Turkish delight turns to defeat
QUESTION What is the story of the Battle of Romani, where the Turks tried to capture the Suez Canal? The Turks made two attempts to capture the Suez canal during World War I. At that time egypt was officially part of the Ottoman empire, but since 1882 had been ruled by Britain.
Secure access to the Suez Canal was vital to the British empire to enable it to access her rich eastern dominions.
The first was an attack led by Djemal Pasha, the minister for the navy, governor of Syria and Palestine and commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army. his German chiefof-staff was Baron Kress von Kressenstein.
It was a hard logistical exercise; Pasha had to march 20,000 across the Sinai desert by night.
They were spotted by British and French aircraft, so when the attack was made towards Ismailia on February 3, it was roundly defeated by divisions of mainly Indian troops under Major-General A. Wilson.
Pasha’s men suffered around 2,000 casualties to just 150 British.
There was a considerable loss of face for Pasha. But the Turks did succeed in tying up an inordinately large British defence intended to protect the canal against future expeditions.
In early 1916, a British force, led by Sir Archibald Murray, left the canal towards Palestine to establish a fresh defensive line 100 miles eastwards. Progress was slow because of the laying down of an accompanying pipeline and road and rail link.
The Turks, under von Kressenstein, planned a fresh assault on the canal.
his intention was to occupy the left bank then use heavy artillery to impede Allied shipping.
In June 1916 a force of 16,000 Turks was grouped along the Sinai-Palestine border. The attack was delayed pending the arrival of machine guns, heavy artillery and anti-aircraft forces.
Murray was thus able to deploy his similarsized force near the railhead town of Romani.
Von Kressenstein’s advance was further impeded by the lack of fresh water, the wells and stations having been destroyed by the British.
By mid- July, von Kressenstein had established his force just outside Romani. he attacked on the night of August 3. Despite initially securing the town, he was eventually seen off by British counter-attacks.
having sustained 4,000 casualties, von Kressenstein led his force back 60 miles to el Arish where the Turkish authorities pronounced the attack a victory. In reality, however, the failure removed any further direct threat to the canal.
The British continued eastwards, arriving at and securing el Arish in December 1916, thus successfully clearing the whole Sinai Peninsula of Turkish forces.
Peter Smith, Durham. QUESTION Are there any English words impossible to rhyme? AS FReQueNTlY advocated by the late, great Richard Whitely of ITV’s Countdown fame, the word orange has almost no perfect rhymes.
The only word in the historical Oxford english Dictionary it rhymes with is sporange, a very rare alternative form of sporangium (the botanical term for a part of a fern or similar plant).
Silver is another word for which it is almost impossible to find a perfect rhyme: the only candidate is the rare word chilver (a female lamb). however, orange and silver do have what are known as half-rhymes: the Oxford Rhyming Dictionary gives lozenge as a half-rhyme for orange, for example, and salver as a half-rhyme for silver.
The difference between a full rhyme and a half-rhyme is that a full and stressed rhyme (e.g.hand/stand) or even an unstressed rhyme (such as handing/standing) contain vowels that are common to both words, while a half-rhyme like orange / lozenge or silver / salver has obvious differences between the vowels in certain syllables.
The technical term for a half-rhyme is pararhyme.
Rex Palmer, new Barnet, Herts. MANY quite common words have no perfect rhymes: these include amongst, bilge, breadth, bronzed, cleansed, corpsed, depth, eighth, false, filmed, fourths, glimpsed, gouge, husband, (en)gulfed, kirsch, morgue, ninth, oblige, pierced, prompts, sculpts, sixth, spoilt, traipsed, twelfth, waltzed, wolf, woman, worlds, wounds.
Many other common words rhyme with words that are too obscure to make them much use to a poet. For example:
Acrid rhymes with epacrid, an Australian plant species. Angst partially rhymes with phalanxed, meaning ‘arranged in rows’, and thanksed, an old word meaning ‘given thanks to’. Bulb rhymes with culb, a 17thcentury word for a retort or a barbed reply.
Chaos rhymes with naos, the innermost part of a Greek temple, and speos, an egyptian tomb built into a cave; and circle with hurkle, to pull in all one’s limbs.
Circus has a homophone, cercus — paired appendages on the rear-most segments of many Arthropoda, and so rhymes with cysticercus, another name for a tapeworm larva. There is also murcous — a 17thcentury word for ‘lacking a thumb’.
Dunce rhymes with punce, a dialect word for flattened, pounded meat, or for a sudden hard kick. False rhymes with valse, which is an alternative name for a waltz.
Music rhymes with aguesic and dysguesic, which are medical words describing a total lack of or minor malfunction in a person’s sense of taste, respectively.
Purple rhymes with hirple, meaning ‘to limp’, and curple, an old Scottish word for the hindquarters of a horse.
Wasp rhymes with cosp, which is the crossbar at the top of the handle of a spade, and knosp, an architectural ornament resembling the bud of a tree. And width rhymes with sidth, an english dialect word meaning the length of one side.
Thomas Piper, Edinburgh. QUESTION The late great footballer Johan Cruyff was reportedly a heavy smoker throughout his playing career. Which other notable sports people were known to smoke? FuRTheR to earlier answers, Ossie Ardiles could often be seen stubbing out a fag on his boot when exiting the White hart lane tunnel on to the pitch. The late, great Formula 1 driver James hunt was also a prolific smoker
anthony Milton, london. ANOTheR great sportsman who was a heavy smoker, was French rugby union player Serge Blanco. he was told to give up smoking to improve his play. But his form fell and they told him to resume smoking. This he did, and went back to his great playing. To this day you often see him on TV, still puffing away.
Robert King, newport.
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