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ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN,
Memories of a site foreman at the Suez isthmus.
Emile Erckmann (1822-1899) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826-1890), authors of many successful novels, tell the story of the everyday life of workers out digging the Suez isthmus:
"When I was working on the Suez canal from 1865 onwards” my friend
Goguel told me, “I used to get up a couple of hours before work
to go and breathe the fresh morning air and check that everything
in the area was in order.
The Serapeum encampment where our sites were situated where
the ancient Serapis temple used to be and which had been a ruin
for 2,000 years, was then made up of five small houses covered
in cement, the canteen - a big brick hut 20-odd other, smaller
huts to house the workers, and the Arab village made up of a cluster
of huts around the pipeline which brought us fresh water
from the fresh water canal about 2Kms away.
[...]
So I would get up at night, because the heat of the day was so great that you
could cook an egg in the sun. And to get rid of the fleas that
plagued you, all you had to do was spread your shirt out on the
sand: the fleas would be roasted in 10 minutes.
I became as black as a crow and all my European friends were the
same.
[...]
I quickly did the roll call, and then the workers from the different
areas started loading up; the unloaders waited at the
top of the ramp; mules at the bottom of the trenches brought the
full wagons to the foot of the slope, the chain hooked them up
and then became taut; and then we had everything working.
What activity all of a sudden! Good gracious! what a bustle! And,
my goodness, you can laugh if you want to, what a beautiful thing
it was to see those wagons full of sand arriving at the ramp and
seeing them flie up and tip over at the top; to see others coming
down, empty, and others rolling over to discharge, and hearing
the noise of the machine and the screeches of the carts! Yes,
it really was a great and marvellous spectacle.
After a quarter of an hour, you did not think of anything but work:
the flies, the fleas, the heat, the red sun which rose on the
arid plains all disappeared. We were in the heat of battle and
that one equalled those of the Crimea and others; at least there
would be something left from this …
But it got hotter and hotter; towards 10 o’clock, it became oppressive;
2 camels were constantly occupied getting fresh water from the
canal offshoot for the workers, they just went back and forth;
others fetched water for the machine and others fetched coal.
The Austrians and Piedmonts together with a few Syrian Arabs loaded
the wagons, the Europeans in shirt sleeves, the Arabs naked.
Here, in this searing heat, was a graphic picture of man's greed for money; they were not working as a duty
to the Viceroy, ours, they were working for themselves. It was
easy to see: the mules only just bore up, standing still, waiting
to be loaded up, their heads between their legs, as though slumped
down; the men just kept going … they didn’t half sweat through
some shirts!
And the track-layers who worked from 11 o’clock to 1 o’clock (while
the others ate) didn’t half suffer!…
As for me, nearly always in the shade from the little hut which
served as my office, I nearly succumbed: at certain times, the
trench, in full light of the sun, seemed like a furnace. […] It
was an impossible life but, you know, good gracious! I can’t help
thinking about it as a happy time.
Later, the men’s work was thrown into turmoil by the arrival of the dredgers:
" Others have described these colossal machines, gracious! they have
analysed them from top to toe; they have even told of the wear
and tear of their joints by the sand and how to repair them. As
for me, all I can say is that I have never seen anything as big
or as imposing as those dredgers, nothing that can give a better
idea of man’s genius and his power to beat the resistance of matter.
You had to see these enormous iron buckets descending, in line,
under the boat, plunging to the bottom of the canal and coming
back up full of sand, mud and debris to the edge, lifting up,
tipping up against a huge geared wheel which pulled them, tipping
their load onto the chute and going back down to fill
up again.
Each dredger carried 400 litres of sand, very day doing the work of 50
fellahs; and as the dredgers were steam-powered and worked
non-stop, turning vertically round a large metal frame, you can
imagine the cubic-metres they could extract from the canal in
a month.
But these still were not the company’s biggest dredgers, those
were the dredgers with long chutes which carried up to 40,000 cubic metres
per month, pouring out the debris directly onto the banks using
immense chutes.
But they were enough to convince us that the maritime canal would
be finished something we had doubted until then, myself most of all,
seeing as I was not a very good mechanic.”
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