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All thought now centred on the taking of el Arish, some twenty-five miles further east, and well protected by Turkish trenches cleverly revetted with scrub, and dress rehearsals were held in which the whole force took part, and which meant a good deal of heavy marching.
He became aware that the private domain he had claimed for his own was truly his own, a corridored, compartmented, dungeoned storehouse of filed fancies and forgotten files. A tunneled, revetted, embrasured and battlemented citadel filled with rusty armor and broken lances. A hock shop, a junkyard, a hall of distorting mirrors. A cemetery by the sea, a peak of glory, a slough of despond.
So much for the roads by which our men marched to this battlefield. Near the lines they had to leave the roads for the shelter of some communication trench or deep cut in the mud, revetted at the sides with wire to hinder it from collapsing inwards. By these deep narrow roads, only broad enough for marching in single file, our men passed to "the front," to the line itself.
In the winter, however, under stress of rain and snow, the dugouts fell in, together with the sides of the trench, which, from lack of material, could not be efficiently revetted. Then men sighed for Trench 40, and the little sandbag shelters too small to collect such quantities of water.
Presently the quartz made way for long lines and broad patches of a yellow-white, heat-altered clay, often revetted with iron, and passably aping the nobler rock: from one reef I picked up what appeared to be trachyte, white like that of Shaghab.
It is apparently a Mosque: one portion, the sole of which is raised, shows traces of the prayer niche; the other might have contained the tomb of some saint now obsolete, or might have been a fort to protect a neighbouring tank. The walls are of rubble masonry and mud, revetted with a coating of cement hard as stone, and mixed with small round pebbles.
Unfortunately the trenches were not revetted, and when the frost broke we came to think less of them and travelled as much as possible across the open. The inside of the trenches was very clean not a tin or a scrap of paper to be seen. The refuse was all dumped just over the parapet or in the shell-holes outside. The French are accustomed to an easy system of sanitation.
The ancient temple, which was probably one of the earliest seats of Egyptian civilization, was situated on a mound, now known as el-Kom el-ahmar, "the Red Hill," from its colour. The chief feature of the most ancient temple seems to have been a circular mound, revetted by a wall of sandstone blocks, which was apparently erected about the end of the predynastic period.
The faces of the solid ground and the sides of the causeways are revetted with wattle-work. There is wattle-work all over, strong and very well made. It clearly was the main stand-by of the Britons, whose fortress this was, and their skill in making it and applying it was great. The wattle when first uncovered is as good to all appearance as the day it was made.
This was a trench revetted by sand bags, running some miles to the east of and running parallel to the Canal. 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 Canal through the Augean camp.
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