d
he and Maxwell tumbled to the real situation when I first saw with my
own eyes the lie of the land instead of the lies on their maps; and had
they let me have the Brigade of Gurkhas I asked for by my letters and by
my cable of 24th March, and by word of mouth and telephone up to the
last moment of my leaving Egypt, these homilies about the urgency of
seizing Achi Baba would be beside the mark, seeing we should be sitting
on the top of it.

In the matter of giving K. is built on the model of Pharaoh: nothing
less than the firstborn of the nation will make him suffer his subjects
to depart from Egypt; and Maxwell sees eye to eye with him--that is
natural. No word of the bombs and trench mortars I asked for six weeks
ago, but the "bayonets" are coming in liberally now.

Two of Birdwood's Brigades sail down to-night and join up with a Brigade
from the Naval Division, thus making a new composite Division for the
Southern theatre. The 29th, who have lost so very heavily, are being
strengthened by the new Lancashire Fusilier Brigade, and Cox's Indian
Brigade. By no manner the same thing, this, as getting drafts to fill up
the ranks of the 29th. Always in war there is three times better value
in filling up an old formation than in making up the total by bringing
in a new formation. I have given the French the Naval Brigade; the new,
Naval-Australian Division is to form my general reserve.

So there! To-morrow morning. We have men enough, and good men too, but
we are short of pebbles for Goliath of Achi Baba. These three nights
have made a big hole in our stocks. Hunter-Weston feels that all is in
our favour but the artillery. In Flanders, he says, they would never
attack with empty limbers behind them; they would wait till they were
full up. But the West is not in its essence a time problem; there, they
can wait--next week--next month. If we wait one week the Turks will
have become twice as strong in their numbers, and twice as deep in their
trenches, as they are to-day. Hunter-Weston and d'Amade see that
perfectly. I hold the idea myself that it would be good tactics, seeing
shell shortage is our weakness, to make use of the half hour before dawn
to close with the enemy and then fight it out on their ground. To cross
the danger zone, in fact, by night and overthrow the enemy in the grey
dawn. But Hunter-Weston says that so many regimental officers have been
lost he fears for the Company leading at night:--for that, most
s