desert
into Palestine, which was to occupy us for the next twelve months.
During this year we had no fighting to do, but it would be a mistake to
suppose that we had an easy or a pleasant life. Undoubtedly people at
home considered that we were much to be envied, and comparing our lot
with that of those fighting in France, we willingly agree. But it is a
mistake to suppose that we were simply having a good time. The Egyptian
Expeditionary Force was associated in the mind of the average citizen
with the idea of Pyramids and flesh pots. For the first, symbolic
pictures were largely to blame. There never was a design representing
"Britain's far flung battle line," which did not show a comfortable man
in a sun helmet with a Pyramid in the background. Pyramids are so easy
to draw. The artists were beaten by the flesh pot--because they had no
very clear conception of what a flesh pot looks like. But the old
Biblical phrase rose irresistibly to the mind mingled perhaps with
recollections of some globe-trotter's stories of the delights of
shepherds. Both ideas are quite false. Our flesh pot was the dixie--and
there was a great deal less to put into it than there was on other, more
canteen-blessed, fronts--while many a man who joined us early in 1916
left for France in 1918 without ever having set eyes on a Pyramid. 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.

Until the evacuation the defence of the Canal and of the eastern
frontier of Egypt had depended almost entirely on the waterless nature
of the 130 miles of country which separated it from Palestine. There
were troops on the Canal, but their numbers and equipment forced them to
remain strictly on the defensive, and Kitchener's alleged question--"Are
you defending the Canal or is the Canal defending you?" was a truthful,
if rather an unfair, way of summing up the situation. There was no
mobile force, no supply of baggage camels, and the desert, as it faded
into the mirage to the east, was an unknown country in which Turkish
patrols moved unmolested. One of "A" Company's jobs as late as March
1916 was to accompany every evening along the Canal bank a camel
dragging a heavy baulk of wood in such a way