Chapter 26 – Jayjay

Charles Bean provides a brief account of a First Infantry Brigade training exercise starting on 8 February 1915, led by Colonel MacLauren “eight miles from Mena, to the village Beni Yusef, higher up the Nile on the edge of the dessert” in Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-18 , vol I, pp. 130-31.

This Brigade training exercise is described in varying degrees of detail in the following battalion histories: The History of the First Battalion , p. 22; Nulli Secondus—A History of the Second Battalion , p. 55; Randwick to Hargicourt—History of the Third Battalion , p. 38; The Fighting Fourth , pp 29-30. Each of the battalion histories include a reference to the defining moment when the Brigadier, Colonel MacLauren announced: “Officers, NCOs and men of the First Brigade, you are fit for war.”

Charles Bean records pride held by members of the First Battalion in Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-18 , vol I, p. 134: “The battalions of the 1st Brigade (N.S.W.) each acquired, in a distinct and manifest degree, a character of their own…The mere name of the ‘First’ Australian Infantry Battalion meant something to the men who bore it.”

Roland Perry provides the following description in relation to Australian troops in Cairo in The Australian Light Horse , pp 58-59, “If a hawker’s food was of suspect origin or simply designated ‘bad, he would have his stall tipped over. Those carrying fruit in their upturned robes might have them slit with the swift use of a knife. Oranges, apples and lemons would spill out.”

The following Cairo street signs are quoted by Roland Perry in The Australian Light Horse , p. 56 “Don’t go elsewhere to be cheated Australians. Come here!”; and “French and English spoken; Australian understood.”

Descriptions of a female seductress include images from Biblical warnings to a young man in the book of Proverbs, references 5:3, 6:25, 7:13-22.

Roland Perry describes the dilemma of theft in Cairo, in The Australian Light Horse : “Pickpockets annoyed the troopers. But the greatest ire was generated in brothels when belongings were stolen while they were busy with women.”

James Barret and Persival Deane state in The Australian Army Medical Corps in Egypt in 1914-15 , (1918), that “Prostitutes who were registered were examined by a New Zealand gynaecologist, who did the work very thoroughly, and conscientiously, and with kindness. Women who were free from disease were furnished with a ticket indicating that they were healthy. At the beginning of the war there were 800 of these women in Cairo, but as the war progressed, the number grew to 1,600.” (p. 123-124)

In The Anzacs , pp 69-70, Patsy Adam-Smith describes the initial consequences for men who were found to have contracted venereal disease: “The orders issued to the ‘military guard’ of the barbed wire compound in which the venereal cases were camped on the Egyptian desert at Mena were: ‘All patients will wear a white band on the right arm. The hospital is in quarantine and the O.C. guard will take all measures to ensure its isolation… He will be responsible that the sentries do not speak to the patients, that no patient is allowed to leave the hospital lines or receive food or other articles from outside; that no visitors are allowed into the lines, that any unauthorised person entering or leaving is placed in the guard room.’”

Charles Bean recorded in his diary that a shipload of men was sent back to Australia early February – refer Bean’s Gallipoli—The Diaries of Australia’s Official War Correspondent , edited by Kevin Fewster, p. 44. These included “about 500 or 600 men who have been found to be endangering Australia’s good name by their behaviour; or who have (generally in the case of the old soldiers) shown themselves to be drunkards or shirkers; or who have made themselves unfit for service by incurring disease. Some of the last cases are hard ones in that the men going back were merely more unlucky than most of those staying behind. Still, they must have known in most cases the risk they ran.”

The treatment is also summarized in Nulli Secundus—A History of the Second Battalion, A.I.F. 1914-1919 , by F. W. Taylor and T. A. Cusack, p. 29. It states that those suffering from venereal disease were sent back to Australia with the other ‘incorrigibles’ in disgrace.

Arthur Butler, author of Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, 1914–1918 has included a detailed discussion on the problem and management of venereal contagion in Egypt in Volume I – Gallipoli, Palestine and New Guinea , pp 76-78. He has also included a full chapter on Venereal Diseases as they effected the A.I.F. throughout the war in Volume III – Special Problems and Services. (Chapter III), pp 148-189.

The 3rd Battalion History records that Australian soldiers in Egypt in 1915 purchased food items from the locals, including tomatoes, dates, oranges and hard-boiled eggs (p. 32).