it and, to clear the way for the transports, had ordered all steamers then in the canal to tie up at the _gares_ or shunting-places, familiar to every soldier whose service has taken him east of Suez. The merchant ships complied with three exceptions. A French mail-boat claimed the right to pass, and was allowed to do so as a matter of international courtesy: two English master mariners of the baser sort disobeyed, and when the British gunboat that regulated the traffic was out of sight they followed in the Frenchman’s wake. This incident considerably delayed the entrance of the British fleet into the Canal, but by the evening of the 23rd, the day before the Royal Irish reached Lake Timsah, 9000 men and a few stores had been landed at Ismailia; the fresh-water canal and the whole line of railway between Suez and Ismailia had fallen into our hands, and communication by land had thus been secured with the Indian contingent, which had begun to disembark at Suez on the 20th. Thanks to Lord Wolseley’s _ruse de guerre_, these successes had been obtained almost without bloodshed. The report that Aboukir was to be bombarded duly reached Arabi, who sent large reinforcements to the threatened forts. The Egyptians believed that the Delta was the object of the British attack, and consequently had concentrated the greater part of their army at the mouths of the Nile, with a body of 12,000 men at Tel-el-Kebir, a post in the eastern desert thirty-three miles to the westward of Ismailia. To this flank guard was allotted the duty of defending the Delta against an enemy based on the canal, and of guarding Zag-a-zig, the most important junction in the railway system of Egypt. By his successful feint upon Aboukir, Wolseley prevented the despatch of reinforcements from the Delta to Tel-el-Kebir, and thanks to the rapidity with which the naval landing-parties had seized the telegraph lines, news of the occupation of the Suez canal did not reach the garrison of Tel-el-Kebir in time to enable them to oppose our disembarkation at Ismailia. Very shortly after Arabi heard that Wolseley had landed on the bank of the canal he transferred his Headquarters to Tel-el-Kebir, where his Intelligence department must have been singularly inefficient, for, “strange as it may appear, it now seems to be certain that the great transfer of force on the 19th of August from Alexandria to Ismailia remained unknown to Arabi till he heard of it with evident astonishment about a year later in Ceylon,”[241] where, after the war was over, he was detained as a political prisoner. But though the British General had thus stolen a march upon his enemy, many difficulties still confronted him, well described in the following extract from the official history of the campaign.