ed, but a single rifle bullet across her
bows had an almost magical effect, and the "boarding party" gallantly
rowing out in the tub were harangued by a weeping Greek skipper in six
different languages without a pause until the arrival of an official of
the Water Transport Department, disguised as a very immaculate subaltern
of Yeomanry. No one ever quite discovered what it was all about; but the
skipper having at last become comparatively coherent in French, we put
on board a prize crew in the person of the Yeoman, and let her go.

For the rest of the Battalion there were no such thrills. Parades were
from 6.30 to 9.30 and for a couple of hours from 4.30 p.m. The companies
were not large enough to be subdivided into platoons, and the nature of
the country confined us chiefly to squad drill and musketry. The
intervening leisure was spent in conversation--mercifully we have all
got mouths and can continue to use them long after our stock of novel
ideas is exhausted. There were also frequent bathing parades. The Suez
Canal is not well adapted for bathing. It is extremely dirty, because
every ship that passes drains into it, and after a few feet of rather
muddy shallow, it drops suddenly out of a man's depth, so that the
non-swimmer finds his range limited. But with a hot climate and very
little washing water, one is not inclined to be exacting. Our drinking
water was the less attractive for being so strongly chlorinated. It was
supplied from the Sweet-Water Canal after a vigorous filtering, and we
continued to patronise the same source right through the desert, and
even when we were fighting in another continent in front of Gaza.

The authorities soon found us a job or two to occupy our leisure. The
Egyptian Labour Corps had not yet arrived on the scenes and the digging
of the Kantara defences consequently devolved upon the white troops.
This meant six hours' digging almost every day for almost every man,
divided into a morning and an afternoon shift. Now sand is admittedly
nice easy stuff to dig in, you do not need a pick, and can fill your
shovel without exertion. But no trench in sand is the faintest use
unless it is revetted. Our revetting material was matting on wooden
frames, and these had to be anchored back to stakes driven in deep down,
six feet clear of the parapet or parados, so that to produce a trench
you had to take out six feet of sand extra on either side, hammer in
your stakes and attach your anchoring wi