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Within a few days after the destruction at Maghdaba of the rearguard, or garrison withdrawing from El Arish, another body of the enemy started to entrench a position at Magruntein near Rafa. This was obviously intended to bar our progress eastwards along the coastal route, the old caravan route to Gaza. Rafa is the frontier town upon the Turco-Egyptian frontier.
In their long journey from Egypt, he and Miss Waddington had always been within speaking distance; and who was the stranger of to-day that was thus to come and separate them? "Miss Waddington," he cried, "do you remember when your horse stumbled in the sand at El Arish? Ah! what a pleasant day that was!" "But you have not recalled it by a very pleasant incident.
When once the leadership is established, you cannot by any persuasion, and can scarcely by any force, induce a junior camel to walk one single step in advance of the chosen guide. On the fifth day I came to an oasis, called the Wady el Arish, a ravine, or rather a gully, through which during a part of the year there runs a stream of water.
The doubled railway track was laid as far as El Arish by the time operations commenced, and this was a great aid to the railway staff. Every engine and truck was used to its fullest capacity, and an enormous amount of time was saved by the abolition of passing stations for some ninety miles of the line's length.
From El Arish onwards the track was now thick with marching men, and at Sheikh Zowaid, another spot of green in the desert, we came to a great camp, where it was easy to read the signs of a coming "show." The bivouac areas were crowded with troops of all arms, and as fast as one brigade left another marched in to take its place.
In January 1917 the military railway from the Suez Canal had been constructed across the Sinai Desert and the first train was run into El Arish, about ninety miles from the Canal. I was asked by General Headquarters to send a cablegram to London announcing the fact that railhead was at El Arish, the town having been captured a fortnight previously after a fine night march.
Our horses and men were deadly tired after their long march, and the watering problem was acute. There was literally no water between El Arish and Maghdaba, and the wells at the latter place were in the hands of the Turks.
Letters, they said, had just been written to London, and, when the convention of El Arish was known there, it would be ratified to a certainty; in this situation, it would not be right to suspend hostilities, and wait. To this the grand vizier and Kléber consented, but on conditions that were irreconcilable.
Sharmarkay was living in an apartment by no means splendid, preferring an Arish or kind of cow-house, as the Anglo-Indian Nabobs do the bungalow "with mat half hung, The walls of plaster and the floors of ," to all his substantial double-storied houses.
Unfortunately, when these advices from Sir Sidney arrived at Cairo, the French army had already executed in part the treaty of El Arish. Kléber instantly countermanded all the orders previously given to the army.
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