The Sword of Fate Read Free

attaching to troop formations.
    It was abominably hot and dusty in Cairo, so I was glad enough, a few days later, to be posted to Ismalia on the Suez Canal, where I was to lend a hand in organising new levies of Arabs which were being recruited as extra police to patrol thecanal banks as a precaution against attempts at sabotage. Everything was very rough and ready in those early days, so I carried out such orders as I could get and for the rest exercised my common sense, working for the best part of eighteen hours a day until we got things into some sort of order.
    Later on, my position was regularised. The Major under whom I had been working gave me a decent chit; I did an abbreviated two months’ course in Cairo and emerged from it at the end of January, 1940, with a commission as a full-blown second lieutenant of the Interpreter Corps.
    By that time the first Australian and New Zealand units were arriving in Egypt for advance training before being despatched to France and I was attached to a New Zealand battalion. They were grand fellows and my duties were absurdly light, consisting almost entirely of arbitrating in an occasional dispute where an Arab farmer claimed that his crops or property had been damaged by the troops, and assisting the military police in keeping under control the swarm of beggars and hawkers that were always endeavouring to get into the camp.
    As we were stationed no great distance from Cairo, I was able to go in and dine at the Semiramis or Shepheard’s or Jimmy’s whenever I felt like it and, for the purpose, in a patriotic effort to economise petrol, I bought a motor-bike—a form of transport that I found both novel and exciting.
    Early in April, my first leave came along. Cairo was getting pretty hot again, so I decided to take it in Alexandria, and instead of going by train I thought it would be fun to use my new toy for the journey. Having strapped a suit-case on to the back of the bike, I set off in the cool of the morning and was there easily in time to lunch at the Cecil.
    As I had stayed in Alex before, I already knew something of that extraordinarily cosmopolitan city. King Farouk has a palace and most of the wealthy Egyptians have summer places there, but it is not really an Egyptian town at all. The bulk of the population is either Greek or Italian, although, of course, there is a good sprinkling of English, French and Levantine Jews, with the Arabs forming the poorer classes.
    When approached from the land Alexandria is not much to write home about, as it appears to consist of a long straggling line of mud-walled houses and tumbledown shacks; but from the sea Alex presents avery different picture as the eye takes in its thirteen miles of fine buildings, spread out along a whole series of great bays. The fact remains, however, that Alexandria is really a fine façade with an unrivalled water-front, but little depth and few buildings of importance behind it, so, to get from place to place along the seemingly endless front, considerable distances have to be covered and I found that my motor-bike saved me quite a lot in taxi fares.
    During the first week of my leave we had the excitement of the war at last breaking out in earnest with Hitler’s sudden invasion of Norway; but that made little difference to life in Egypt. I got to know quite a number of Anglo-Egyptians at the English Club, of which all British officers had been made honorary members, and among them a nice family called Wishart. The father was, I think, something to do with the railways; anyhow, it was on the eighth day of my leave that the two girls, Barbara and Dorothy, asked me to go out to their home at Ramleh for tea and tennis. Ramleh is the fine suburb at the extreme eastern end of Alexandria in which most of the English live, and with my flannels in a small bag, I set off on my motor-bike.
    I had hardly covered a third of the distance and was still passing through the Park Lane of Alexandria, where the very rich