nst it. However, at the end of the time limit--eight minutes--no
competitor had moved at all, so that the tortoiseless one was adjudged
the winner amid great applause.

Soon after our arrival we took over from the 7th S.R. as a reserve
battalion and on the 23rd we took over a section of the outpost line
itself. Bir el Abd was now the most forward infantry post. It was
half-way between Kantara and el Arish--so that the "spear head" of the
offensive defensive was making good progress. It was defended by a great
ring of outpost positions, each held by a platoon or so, usually with
another platoon in support. Night after night we slept in clothes and
boots, with our equipment on us, and woke at intervals to peer into the
dark for an hour, or see that others peered--then two more hours' sleep
and another turn of duty--and so on till we were called for
stand-to--variously at three, four, five or six a.m., as the season
changed. Then we all stood ready, rifles loaded and bayonets fixed,
denied cigarettes or conversation, lest our positions be given away to
an approaching enemy, who would not naturally be familiar with them as
he would in trench warfare, while the horizon in front of us grew
lighter, till at last the desolate world revealed itself, empty as ever
and, to the jaundiced eye of a fasting man, utterly abominable. And all
the time the nearest Turk would be a camel outpost twenty miles away. Of
course they might have come. When utterly fed up we would remind
ourselves of the R.S.F. and the Turks who appeared before their pickets
in a misty dawn in April. But to us they never did come. And the effort
to be always ready, with so little hope of ever having any reward, was a
real test of discipline--continuing as it did month after month in a
country where unrelieved monotony tempted us all to the slackness of
utter boredom.

The men were extremely badly off for washing water, and dirty bodies and
dirty clothes were neither pleasant nor healthy. But there was no help
for it. Sometimes a prowling officer would discover a little used well
in some hod within marching distance, where the well-guard--for in Sinai
you do not leave wells unguarded for any chance comer to draw a bucket
of precious water--was amenable to tactful suggestion, or to which the
Brigade could give us the entree by some mystic chit. Then we would go
forth with our kits and letting down biscuit tins would draw up a supply
of the brackish fluid, which we