al. The emergency rations too
which we found on the earlier batches of prisoners had a distinctly
Teutonic flavour--they were so scientifically nourishing in theory and
so vilely inedible in practice. They were a species of flat gluten cake
rather like a dog-biscuit, but much harder. An amateur explosive expert
of ours tested one of these things by attempting detonation and ignition
before he would let his batch of prisoners retain them, which, to do
their intelligence justice, they were not keen on doing, but offered any
quantity of the stuff for cigarettes. We ascertained from them that you
were supposed to soak it in water before tackling it in earnest, but as
the only supply (except the runlet they still carried on them) was in
the fresh-water canal behind our unshaken line, such a course was not
practicable; the discovery of a very dead Turk some days later in that
canal led to the ribald suggestion that he had rashly endeavoured to eat
his ration. Our scientist laid great stress on its extraordinary
nutritive properties, but desisted, after breaking a tooth off his
denture, in actual experiment.

German influence, too, was apparent in the relations between officers
and men. A Turkish _yuzbashi_ was asked to get a big batch of prisoners
to form two groups according to the languages they spoke--Arabic or
Turkish. It was not an easy task in the open on a pitch-black night, but
he did it with soldierly promptitude and flung his glowing cigarette end
in the face of a dilatory private. As a natural corollary it may be
mentioned here that one or two of our prisoners had deserted after
shooting officers who had struck them.

For some days after the battles of Serapeum and Toussoum we expected
another attempt, but they had been more heavily mauled than we thought
at first. The dead in the Canal were kept down by the weight of their
ammunition for some time, and the shifting sand on the Sinaitic side
was always revealing hastily-buried corpses on their line of retreat.

Jemal Pasha hurried back to Gaza and published a grandiloquent report
for Moslem consumption, to the effect that the Turks were already in
Cairo (as was indeed the case with many hundreds), and that, of the
_giaour_ fleet, one ship had sunk, one had been set on fire, and the
rest had fled. Two heavy howitzers, as a matter of fact, had managed by
indirect fire from a concealed position to land a couple of projectiles
on the "Hardinge," which was not origina