The first and second divisions and the field artillery were assembled after dark on September 12, on the rising ground known to the Staff as Ninth Hill, which lay about four miles to the east of Arabi’s position. To give the enemy’s scouts and spies no clue to the intended movements the tents were not struck till sunset, when all bugle calls ceased. Then the troops were set in motion, the men marching light with a hundred rounds of ammunition, rations, and water-bottles.[246] As soon as the sun went down the Royal Engineers began to set up on Ninth Hill long lines of posts, running many hundred yards into the desert, to serve as guides towards the enemy’s entrenchments. The night was unusually dark, the posts were hard to find, and it was not till eleven P.M. that all the units had reached their proper places. Graham’s brigade was on the right of the line, with its battalions standing in the following order from the right, Royal Irish, York and Lancaster, Royal Marine Light Infantry, Royal Irish Fusiliers: in the centre were the field-guns: on the left was Alison’s brigade. H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught’s brigade of Guards supported Graham, while in rear of Alison was a small brigade of two battalions under Colonel Ashburnham, King’s Royal Rifle Corps. At 1 A.M. on the 13th of September, Graham called together the officers commanding the battalions of his brigade and in a low voice gave them instructions, briefly and to the point: the works of Tel-el-Kebir were to be surprised; the troops were to close upon them at earliest dawn, and carry them at the point of the bayonet. The soldiers were then roused; the orders were explained to them, and in half an hour the greater part of the army was on the march to attack an enemy of nearly double its numbers, and holding fortifications about which, except their strength, little definite was known. The Indian brigade did not leave its resting-place, south of the Canal, until 2.30 A.M., as to have moved earlier would have run the risk of giving the alarm to the inhabitants of the belt of cultivated land through which Macpherson had to march. Throughout the night telegraphic communication was kept up between the Indian brigade and a detachment of Royal Marine artillery, who followed behind the second division. It was many years since a British general had attempted operations at night upon so large a scale. In the Peninsula Wellington’s troops had been thoroughly accustomed to marching and manœuvring in darkness, but the art was now almost a lost one, and Wolseley wisely gave great latitude to his divisional generals in the choice of the formations in which their commands were to advance; he wished the brigades to be so marshalled that no manœuvring would be necessary to pass them from the order in which they marched into that in which they were to attack, and he suggested, though without positively commanding, that each brigade should move in line of columns of half battalions at deploying intervals.