res to the matting and then fill
in the whole again. Traverses had to be dug right out and then filled in
again when the wall of matting was in position and secure. Progress was
therefore not rapid, and especially on windy days when most of the sand
was blown off your shovel before you had time to throw it and the wind
silted it up in your excavation rather quicker than you could take it
out. Still all this work, together with the wiring, was done thoroughly
if slowly, and it was depressing to see next year that now that the war
had been carried into the enemies' country, all our redoubts had been
carefully filled in.

Other diversions provided for us took the form of unloading barges or
loading trucks, and for some of these jobs it was necessary to cross to
the western side of the Canal. On the outward journey there was never
any difficulty about this, but on the homeward some such scene as the
following was almost certain to occur. As the fatigue party--thirty men
under an officer--reach the end of the pontoon bridge, after a hot
afternoon in the ordnance depot, a cloud of natives hurl themselves
upon it from either end and proceed to haul it in two halves under the
whip-cracking of their own headman and the fatherly advice of an R.E.
corporal. Looking up the Canal the fatigue party, already late for their
dinners, perceive a P. & O. liner about four miles away majestically
crawling south. Their only hope is now the horse-ferry, an aged
flat-bottomed contrivance wound across by a squad of natives and a
chain. With the assistance of a friendly military policeman, the headman
of this gang is discovered some hundred of yards away lying asleep with
his feet in the Sweet-Water Canal, Bilharziosis doubtless entering at
every pore. When aroused he breaks into a voluble flood of Arabic--the
M.P., an Argyle in disguise, addresses him in Scotch at a similar rate,
while the O.C. fatigue party speaks very slowly in English, French, and
what he believes to be modern Greek, successively. At this game the
gippy always wins, and it is only when, confessing their defeat, the
opposition resorts to personal violence that he goes off weeping to beat
up his team, having been fully aware from the first that that was what
was required. The officer in premature triumph embarks his party in the
ferry, into which enter also some horses, two camels and a motor bike.
The horses are naturally very frightened. The fatigue climbing to
precarious fo