From El Arish onwards the track was now thick with marching men, and at Sheikh Zowaid, another spot of green in the desert, we came to a great camp, where it was easy to read the signs of a coming "show." The bivouac areas were crowded with troops of all arms, and as fast as one brigade left another marched in to take its place.
There is a subtle difference between a concentration camp near the front line and one down at a base; something more purposeful, perhaps, in the former than in the latter. There is, withal, considerable less ceremony. Here there were canteens--observe the plural--of surpassing magnificence. In the mere attempt to get near them we experienced something of what our people were going through at home. The queues were prodigious! As two canteens were rather close together we had carefully to note which queue we were in lest we should inadvertently find ourselves at the end of one when we ought to have been at the head of the other, or _vice versa_. In the latter case the unobservant one would have his correct and ultimate destination described with a wealth of epithet and in a variety of dialects.
The ever-enterprising Y.M.C.A. had a marquee, too, where we could sit in comparative comfort, where we met men from other units with whom we exchanged views on how the campaign should be run, on the appalling iniquity of those A.S.C. people at the base, who lived on the fat of the land while the fighting men starved--a slight but very popular exaggeration with the troops--on the possibility of a mail within the next year or two, and on similar great matters.
After this we gave each other cap-badges or buttons as a sign of mutual goodwill and returned to our palatial burrows in the sand, a perilous journey in the dark across an area literally honeycombed with similar burrows, into which we fell with monotonous regularity. Our progress was punctuated by a series of muffled but pungent remarks from people whose faces we had stepped on, or who had been suddenly interrupted in a snore of powerful dimensions by the violent impact of a hard head against the diaphragm. By the time we had reached our own place the remarks had swelled to a chorus with a deplorable motif.