I sincerely hope that you are not going to take this company from me until the present strife is over. They are simply invaluable, both officers and men, and have thoroughly earned the excellent reputation they have already acquired everywhere they have been. They have worked up till 2.30 by moonlight. Their work has been excellent. The men have been delighted with the work, and they have been exemplary in their conduct. Even if you can produce other companies as good, I should be rather in a hole if No. 3 were to be taken away.
Thus we arrive at the day before the main attack was delivered. It was intended by the Turkish and German leaders that there should be feints all along the 70 miles of fightable front, and that between Toussoum and Serapeum the main body would be thrown in and across the Canal. Plans were formulated to deceive the defenders as to the exact point of the attack, troops marching diagonally across the front (an operation which had brought disaster to the German Army at the Marne), and changing position during the days preceding the main venture; but, nevertheless, this manoeuvre was limited to a 20-mile section, with Ismailia as the central point.
The Turks commenced on the afternoon of Tuesday, 2nd February, to engage our artillery at a point some miles north of Ismailia, called El Ferdan, but there was little force in the attack. Really it seemed only designed to cover the movement of bodies of troops which had been massed at Kateb el Kheil, and which were now with camel trains proceeding south and taking up position for the attack. A party of British and Indian troops moved out to locate, and silence if possible, the artillery, but a sandstorm of great violence compelled both the Indian and Turkish forces to retire within their camps.
[Illustration: AUSTRALIANS MANNING A COMMUNICATION TRENCH LEADING TO ISMAILIA FERRY POST.]
[Illustration: TURKISH PRISONERS IN CAIRO.
On the morning of the 3rd the main attack was delivered. I was enabled to visit the defences at Ismailia, and was taken through the Ismailia ferry post round through the long length of communication trenches that led to the forward positions and back to the banks of the Canal, many hundred yards farther north. I saw the extraordinary pits that had been dug by the Gurkhas, in the centre of which had been placed spiked iron rails, on which many of the enemy subsequently became impaled. There were flares and trip wires round the lines, making, even on the darkest night, a surprise attack an impossibility. Ismailia post, like, for that matter, all the posts I saw along the Canal, was exceedingly strong. The trenches were 10 feet deep, and many of them protected with overhead cover, with iron and wood and sandbags. Extreme care had been taken to conceal the exact contour of the trenches, and from two or three hundred yards away out in the desert I would never have suspected that there was a post bristling with machine guns on the edge of the yellow desert dunes behind which lay the blue waters of the Canal. For at this place, like so many spots along the Canal, the banks are as much as 80 feet high, which, while they serve as a protection, do not always enable the warships to fire over the banks. Gaps, however, were to be found, and the Bitter Lakes presented suitable stations for the battleships that took part in the battle, as I shall indicate.