What do you want here? Turkish and British child soldiers on the Suez Canal. After crossing the Sinai Peninsula during January, 1915, a Turkish army of approximately 12,000 soldiers reached the Suez Canal on February 2, and tried to cross after nightfall, but were driven back. On the 3rd, the British crossed the canal, and struck the Turkish left flank, driving them back. By February 10, the Turks had evacuated the Peninsula.
Was willst Du hier?What do you want here?Suez-KanalReverse:A.R. & C.i.B. No. 718/4
"Outside, on the decks, one finds the haunted darkness and the sea. One stumbles over the sleeping soldiers, wrapped in their blankets. The sea is darker than the sky, but the escort of destroyers is dimly seen, long shadows, scarcely more than a blur on the water. Nothing is heard but the throbbing of the engines. The sentries loom in doorways, standing upright and silent above the recumbent sleepers, like men watching over a litter of dead bodies.Lights and drinking card-players and wireless operators and navigators within; chart-rooms, and kitchens and engine-rooms; all that is life, struggling to keep above water. And outside the mystery and unpitying hugeness of death and sleep, the terror that walks by night, and the impossibility of escape."
Excerpt from the diary of Siegfried Sassoon, British poet, author, Second Lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers (R.W.F.), and recipient of the Military Cross for gallantry in action. Sassoon had been wounded in April, 1917, and by mid-June had concluded that the war begun 'as a war of defence and liberation, [had] become a war of aggression and conquest.' In October he was at Craiglockhart, a psychiatric facility in Scotland, and under the care of W. H. R. Rivers. Ready to return to the war in February, 1918, Sassoon was deployed to Palestine where British forces had been moving north until the shock and success of Germany's spring offensives Michael and Georgette, and British losses, required every available soldier be on the Western Front. Through the day and into the night Sassoon had been watching the officers and men on the convoyed ship bringing them from Egypt to France, and closer to death. Sassoon continues, 'This is rather portentous stuff. I have obviously been rereading Lord Jim; and the mixture of War and Peace and Howards End contributes to the mental hotch-potch.'
Siegfried Sassoon Diaries 1915-1918 by Siegfried Sassoon, page 244, copyright © George Sassoon, 1983; Introduction and Notes Rupert Hart-Davis, 1983, publisher: Faber and Faber, publication date: 1983
1918-05-04, 1918, May, Egypt, convoy, destroyer
