendor of rifle-covers, barber, boot-repairer, tailor, and proprietor of the wet-canteen.

We get precious and intermittent mails from Australia. Their delivery is somewhat irregular. That is no fault of our friends. What may be the fault of our friends is an ultimate scarcity of letters. One has read of the ecstasies of satisfied longing with which the exile in Labrador reads his half-yearly home mail. If friends in Australia knew fully the elation their gentle missives inspire here, they would write with what might become for them a monotonous regularity. The man who gets a fair budget on mail-day hankers after no leave that night.

Sabbath morning in the Egyptian desert breaks calm; there is no before-breakfast parade. The sergeants set the example of lying a little after waking, as at home. Through the tent door, as you lie, you can see the sun rise over the undulating field of sand. The long stone Arab prison, standing away towards the sun in sombre isolation, is sharply defined against the ruddy east. The sand billows redden, easily taking the glow of the dawn; and the hills of rock in the south, which look down over Cairo, catch the level rays until their rich brown burns. A fresh breeze from the heart of the desert, pure as the morning wind of the ocean, rustles the fly and invites you out, until you can lie no longer. Throwing on your great-coat, you saunter with a towel, professedly making for the shower-baths, but careless of the time you take to get there, so gentle is the morning and so mysteriously rich the glory of Heliopolis, glittering like the morning star, and so spacious the rosy heaven reflecting the sun-laved sand.

You dawdle over dressing in a way that is civilian. By the time these unregimental preliminaries to breakfast are over, the mess is calling; and thereafter is basking in the sun beneath the wall of the mess-hut with the pipes gently steaming, reading over the morning war-news. The news is cried about the camp on Sunday more clamorously than on any other day: Friday is the Mohammedan Sabbath. Sunday brings forth special editions of the dailies, and all the weeklies beside. The soldier is the slave of habit, and the Sunday morning is instinctively unsullied. Even horse-play is more or less disused. The men are content to bask and smoke.

At 9.15 the "Fall-in" sounds for parade for Divine service. Columns from all quarters converge quietly on a point where the Chaplain's desk and tiny organ rest in the sand. By 9.30 the units have massed in a square surrounding them and are standing silently at ease. The Chaplain-Colonel whirrs up in his car. He salutes the Commandant and announces the Psalm. Thousands of throats burst into harmonious praise, and the voice of the little organ, its leading chord once given, is lost in the lusty concert. The lesson is read; the solemn prayers for men on the Field of Battle are offered: no less solemn is the petition for Homes left behind; the full-throated responses are offered. The Commandant resumes momentary authority. He commands them to sit down; they are in number about five thousand. The Chaplain bares his head, steps upon his dais, and reclining upon the sands of Egypt the men listen to the Gospel, much as the Israelites may have heard the Word of God from the bearded patriarch—even upon these very sands.

At no stage in the worship of the God of Battles is the authority of military rank suppressed. The parade which is assembled to worship Him that maketh wars to cease is never permitted to be unmindful of a Major. One despises proverbial philosophy in general, but herein the reader may see, if he will, a kind of comment on the truism that Heaven helps those that help themselves. Colonels and Majors are part of the means whereby we hope to win. The persistence of military rank throughout Divine worship is the implicit registering of a pledge to do our part. There is nothing in us of the unthinking optimist who says it will all come out well and that we cannot choose but win....

As the Chaplain offers prayer a regiment of Egyptian Lancers gallops past with polished accoutrements and glittering lance-heads for a field-day in the desert. Bowed heads are raised, and suppressed comments of admiration go round, and the parson says Amen alone.