At once, like an overpowering personality, the East rose up to greet us, oppressing us with its merciless Egyptian sun and its pungent smell of dark humanity.  Heady with the sun, and sick with the smell, we found ourselves in one of the worst streets of Alexandria, the “Rue des Soeurs,” a filthy thoroughfare of brothels masquerading as shops, and of taverns, which, like the rest of the world, had gone into military dress and called themselves:  “The Army and Navy Bar,” “The Lord Kitchener Bar,” and “The Victory Bar.”

Phew! the sweat and the stench!  The East was a vapour bath.  What a climate for a white man to make war in!  And yet everywhere in this city of Alexander and Athanasius, British and Australian soldiers sauntered on foot or drove government waggons through the streets.  Sick and wounded, too, roamed abroad in their blue hospital uniforms.  Only too pleased to display before three eager novices their superior acquaintance with Gallipoli, they told us the story we had heard at Malta:  the Helles army, firmly stopped by the hill of Achi Baba, was melting away in the atrocious heat; but some startling new venture was expected, for the forty quays of Alexandria had been scarcely sufficient to cater for the troops and stores that had put in there; and all the hospitals in Egypt had been emptied to admit twenty thousand casualties.

We hired a buggy, and drove back through the same odorous street to the dockyard, and, having given the thief of an Arab driver a third of his demands, went straight to our cabins to rinse our mouths out.

Next day at sundown, the siren boomed good-bye.  Perhaps there was a military reason for it, but we always left these ports at sunset.  It was sunset, as we steamed out of Malta; and now, with the sky flushed and the air rose-tinted, we began to slip gently out of the harbour, amid cheers and handwavings from every ship that we passed.  We were picking our course between the ships, when Monty plucked my sleeve, and, pointing to a home-bound liner, murmured: 

“Beauty, Rupert.”

I looked, and saw what he meant.  For in the big liner’s bows two tiny English children clad in white, a little boy and girl, waved mechanically under the instructions of their sweet-faced English mother, who, though a young one, looked with a mother’s eyes at our yellow rows of helmeted lads, and waved the more energetically (I doubt not) as she strove to keep back her tears.  In the sad eyes of that youthful mother I saw looking out at us the maternal love of her sex for all the sons of woman.  She was the last Englishwoman that many of these boys ever saw.

As we drew near the entrance of the harbour, a cheery Englishman was swept past in a white-sailed craft, and called out, as the wind bore him away:  “Good-bye, lads.  Do your duty, lads.  Give ’em hell ev’ry time.”  Almost the next minute he was a white speck among the shipping of the harbour, and we were out in the open sea.