Fourgues and I hadn’t time to arrange anything for the poor devils. We were given only twenty-four hours’ notice and had to coal and revictual. Think of it! To take six hundred men when you’ve enough to feed thirty-five and not to know whether it is to be for ten or for twenty days, because no one could tell us whether they were going to Marseilles, to Havre, or to England! The shore authorities at Port Said told Fourgues that he would receive orders at sea by wireless. When he answered that he had no wireless, there was the usual palaver and they were polite to each other. Finally, they told him to call at Marseilles for instructions and that there they would tell him what to do. Fourgues profited by the incident to telegraph the owner and demand urgently that we be fitted with wireless because he had had enough of being called over the coals as though it were his fault. But all that is by the way. We took from on board the Indian cargo-boat the entire provision of rice for six hundred men, as well as the officers’ provision of whiskey. The officers had with them cases of port wine and of sundry other drinks. It was lucky for them, for you know except for old brandy and rum, Fourgues doesn’t like to have us drink aboard. They had to have Fafa to make their cocktails and wait on them specially during the entire voyage. The night we stayed in Port Said, Fourgues and I went to buy some eatables, preserves, jams, etc., with which to feed all those officers. The things were not easy to find, and whew--the prices! What enraged Fourgues the most was that we had to pay for everything in gold, but no one ever gave us anything but silver. As the same thing had happened in Alexandria, at Cairo, and everywhere we have been since the beginning of the war, he swears that it is another stroke of the Boches. “You see, my boy, we pay in gold, and never set eyes on it again. Don’t worry! It isn’t lost for everybody! They have their agents everywhere. Our good money goes to Hun-land by way of Greece or Italy and with it they pay the neutrals for their victuals!”