Another camp on a similar but larger scale was the attractively named "Change of Air" Camp at El Arish, which could accommodate some thousands of men at a time. Here the tents were pitched almost at the water's edge. Men divided their day between lounging about in their pyjamas and bathing, whilst in the evening they could sit and listen to one of the numerous concert parties who came up the line from Egypt. There was also a library of sorts; it was, rather, an olla podrida of books, some left by the troops themselves, but largely cast-offs from the stately homes of England, ranging in variety from the admirable racing-stories of Mr. Nat Gould to a learned treatise on bee-keeping, the latter evidently intended by the sender as a guide to budding colonists in the Land of Canaan. Many thousands of the troops in Palestine will, I fancy, have pleasant memories of these two camps, if only because you could, if you wished, bathe for twenty-four hours every day; and it was a wonderful sensation to feel really clean. Those who had the misfortune to sojourn for a while at Deir Sineid, however, will remember the Rest Camp there with quite different feelings. This was established during the rainy season of 1917-18, and most of the rain in Palestine fell on the Rest Camp. Troops returning from Kantara to rejoin the Desert Corps stopped at Deir Sineid _en route_. Sometimes, more particularly when the railway was flooded, the congestion was so great that one tent to sixteen men was considered a liberal allowance by the authorities. The men thought otherwise. Once the sixteen were safely wedged in, there they stopped for the night. There was, indeed, no encouragement to wander abroad even if you could get out without the aid of a shoe-horn. Frequently a tent collapsed under the weight of its responsibilities, and there are few things more disconcerting to a sleeping man than suddenly to be enveloped in a mass of cold, clammy canvas. Mr. Jerome, in _Three Men in a Boat_, speaks amusingly of his efforts at putting up a tent; by the same token, his description as an onlooker of the efforts of sixteen sleepy but infuriated soldiers, indifferently protected by a ground-sheet against the cold blast and the pouring rain, struggling to erect a tent in ankle-deep mud would have been deliriously comic. One party acquired a number of wooden boxes--once the home of tins of "Ideal" milk--with which to make a floor for their tent. This answered satisfactorily for a time, until the heavens opened and the rain descended almost solidly for three days. On the third night the sleepers were awakened by the sound of rushing waters. Their floor was afloat, a raft on a sea of mud and rain, and in a few moments the tent made an unsuccessful attempt to act as a sail. Subsequently the use of makeshift floor-boards was strongly discouraged; it was better to sleep in the mud.