I KNOW more about the desert in Egypt than any other part of it, for it was on the desert we trained. There were sham fights galore, but it was mostly squad and company drill, until if some devil had scooped out our brain-boxes and filled them with sawdust we could have carried out the orders just as well. In fact, one fellow must have gone mad with the monotony of it and perpetrated the rhyme, to the tune of ' The Red, White, and Blue'
- At the halt, on the left, form platoons,
- At the halt, on the left, form platoons,
- If the odd numbers don't mark time two paces,
- How the hell can the boys form platoons ?'
I don't know whether the author was ever found, but I know plenty that were laid out for singing it. We began to have a -sinking feeling that we would not be in the real scrap at all, for a good part of our time was taken up in forming 'hollow square,' a formation that is famous in the British army as having been only once broken, but is only of value against savages, and 'furphies' (unfounded rumours) spread that we were going into Darkest Africa or the Soudan. However, we also practised echelon for artillery formation,
that is, breaking a company into chunks and throwing it about at unequal distances, so that a shell falling on one chunk would not wipe any of the others off the map.
Then there was more gloom, for' that looked as if the war was real, and there must be something in what the papers were saying after all. About this time some of the boys' letters began to contain more war news even than the papers, for the padre, who was regimental censor, informed us that if he
left our mail go home unpencilled there would be, many mothers weeping at the danger their boys were in, as they described fierce battles in the desert. Even as -it was, letters were published in home papers that showed our regiment to have been four times annihilated while we were in training !
The only shots these fellows heard all day were the popping of the corks in the wet canteen ! (No charge to the ' drys ' for this story !)
And then, of course, we route-marched-in the desert, please remember ; a very different thing, Mr. Rookie, to the same thing on made roads ! For one thing, we were not supposed to do more than fifteen miles a day, but on the desert there were no milestones, and the distance was ' estimated' by the officer in command. Some of these officers must have been city treasurers in private life, for their estimate of distance was like estimated annual expenditure, generally much under the mark. Mostly they would know when we bad gone far enough, which for us was too far, and
then we would get lost coming back.
Fortunately, there were a lot of men camped in that desert, and as it is customary for a man lost to travel in a circle, we would generally run into some camp or other, otherwise 1 'm afraid we would now be a petrified army, ' somewhere in Sahara.'
Ten miles with an eighty-pound pack on your back, through heavy sand, is as much as a man can endure ; after that he doesn't endure, he just carries on, and on, and on, and on. At that time your company are all feet and are walking on your brain. Anyway, the man behind you does actually walk on your - heels every second step.
In the desert, also, did we dig trenches. No, not the same thing as digging trenches anywhere ! For it is really nearly as easy to dig trenches in the ocean. For every spadeful you throw out two fall in, and if, by the use of much cunning, you do manage to get
a hole dug, then you must not leave it for a single instant, for it is only waiting until your back is turned to disappear. There is one thing-those trenches were good cover, for we would no sooner occupy them than we would be covered up entirely. I would defy an aeroplane with the best ' made in Germany ' spectacles to discover whether we were men or mummies.
But we had one very exciting trench-digging expedition. We dug, if you please, into an old city. It was all jolly interesting, but there is a fly in every box of ointment, and the supposed age of the relics that we found brought home to us the fact that this soil had been lived on for thousands of years by
people much like our present neighbours, without any sanitary ideas ; and one of our fellows with a
scientific mind pictured to us every grain of sand as being a globe inhabited by germs. This was
comforting, for we each of us swallowed a few billion of these
'universes' every day! They got
in our eyes, in our ears, in our nose and mouth, but if they got into a cut by any chance, then we
were subjects for the doctor. 'Oh Egypt, thou land of teeming life, how healthy wouldst thou be
if thou weren't so overcrowded ?
Yet there was beauty in the desert. We would frequently pick up agates, sapphires, and turquoise
matrix. But its beauty was chiefly suggestive. There were gorgeous sunsets-poetry there, but
more poetry still in the wonderful mirages. Why, here, hung above the earth, were scenes from every
age : Cleopatra's galleys, Alexander's legions, the pomp of the Mamelukes, Ptolemy and
Pompey, Napoleon and Gordon-their times and deeds were all pictured here. Perhaps the spirit
world has its ' movies,' and only here in the desert is the ' screen ' of stuff that can be seen
with mortal eyes.
But beauty is not for soldiers-the desert was schoolmaster.' It was the right-hand man our of Kitchener, and well did it perform its task of putting iron into our spirits and turning our muscles into steel, and making us fit for whatever job the Maker of Armies had for us. He knew the place to train us-where the weaklings would fall and only the very fit survive. Any soldier who passed through his
grades in the ' academy of the desert' might not shine in a guard of
honour to a princess his skin would be blistered, his clothes would be stained, but he 'd be the equal in strength of any man on earth, and would have fought the attacks of every known disease.
It was Egypt and the desert that made Gallipoli possible, and the Australian army owes much to the astuteness of Kitchener, who knew the ideal training-ground for the daredevil freeman from 'down under.' |
