At Suez we disembarked and we were none of us sorry to say good-bye to the old ship, and there were no fond farewells taken of the crew, for they were as unpatriotic a set of scoundrels as ever sailed under the British flag. They robbed us right and left. They stole our ration jam, selling it to us in the form of a drink. A penny a glass would buy "pineapple cordial," which was merely a tin of pineapple jam mixed up in a ship's bucket of iced water. "Orangeade" was marmalade jam and water. Strange to say, there were always enough "boobs" among us soldiers to fall for it. On board ship we were not allowed to wear boots, as the hobnails in our military footwear could cut up the deck, so those that hadn't shoes went barefoot, but at the end of the voyage when we began to search for our boots there was the deuce to pay. Only half the men could find them at all, and it was only through a search of the whole ship that many of us did not have to walk in the sands of Egypt barefooted. The missing pairs were found among the sailors, of course, one of them even having six. It is a wonder those sailors didn't cut our hair when we were asleep to stuff their pillows--they certainly skinned us as close as they could. PART II EGYPT CHAPTER VII THE LAND OF SAND AND SWEAT How we hated Egypt before we left it! It may be a land of fascination to the tourist who drives about in gharris to view its wonders and stays at a European hotel, but to be there as a soldier, to lie in its vile sand, to swallow its conglomerated stinks, to rub the filth off the seats in the third-class train-carriages, to have under your eyes continually the animated lump of muck that the "Gyppo" is, to have your ears filled continually with the vile expressions that the Egyptian conceives as wit, is an experience that makes one so disgusted that few Australians that were there will ever want to see the rotten country again. At first, however, all was novelty, and we were like children on a picnic as we marched from the wharf into the third-class carriages of the Egyptian state railways waiting for us just outside the gates. It was some job getting into those carriages. Ordinarily white people travelled first-class, but we were troops, and it was like pushing against a wall to pass the smell that came from the doors of these carriages that had been the preserves of the unwashed nigger of varied age and sex for the Lord knows how many years.