Author: Martin Shaw Briggs
Publisher: London : T.F. Unwin
Published: 1918
Total Pages: 362
ISBN-13:
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In the good old days before the war, Egypt was the happy hunting ground of millionaires. Now we of the E.E.F. have entered their preserve in our hundreds of thousands, obtaining admission by the simple expedient of donning a khaki uniform. We too have danced to Shepheards band, and have sentimentalised over the Sphinx by moonlight. The wealthy tourists stayed in Cairo, in Luxor, and in Assouan, doing their sight-seeing from the deck of a comfortable steamer on the Nile. Manyy of us have lived in Cairo or in Alexandria, most of us have seen something of those cities during our local leave, and a fortunate few have visited Luxor and even Assouan. But the steamers ceased running long ago, and now the millionaires haunt the hotels no more. The Egypt we know is very different from the tourist's Egypt. During 1916 most of us were encamped on the bare sands of Sinai, on the unknown Libyan coast, in remote oases far out in the western desert, or in little mosquito-ridden towns on the Nile. In 1917 we marched into Palestine, and spent the summer in the dusty barley-fields outside Gaza, or on the banks of the desolate Wadi Ghuzze. Travel-books describing Egypt and Palestine exist in hundreds, but they dismiss in a few lines the places we know best. The object of this volume is to picture Egypt as the soldier has seen it, from Sollum on the borders of Tripoli to Gaza in Palestine, and from the Mediterranean to the First Cataract at Assouan. It has no military significance, for it only records the trivial doings of a non-combatant who has had the unusual experience of having lived in nearly all the camps occupied at various times by the E.E.F. This book has been prepared under unfavourable conditions, during constant travelling, involving many interruptions. -- p. 5.
