Pan-Islam. Bury George Wyman
shoes, and bore the legend "Gruss von München."
A certain coyness, or possibly an appreciation of their personal value, kept most of the German officers from actual contact with our line. Only one reached the Canal bank, and he is there still. The German touch, however, was much in evidence. There were detailed written orders about manning the pontoons, not to talk, cough, sneeze, etc., and for each man to move along the craft as far as feasible and then sit down. They seem to have relied entirely on surprise, and ignored the chance of its occurring on the wrong side of the Canal. 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 originally built for such rough treatment, being an Indian marine vessel taken over by the Navy. She gave more than she got when her four-point-sevens found the massed Turkish supports.
A great deal of criticism has been flung at this first series of fights on the Canal, mostly by Anglo-Egyptian civilians. They asked derisively whether we were protecting the Canal or the Canal us. The answer is in the affirmative to both questions. Ordinary steamer traffic was only suspended for a day during the first onslaught, and the G.O.C. was not such a fool as to leave the Canal in his rear and forgo the defensive advantage. There are some who, in their military ardour, would have had him pursue the enemy into the desert, forgetting that to leave a sound position and pursue a superior force on an ever-widening front in a barren country which they know better than you do and have furnished with their own supply-bases is just asking for trouble. Our few aeroplanes in those days could only reconnoitre twenty miles out, and there was no evidence that the enemy had not merely fallen back to his line of wells preparatory to another attempt. We had not then the men, material, or resources for a triumphant advance into Sinai; it was enough to make sure of keeping the enemy that side of the Canal with the Senussi sitting on the fence and Egypt honeycombed with seditious propaganda.
Anyone at all in touch with native life in Cairo could gauge the extent of propagandist activity by gossip at cafés and in the bazars. The Senussi was marching against us. India was in revolt and the Indian Army on the Canal had joined the Turks. The crowning stroke of ingenuity was a tale that received wide credence among quite intelligent Egyptians. It was to the effect that the Turks had commandeered an enormous number of camels and empty kerosene tins. This was quite true so far, but the yarn then rose to the following flight of fancy: These empty tins were to be filled with dry cement and loaded on camels, which were to be marched without water for days until they reached the Canal, when the pangs of thirst would compel them to rush madly into the water. The cement would solidify and the Faithful would march across on a composite bridge of camel and concrete. Our flotilla was to be penned in by similar means.
There must be something about a Turk that hypnotises an Egyptian. His country has suffered appallingly under Ottoman rule, and a pure-blooded Turk can seldom be decently civil to him and considers him almost beneath contempt. This is the conquering Tartar pose that has earned the Turk such detestation and final ruin in Arabia, but it seems to have fascinated the Egyptian like a rabbit in the presence of a python. Quite early in the Turkish invasion of Sinai a detachment of Egyptian camelry, operating in conjunction with the Bikanirs, deserted en masse to the enemy. It was at first supposed that they had been captured, but we afterwards heard of their being fêted somewhere in Palestine. On the other hand, an Egyptian battery did yeoman service on the Canal; I saw a pontoon that looked like a carelessly opened sardine-tin as a result of its attentions.
The most tragic aspect of this spurious and mischievous propaganda was its victims from Indian regiments. The Indian Moslem as a rule has no illusions about the Turks, and will fight them at sight, but there will always be a few misguided bigots to whom a specious and dogmatic argument will appeal. There is no occasion to dwell on these cases, which were sporadic only and generally soon met with the fate incurred by attempted desertion to the enemy.
We looked on the movement as an insidious and dangerous disease and did our best to trace it to its source and stop the distributing channels. After events on the Canal had simmered down, I was seconded to Cairo to help tackle the movement there: to show how little hold it had over the minds of thinking Moslems. I may mention that my colleague was a Pathan major who was a very strict Moslem and a first-rate fellow to boot.
We both served under an Anglo-Indian major belonging to the C.I.D., one of the most active little men I have ever met. There were also several "ferrets," or Intelligence agents, who came into close contact with the "suspects" and could be trusted up to a certain point if you looked sharply after them. This is as much as can be said for any of these men, though some are better, and some worse, than others. On the Canal we employed numbers of them to keep us informed of the enemy's movements and used to check them with the aerial reconnaissance – they needed it. It did not take us long to find out that these sophisticated Sinaites had established an Intelligence bureau of their own. They used to meet their "opposite numbers" employed by the enemy at pre-arranged spots between the lines and swop information, thereby avoiding unnecessary toil or risk (the Sinaitic Bedouin loathes both) and obtaining news of interest for both sides. It was a magnificently simple scheme; its sole flaw was in failing to realise that some of us had played the Great Game before. We used to time our emissaries to their return and cross-check them where their wanderings intersected those of others – all were supposed to be trackers and one or two knew something about it. Of course they were searched and researched on crossing and returning to our outpost line, for they could not be trusted to refuse messages to or from the Turks. It was among this coterie that the brilliant idea originated of shaving a messenger's head, writing a despatch on his scalp, and then letting his hair grow before he started to deliver it. I doubt if any of our folk were thorough enough for this, but we tested for it occasionally, and an unpleasant job it was. Generally they would incur suspicion by their too speedy return and the nonchalant way in which they imparted tidings which would have driven them into ecstasies of self-appreciation had they obtained such by legitimate methods. Then a purposely false bit of information calculated to cause certain definite action on the other side would usually betray them. Some purists suggested a firing party as a fitting end for these gambits, but that would have been a waste. Such men have their uses, until they know they are suspected, as valuable channels of misinformation. No doubt the enemy knew this too, and that is how an Intelligence Officer earns his pay, by sifting grain from chaff as it comes