Front Everywhere

Excerpt:

. " I cannot imagine that any military attack has ever been so welcomed by the land which has had to endure it. British Egypt has exulted positively in its invasion, and Djemaal Pasha and his numerous German overstudies in the command of his army have come in unbeknowingly for quite a deal of money. There has hardly been a soldier in Cairo or upon the Canal who has not offered generous sums to any and all of the enemy's leaders who would bring up troops, march on the Canal and end the waiting.

Djemaal himself has all along been willing enough by means of military feats on the soil of Egypt to confirm for himself the brevet-Alexander title which his Teutonic friends have granted him in reward for his prospective victories. With the gestures of a knight and the intentions of a diplomatist he has written missives to Lieutenant-General Maxwell asking him to let their opposing armies meet on some chosen spot in the open, either on the Asiatic or, as he put it, even on the African side of the Canal, away from cover and from entrenchments, where the thing could be fought out without favour. These appeals proving fruitless he seems to have decided to take things as they were on the now famous morning of February 3rd. The attack as an attack, judged on its own merits and considered in the light of its difficulties, is worthy of appreciation. The ranks of Tuscany have never had more occasion to cheer. That the Turks should have been able to vanquish all the difficulties of the desert (160 miles of desert in a straight line separated their base from the canal), to bring a force through the ever-present dangers of hunger and thirst and to launch it, supported by artillery, actually upon the defences of the canal, is a great feat.

The Turks alone, however, would never have done it. There is evidence of German thoroughness throughout. Willy-nilly the Ottoman Army has had imposed upon it a passable commissariat and a sufficiency of supply. In the matter of food and drink its rations, of course, would have satisfied only doubtfully our soldiers. But the Turk is a natural teetotaller, using the word in the sense of general abstemiousness. Coming across the desert he has lived on bread and water. His bread I have handled ; it is in the form of a circle, just about covering the palm of the hand, more of a biscuit perhaps than bread, answering back rather like wood to the knuckles when they strike it. The specimen I saw though was not fresh. It had a palatable enough appearance, well-browned as it was, and it came from a field-bakery. Turks and field-bakeries !—an unusual conjunction.

The enemy was also, I am told, pretty well supplied with water in his advance. This had been the best year for water in Arabia Petraea for seven years past. The vintage has been
free and flowing : rains had been greater than usual and springs more active. Water by digging has been discoverable just below the surface.

The Turkish transport was no less seriously organised. The pontoon-boats, thirty-six in number, it is estimated, of which we captured or destroyed the greater part, would have done credit to any army. (In point of fact they were German service-pontoons.) They are made of zinc or of galvanised iron or of some allied metal, rather like punts in shape, 19 feet by 4 feet 6 inches, each capable of holding between thirty-five and forty men. They had ropes along their sides, so that they might be lifted with greater ease, and on the side of each in neatly stencilled characters was the word ' Constantinople.' The oars which went with them had been bound with cloth so as to be muffled permanently.

How were these large boats got across the desert ? They were carried probably on some species of truck in the preliminary portion of the march, and when the force debouched into the desert proper they were sometimes carried in this fashion, sometimes drawn along the ground, generally by animal traction. There was no lack of this ; quantities of bullocks and of camels were with the invading troops and one air reconnaissance of ours revealed no fewer than seven hundred transport-horses drawn up in lines of eight. The bottoms of the pontoons were highly polished from sand-friction—conclusive enough evidence of their having been dragged along the desert surface. (The desert of El Tih has mainly a hardish, sterile surface.) Rough rollers or wheels were attached to facilitate their movement.

The enemy's artillery was drawn upon very broad iron wheels, the tracks of which remained still visible in the desert after they had fought and had retired. As much may be said of their ammunition-supply waggons. It is difficult to establish in what strength of guns they were, but opposite the Serapeum-Toussoum section of the canal at least a 6-inch gun was in action and, apart from machine-guns and Maxims, four others, field-guns and a couple of mountain guns.

Of the numbers of the attacking force any estimate is no more than an estimate, but I do not base myself on fantastic reports when I say that there were 30,000 to 32,000 men. This is not a turnstile count, of course, but it is fairly close to the truth. (This total actually included the reserves in Syria. The expeditionary force was nearer 20,000.) They moved with slowness from their original base in Syria : the earliest prisoners whom we took had been about a month en route. One cannot but admire their doggedness in this toilsome journey, considering the prospects which they had before them.

 

They made some wonderfully meticulous arrangements to deal with our aeroplanes. On one occasion an airman, flying on his habitual route—for till the day before their actual attack our airmen almost convoyed the Turkish troops like policemen— found waiting for him a little assorted park of artillery. There were four guns of varying calibre, evidently on the watch, since without any bustle they were successively discharged at him, at varying ranges. It was clearly a sort of pre-arranged test, and though he escaped the shooting was good. And not only did these four let fly. As he still hovered, two others, each harnessed to ten horses and ready limbered, dashed headlong to the summit of a little hill and were quickly in action. These methods point to the existence of German forethought and are a vast difference from the haphazard and incompetent valour of the Turk when left to himself.

Under these conditions, blasted from above and labouring below, the Turkish force reached its penultimate stage. It halted and formed a large base-camp or, more properly speaking, two nearby base camps at Moya Harab and at Mouksheib, in the shade of a deep and sheltered valley, clothed with some light scrub vegetation, about forty miles due east of Serapeum, which is a station on the Suez Canal, practically midway between Lake Timsah and the Great Bitter Lake. Here was the end of their adventure as a mere itinerary ; from here they broke up into their battle-formation.

This formation was on the whole very simple. They came in streams like water from the rose of a watering-pot, spreading their attack along all the front. That front, however, was a limited one. The twenty-seven miles stretch of the canal from Port Said to El Kantara was rendered inaccessible to them by the inundations which, with great engineering skill and at a low cost of two thousand pounds or so, have been made to cover the land thence lying eastward, known as the Plain of Tina.

The extreme southern portion of the canal, about sixteen miles from Suez to the Small Bitter Lake, is so very open and flat and so very coverable by the fire of warships stationed in the canal that even a fanatic in his cups would hardly venture on to it with hostile intent. In their turn the Great and the Small Bitter Lakes oppose the barrier of their waters to the enemy. He was, therefore, forced to attack between El Kantara and the head of the Great Bitter Lake. He did attack in fact all along this front with varying intensity, but his main effort was made where the defence expected it, on the section between Toussoum and Serapeum.

The party which attacked El Kantara appears to have made rather a detour. They seem to have come from Moya Harab and would therefore have been forced to march north before turning west again. They were seen on their way by the seaplanes of Port Said, those wholly daring flying-fish of ours who are never so much in their element as when they are out of it, soaring with perilous floats inland. This El Kantara attack was well pushed, but not made in much force. (It was a demonstration tinctured with aggression.) The place is difficult to attack, as at present it is practically a peninsula. However, the enemy, supported by two guns, got within, or was allowed to get within, fifteen hundred yards of the outer defences. They came on over an arid, featureless stretch of land known as the Plain of the Hyenas, and there they died. Many were caught in the frightful trous-de-loup, mediaeval defences which make one shrink to regard them. The fighting lasted hereabouts from six in the evening till three in the morning, and the Turks' efforts against our trenches and redoubts can only be considered comparable to those of a flea striking home at the Matterhorn.

Between El Kantara and Ismailia the station of El Ferdan was subjected to a slightly hotter onslaught.

The sound of guns sent many of the natives of Ismailia into headlong flight. But then the Egyptian native, when he has not been trained to arms by his British suzerains, is one who takes naturally and effortlessly to flight. The natives of Ismailia flew on broad principles—not to any exact refuge, for no one could find where they had gone. They simply dissipated and were no longer seen. The European inhabitants of Ismailia gathered to witness the sight. The most they could see was the bursting of various Turkish projectiles and the slapping of others into Lake Timsah, on whose banks Ismailia clusters. No shell fell in the town proper.

The main damage was done to the Hardinge, a transport of the Indian Marine, unarmoured but bearing cannon and acting as part of the defence. She came under the fire of the chief piece of artillery which the Turks brought up, their 6-inch gun, provided always that there was only one of these. Captain Carew stood, as he told me, on the bridge, piloting the vessel. The shells were falling all about : one had struck close to the bows of the ship. He heard them whistle past and over, and then all at once came a whistle of which the tone suddenly sank. There was a terrible crash beside him, a fury of light, a tearing shock, and he found himself clinging to a twisted rail, looking at his left leg, which hung awry, shattered and almost severed. Small fragments of the shell had hit him here and there all over the body—he has eighteen wounds —and his left arm, too, was badly struck.

He looked at his leg—he felt more shock than pain for the moment—and said to himself : ' Well, it's all up with you ! '