the blessings of British occupation.

Most of the cases that I heard turned on the adulteration and
falsification of liquors. Egypt has had no licensing laws; and no effort
to apply elementary principles of fair dealing to the drink trade had
apparently been made until initiated under military law for the
protection of the troops. Foreign wine dealers at Alexandria
consequently flooded the market with spurious liquor, concocted from
the weirdest raw materials. The only genuine claim they could set up for
their merchandise was that it was at all events alcoholic. Owing to the
utilisation of refuse beet and potatoes, alcohol is cheap in Egypt. By
blending pure alcohol to the extent of anything up to ninety per cent.
of the whole concoction with any particular paste or colouring matter,
it is open to wine dealers to pass off any liquid as the most popular of
wines or spirits. Case after case came before the court, of beer made of
alcohol and powder; wine of colouring matter, alcohol and paste; brandy
of "essences"; and bitters of "Chinese elixirs." The falsifying
appliances came from Europe, but the bogus labels, which described those
poisons as "specially adapted for invalids and bottled in Glasgow,
Scotland," or even offered 25,000 francs to any who could prove that
so-called Greek "Koniak" was not "the pure juice of the grape," were
amusingly Levantine. British justice is sweeping away these pitfalls for
the soldier and sailor.

Egypt was at this time a centre of Anzac relaxation. To have explored
the tombs of the kings with a New Zealander, paced the roof of the Cairo
Citadel with Australians, and watched the colonial celebrations of
Christmas in the Alexandria streets is a political education. No
Englishman after the War will be ignorant of that golden New World,
where all the labour is well paid, all hours of work are limited, and
all shops close at noon on Saturdays. In any competition for the glory
of being God's own country

"Australia will be there."

We were, however, at war. As a field officer, I had the duty of
attending the burial of British soldiers in the Christian cemetery at
Alexandria on Christmas Eve, 1915. Since the outbreak of the War the
graveyard had extended from its original site, prettily shaded by
foliage, over an adjacent waste of sand and rubble, where over 2500 of
our men who died of wounds or disease at this base had already at this
date been laid to rest. Here sleep many Manchester