Pte Archie ‘Smiler’ Williams (Lilydale), 8^th Battalion: In camp at Mena, Cairo, Egypt. In a letter to a friend in Lilydale – ‘Ismailia is a pretty place on Lake Timsah, through which the boats using the canal pass. In contrast to Cairo, its houses are more like the high-class residential ones in Australia – Toorak, and not like magnificent hotels. There are very pretty public gardens all round the place – in fact, the town seems like one big garden, even the houses being covered with flowering creepers. The natives too seem of a better class than at Cairo, and you are not pestered with hundreds of boot blacks, orange sellers, donkey men, and others after the eternal backsish.

On our whole holidays most of us go to Cairo by the electric trams or motors cars, and generally manage to have a pretty good time. The buildings of the city are very elaborate and look like huge hotels. Drinking saloons abound in the city and the standard of morality is very low. In the streets you are pestered with bootblacks, guides and hawkers, who want to sell you anything from a walking stick to a camel at four times their value, and if you happen to buy anything you have to haggle with the vendors to get the article at near its real value. The slums are low and most filthy; indeed, the main streets are narrow and none to clean, but the minor streets are absolutely fever stricken, and you never see a native child without its eyes being full of flies, which no doubt accounts for the large number of natives with diseases of the eyes.

The eating houses are dearer than in Australia, and you can’t get a decent meal under 12 piastres (2s 6d). There are many places of interest in and around Cairo – the Citadel, part of which is now a hospital, native mosques, the Egyptian Museum, which contains a lot of ancient and surprising things, and the Zoo at Gizeh, which is every bit as good as the Melbourne ones’.