THE NEW FRONT.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVI, Issue 7708, 15 April 1916, Page 1

THE NEW FRONT.

FROM CAIRO TO THE FIRING LINE. THE DESERT AGAIN. (From Malcolm Ross, Official War Correspondent with the N.Z. Forces). (Published by Special Arrangement). The second season since the war began is in full swing at Cairo, but the tropic suits and gay gowns of the rich cosmopolitan tourists are conspicuous,only by their absence. Khaki still reigns. Generals and colonels and majors, and all the other official ranks, fill the two dining-rooms and the grill-room at Shepheard’s. A countess or two from the Continent, a few officers’ wives, overseas nurses, in drab grey relieved with scarlet capes—the Canadians strikingly tall and handsome in their well-cut military dark blue and shining gilt buttons—mingle with the khaki throng. A band plays at dinner, and on RaturA band plays at dinner, an on Saturday evenings there is a dance in tile splendid, domed Moorish hall. At the Continental it is very much the same. Other well-known hotels are shut, or are used as hospitals. The Heliopolis Hotel—-the largest in the world—houses only sick and wounded. There are few of the latter now. Tile Semiramis boards and lodges a hundred and fifty nurses—mostly unemployed. Later, there may be work for them to do. At present there is no fighting in our zone. The army is “somewhere iu Egypt’’—doing desert marches, building roads and railways, layingpipe and telegraph lines, and making trenches. A “ Tommy ’’writes home to his mother to say that lie is in a strange country, inhabited mostly by natives. He adds that where he is camped there are no shops—only sand. He walks out a mile or two, and there is more sand! He adds a line asking her to tell father that there is no use coming out to this country to grow rhubarb!

The new colonial troops are rather interested; the old ones “fed up,” because a year ago they had their fill of the desert. They don’t forget the manoeuvres on the hills beyond the old Mena Carop, nor the trying marches to the detested third white tower and back that made them fit to storm the heights of Anzac. The “Tommy,” like the average man, is never quite contented with his lot. At one time he is longing for a fight. At another time he is longing to get out of it. Just at present our men are, as one officer put it, frightfully fit, and against any soldiers in the world they would give a good account of themselves.

From a damp dug-out on Gallipoli to the white damask of Shepheard’s is a far cry and a pleasant change, but after a time the conventions and even the menus of civilisation begin to lose their novelty and their charm, and you long for change. The day comes when you feel a sense of elation in buying another camp bed and a canvas bucket, and all the other odds and ends lost, stolen, or strayed on Gallipoli. With the green fields of the Delta flying- past you in the train you feel that you may be once more getting back to “the real thing”—to new thrills and sensations. The palms and the mud villages, the tall, robed felalhin toiling in his field, the singing sakeer flooding- the land by the power of its patient circling oxen, the sheep and the goats following- the shepherd as in the time of Moses, are left behind, and that night you unfold your bed with a feeling of supreme contentment under the canvas roof on a floor of the clean desert sand. Your batman takes the place of the bigdark Berberin. You are with the Army again. THE CANAL.

It is not so easy as it seems to get to the new front. Leaving your camp in tile early morning you have a long day and varied means of locomotion ahead of you. First a motor-car, then a motor launch along the Canal. The Canal is always interesting. It is more interesting now than ever. In spite of the Turko-German menace, sliips that prove the maritime might of Britain and of the greater Britain beyond the seas, still pass np and down between Suez and Port Said unchallenged and unharmed. A hundred and fifty miles away at Bcerslieba the Turkish headquarters are no nearer their goal than they were a year ago. A patrol away out in the desert, a spy caught swimming- the Canal—these are the only near evidences of posible attack. At Tussum a cross above the German officer’s grave is a landmark of last year’s abortive attack. Out in the-desert a few huddled corpses—skin and hone and faded clothing—from which their covering of sand has blown arc still grimmer reminders of the fight. The beams for a bridge lie further afield —evidence of dogged persistence and unwarranted optimism on the part of our friend the enemy. He failed miserably then: lie will fail again.

Stripped on the banks ready for a bathe the overseas Apollos give us a friendly hail as we go by. Robed Egyptians, singing as they work, are quarrying stone and loading the dahabealis that arc to carry it to the new roads into the desert. At other places they are busy with water pipes and rails, and the many other tilings that are needed in this strange campaigning. A big liner—you can hear the flop, flop, flop of her propeller and the slow beating of her engines—rounds a bend. She carries mails and merchandise, hut few passengers in these days of the dreadful submarine menace. Other ships conveying troops both ways—from the colonies to Egypt and from England to Mesopotamia—steam past. Occasionally a ship of war, with statelier mien, threads her way through, to cheers from the troops lining the banks. The sailors reply stirringly as only sailors can. Day and night this goes on, only

at night the scene is far more picturesque. Strong searchlights illumine the banks. Each feature stands out in bold relief in the garish light. The smallest Mentation is a shadow. It is a map in high relief under a slanting light—very much like the mountains of the moon as seen through a strong telescope. The long, bow-like spars of a forest of dahabealis lining the banks stand black against the light or make contrast with a dredge’s smoke etherialised for the moment in the steely glare of the searchlight. It is all enchantingly beautiful, but seems unreal—as unreal as the transformation scene in a pantomime.

ACROSS THE DESERT. Leaving our launch, we climbed a sloping roadway on the eastern bank, and find ourselves at a divisional headquarters. The zig-zag- line of the old trenches, with their entanglements of barbed wire, are still there. New wire has been added, to make the barrier more formidable. Here the problem of further transport faces us. Every man, every horse, every mule, every camel, is at work. Eventually, we get three transport horses and start gaily on our journey eastward. It comes near to being a disastrous start, for the big chestnut that one of the party has mounted is a bolter and a buck-jumper, and has a mouth as hard as iron. He at once proceeds to exercise all these attributes of the equine race, with the result that the rider is soon lying motionless on the desert sand. Fortunately it is sand. In due time the journey is resumed—in a motor-waggon—one member of the party riding ahead on the tamest horse of the trio.

Running- out into the desert are a road, a railway, a pipe line, and a telegraph line. They fade away and become lost in the sandy spaces ahead. Four Tommies are sweating at the railway, packing up the sand under the rails. ‘‘ I was a bank manager in New South Wales; now I am a blessed navvy,” says one. Yes, they are “fed up” with the desert—nothing hut sand for miles and miles, and then more—sand I As far as the road runs there is much traffic. A train with narrow waggons and a quaint little George Stephenson engine comes rumbling past. On the road motor lorries and mule carts come and go, and out on the right there is another little railway with a still narrower gauge. The little trucks are drawn by mules. They carry stone for the road—a friable limestone that hinds fairly well after it is watered. Each truck has an Australian soldier and one or two “gypsies” in it, one man generally riding postillion. The black and the white work cheerily together, Christian and Mohammedan, in the common cause. The lies of the German press about shooting- down the redifs, and that weird tale of an Australian officer killing two of his Indian orderlies because they were “guilty of clumsiness” would make our men smile.

Mile after mile the six-inch pipe line winds its way across the desert, curved in places for expansion and contraction, for there is a big drop in the temperature at night as compared with noon-day, and where the curves are you can see how it lias dragged across the sand as if it were a living snake. Presently we come to the rail-head and the end of the road, but the telegraph line still goes eastward, and the pipe line branches, stretching several fingers across the sands. Here I feed and water my horse, and await the comingof my companions in the motor-wag-gon. A PHILOSOPHER AT THE RAILHEAD.

The time is beguiled in conversation with a colonial officer who was a plumber and has been promoted from the ranks. He would not appear to great advantage in Bond street, nor feel quite at ease in a London draw-ing-room, but he has been at Anzac all the time and has an amazingsingleness of purpose in his work. The sand doesn’t worry him: he doesn’t care where he may he scut — France, Mesopotamia, or Salonika, it is all the same to him, so long as he is doing his bit to end the war satisfactorily. Yes, lie would like to see the end of it. “Nine months solid at Anzac and only hit once; I’ve got a feeling I’ll come through all right,” he adds. He is married —a wife and three kiddies—and they are beginningalready to ask when daddy is coming home; the youngest one doesn’t know him. But he had to go to the war. He could not have borne, in after years, had he not gone, to have his children asking him where were his . medals. Now he lias his medals and his commission. He lias been volunteer soldiering all his life, has gone through every rank, and is proud that lie has earned his commission through work and not through the death of another above him. He has the Tommies’ unshaken confidence in Kitchener. Give “Kitch.” a free hand, he says. “Let him go right in, and by God I believe he’ll go right through.” He has one other pet idea. “Why not employ them Zulus?” They’re good fighters, and they populate quickly and have so many wives according- to what he lias read that it would not matter if a good many of them got killed oil. “What’s the use of tile White King ’aving- a dog if he won’t lot him bark i Give ’em white officers and a fair number of non-coms, and they’d be all right.” If wc could make good fighters out of our Fijians and our Indians why not out of them? Yes, he was sure the war was going all right. One could not but admire his splendid optimism. He left to go on with his job, the while he made me free of his tent and anything that was in it. BY CAMEL TO THE FRONT. Somewhere out in the desert, as will be readily surmised, there is a line of defence for the Canal. Wo were bound for the trenches, but the I question of transport again arose. It

was finally solved by one man riding the tame horse and the others getting into two things like water troughs made of scantling and canvas and slung on either side on top of a camel. The camel eyed us with a sad superciliousness as he bent himself in sections to the ground, and we prepared to mount. Mahomed Islitak, of Ismailia, our camel driver, let a broad grin spread over his young handsome features as we prepared for the next act. The camel gave a little wriggle in front, and then suddenly arose in jerks from behind, depressing our heads and sending our feet into tiltair. He repeated this performance from the front just as suddenly, and finally we found ourselves in a more or less recumbent position smiling at each other from our water troughs across his wooden saddle. Then Mahomed made a strange noise in hitthroat, and tile camel started off at a heaving swaying- gait that boded no good to any man’s anatomy. This gail lie varied from time to time as the whim took him. Now it was a kind of waltz, punctuated with the hop of the polka mazurka at frequent but certain intervals. Then, just as you were becoming used to this, the beast would take it into his head to introduce the short, jerky, bending step of the Argentine tango as performed by ■an amateur. One began to study one’s own anatomy with a new interest and some solicitude. The pitching motion gave you grave concern about your luncheon on the one hand, and your lumbar region on the other. Especially was this the case if you sat up. 111 a semi-reclining position you were in danger of rubbing the skin off certain parts of your anatomy. Half a mile of experiment in every conceivable attitude enabled us to conclude that we could reduce bumping- and abrasion to a bearable, but still unsatisfactory, minimum by lying as an inert body on the bottom of the trough. But at times, when the troughs gave indication of slipping right round the animal, we could not resist the temptation to sit up again. Then wc would note Mahomed’s grinning countenance down below—a very long way down it seemed—and listen til his “quaise keteer” (it is very good) with mixed feelings of incredulity and contempt. However, in due time, by the grace of God and the good guidance of Mahomed, the camel got us there. We walked back! As we reached the farthest outpost men with muskets and shovels were coming- back from the front line. We walked out to it, and saw that it was well made. The trenches were in strange contrast to those wc had dug on Gallipoli. Here the drifting sand was, and always will be, a problem, but it can he dealt with, though it must be heartbreaking to find that your digging- of yesterday had to be done all over again on the morrow. But one must not go into details either as to the construction or the location of the trenches.

Returning to the rail-head, wc passed the camel trains coming in with pipes, and other camels going hack with the empty water cans. 11l this war in the Near East the water problem seems to be ever with us. Having walked hack through the heavy sand to the rail-head, wc found that night had descended upon us, but we got a ride back in a ear—there were seven in the seats of four—as far as the Canal. There we found a patrol boat waiting for us, and set off gaily on onr journey down the Canal. We got back to camp in time for a late dinner, having tried almost every available means of locomotion except an aeroplane, and we had seen the new front and the new firing line. Whether there will ever lie a shot fired from it none of us can say. But we live in hope.