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Updated: May 24, 2025
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 Canal 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.
Later, the general is reported to have written praising the keenness of the two companies, but recommending that in future zeal should be tempered with discretion. Whether the story be true or not is really immaterial, because the incident could quite easily have happened with these railwaymen; it took much to stop them. Not only here but at Kantara a like activity prevailed.
Those people at home who, from time to time, asked querulously, "What are we doing in Egypt?" should have seen Kantara in 1915, and then again towards the end of 1916. Failing that I would ask them, and also those kindly but myopic souls who said: "What a picnic you are having in Egypt!" to journey awhile with us through Kantara and across the desert of Northern Sinai.
We had never been allowed to draw clothing in Palestine after Yalo as we were on the waiting list for France, and when we arrived at Kantara we were a most disreputable looking crowd clothing patched and torn, garments showing where they should never be seen, and boots in some cases almost without soles at all.
The thought of all that barbed wire tucked away into the folds of the ground by the shore follows me about like my shadow. Left Port Said for Kantara and got there in half an hour. General Cox, an old Indian friend of the days when I was A.D.C. to Sir Fred., met me at the station. He commands the Indian troops in Egypt.
We were at once set to dig ourselves funkholes, which we were supposed to occupy on the alarm being given, but they never once bombed us, or seemed to take any notice of us. They made one or two bold individual attacks on the railway, between Kantara and El Arish, but for the most part they appeared to be out purely for reconnaissance.
"Imshi!" was the N.C.O.'s great word, however; he used it on all occasions implying a departure from his presence; when a man's face displeased him, for instance, and when he dismissed them for the day. They made a weird combination, these two, the dominant white man and the dusky native; but they built Kantara and a few other places. As the camp grew and grew so also did its needs.
The principal attempt has been to present Kantara as it looked to us when we crossed the bridge that moonlight night in the early spring of 1917: a cluster of feluccas with their great masts bared to the sky; long lines of neat huts fringing the Canal; behind them a vast white city; away to the north the twinkling lights of the railway station; then, when the last gun and the last waggon had rumbled over the bridge, the broad highroad leading eastward to the desert and thence into Palestine.
Their defeat at Romani had been followed by the steady construction of a railway eastward across the desert from Kantara, and on 20 December El Arish was captured, while on the 23rd the Turks who had fled south-east to Magdhaba were there surrounded and forced to surrender.
And upon me, like cloud and fire cloud of the tombs and the great temple columns, fire of the brilliant life painted and engraved upon them there stole the spell of Egypt. I do not find in Egypt any more the strangeness that once amazed, and at first almost bewildered me. Stranger by far is Morocco, stranger the country beyond Biskra, near Mogar, round Touggourt, even about El Kantara.
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