British abandon Sollum

On 23 November 1915 the Egyptian garrison of Sollum, a little over a hundred men, boarded the coastguard cutter Rasheed and sailed east to Mersa Matruh. The British gave up without a fight their westernmost post in Egypt. That same day they began shipping troops to Mersa Matruh, where a new formation was to assemble to fight the Senussi order: the Western Frontier Force.

Raids on both sides of the frontier

Since mid-November the order’s men had been attacking Egyptian posts ever more boldly. According to the British official history, on the night of 18 November some three hundred Muhafizia, the Senussi regulars, occupied the zawiya, or lodge of the order, at Sidi Barrani, nearly 80 kilometres east of Sollum. The next night the coastguard barracks were fired on and one coastguard was killed, and on 20 November an Egyptian post about fifty kilometres south-east of the town was attacked. News of the fighting caused serious unrest in Alexandria. The British considered themselves at war, although no one had formally declared it.

Why Mersa Matruh

The command in Egypt wanted above all to avoid a defeat at the outset. Sollum lay about 450 kilometres from Alexandria in a straight line, too far to be made the base of an expedition. Its open roadstead was exposed to attacks by German submarines, which at the beginning of November had sunk an Egyptian cutter there, and Admiral Richard Peirse did not have enough fast ships to protect shipping. Mersa Matruh, almost 200 kilometres further east, had a better water supply and a more convenient position. The railway from Alexandria ran as far as El Dabaa, 120 kilometres short of Matruh, and beyond it there was only a dirt track, grandly called the Khedivial Motor Road. It was therefore decided to pull the posts back to Matruh and to gather there a force capable of dealing with the order.

On 20 November the order was issued to form the Western Frontier Force under Major-General Alexander Wallace, who in February had commanded a sector of the defence of the Suez Canal. It consisted of a brigade made up of various yeomanry regiments, a regiment of Australian Light Horse, a battery of horse artillery and an infantry brigade with the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots, two battalions of the Middlesex Regiment and the 15th Sikhs. These were units hastily scraped together from what remained in Egypt after the troops had left for Gallipoli: some of the Territorial battalions had not finished their training, and the cavalry brigade was cobbled together from men of some twenty regiments. On 21 November a train took to El Dabaa the 2nd Battalion of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade, which had only just arrived in Egypt, a company of Sikhs and a detachment of the Bikaner Camel Corps, to guard the railway line.

Retreat from the coast

During the night of 23–24 November three trawlers left Alexandria with three hundred Sikhs. They were to land them at Matruh and sail on to fetch the Sollum garrison, but it was already on its way aboard the Rasheed and reached Matruh at the same time as they did. A British prisoner from the sunk Tara, Commander R. S. Gwatkin-Williams, later recorded a version he had heard according to which the garrison had to leave the town in half an hour, during a sandstorm and under attack. The official histories speak simply of a planned withdrawal. The post at Sidi Barrani beat off an attack on the evening of 22 November, set out before dawn by land and reached Matruh on 24 November. The post at Baqbaq (Buq Buq) was also evacuated. During the march the weakness of the Egyptian Coastguard became apparent: according to the British official history, 14 officers and cadets and 120 other ranks went over to the Senussi with their weapons, equipment and 176 camels. The Egyptian infantry and artillery units, of whose loyalty they were not sure, the British quickly sent away from Matruh.

Immediately after the evacuation small steamers and sailing vessels carrying ammunition for the order began to put in at Sollum. On the coast the British departure was taken as proof that the submarines had deprived them of command of the sea, and the Bedouin between El Dabaa and the frontier favoured Sayyid Ahmad, expecting him to win. Moving the troops to Matruh took a long time, because only trawlers were available and escort ships were lacking, as German submarines had just stepped up their attacks on the routes to the Dardanelles and Salonika. By 3 December the Matruh garrison numbered 1,400 men, and by 10 December all the planned forces had arrived. As early as 11 December Wallace’s column fought its first skirmish at Wadi Senab west of the town. In it fell Lieutenant-Colonel C. L. Snow, the former commandant of Sollum, who had believed to the end that war with the order could be averted.