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Updated: May 24, 2025
It was not until the spring of 1916 that Kantara dropped its mantle of obscurity and began to take its place as our principal base of operations. From then onwards the place hummed with ever-increasing activity, for the danger of a further attempt on the Canal was now somewhat remote, and work could be carried on in comparative safety.
The Kantara of the spring of 1916 was very different to the great town of camps and metalled roads, lines of sheds and pyramids of stores, canteens, and Y.M.C.A.s, lorry parks and hospitals, real nurses and a cinema, which became familiar to hundreds of thousands of troops on their way up to Palestine in 1917-1918.
They were native feluccas, garnered from every canal and waterway in Egypt. They brought grain and fodder for the horses, rations for the men, vegetables of all kinds from the fertile province of Fayoum, stores for the roads; and at Port Said and Suez material from the outside world was trans-shipped on to them for conveyance to Kantara.
This ended the Turks' right-half section of the Gaza defences. Close by passed what from time immemorial has been called the Cairo Road, a track worn down by caravans of camels moving towards Kantara on their way with goods for Egyptian bazaars.
There was hardly a case of drunkenness throughout our stay no bad record for men who had been teetotal, through necessity and not through choice, for months and were now exposed to the dangers of the vile though seductive liquor sold in the native bars. Our holiday came to an end all too soon and we returned to Kantara in excellent form for whatever might be demanded of us.
During the afternoon the Turks kept up some desultory firing that was ineffective; they also engaged in some reconnoitering of British positions during the dark night that followed, but when morning broke they had all disappeared. Meanwhile, at El Kantara the struggle had reached much the same conclusion.
Do not for a moment imagine that by railway-station I mean anything so elaborate as the merest village station at home; except at Kantara even the best and largest of ours did not rise to such heights. The platform, if there was one, was of sleepers piled almost haphazard one upon another with sand shovelled into the interstices and spread over the top.
The construction was commenced of a broad gauge of railway from Kantara eastwards across the desert. This railway eventually became the trunk line between Egypt and Palestine.
About eight miles from the Canal a line of redoubts had been built, spanning the gap between protective inundations and barring the way to Kantara.
Egypt west of the Canal and Egypt east of it are two very different countries, and when transports took to hooking up beside the Canal banks at Kantara, and discharging their defrauded drafts there, it was only the lucky ones, who got a week's leave or a cushy wound, who ever visited the true land of the Pharaohs at all.
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