By the end of July the troops began to leave the United Kingdom: and the second battalion of the Royal Irish regiment, almost the last corps to sail, embarked on August 8, 1882, at Plymouth, bound, as was then believed by all on board, for Alexandria. To enable the reader to appreciate the situation when the battalion reached the seat of war, it is necessary to give a short account of the events which took place while it was still at sea. On the 15th of August Lord Wolseley arrived at Alexandria, and with his naval colleague, Admiral Lord Alcester, settled the details of the combined operation by which the sailors in the men-of-war already stationed in the Suez canal were to seize and hold the towns upon its banks, until the soldiers could begin to land at Ismailia. A considerable portion of the expedition had already disembarked at Alexandria, and transports were daily, almost hourly, arriving from England. The question of how these troops were to be re-embarked and despatched to the canal without giving Arabi any clue to their destination now had to be solved. Throughout his career as a soldier, Wolseley had urged the necessity of deceiving your enemy in war: now he had a great opportunity to give the British army an object lesson in the art of mystifying an opponent, and right well did he avail himself of it. A strong believer in the truth of the axiom that whatever is rumoured in your camp to-day will be known to-morrow to the enemy, he determined to mislead, not only Arabi but the whole of the British army as to his intentions. Orders were accordingly issued for a combined naval and military attack from the sea upon the forts at Aboukir Bay, supported by the troops left to garrison Alexandria. Not even General Hamley, who was in command at Alexandria, was in the secret; and with the help of his brigadiers, Alison and Wood, he worked out elaborate details for co-operation in the advance of the main body after it had landed at Aboukir Bay; the scheme was submitted to Wolseley and gravely approved! At noon on the 19th of August all the troops, except those left to hold Alexandria, were on board their ships, and eight ironclads and seventeen transports steamed away towards Aboukir. Before his departure the Commander-in-Chief handed a sealed packet containing his real plan to General Hamley, with strict orders not to open it till early on the morning of the 20th. The fleet reached Aboukir in four hours, and anchored till nightfall, when the gunboats and other small naval craft stood inshore and engaged the forts, while the big ships slipped away unobserved and arrived at Port Said early next morning, to find that the navy had carried out their instructions admirably. The sailors had surprised the detachments of the enemy watching Port Said, Ismailia, and Suez; these places were in their hands. They were in possession of the whole of the Suez canal. They had prevented any vessels from entering it and, to clear the way for the transports, had ordered all steamers then in the canal to tie up at the _gares_ or shunting-places, familiar to every soldier whose service has taken him east of Suez. The merchant ships complied with three exceptions. A French mail-boat claimed the right to pass, and was allowed to do so as a matter of international courtesy: two English master mariners of the baser sort disobeyed, and when the British gunboat that regulated the traffic was out of sight they followed in the Frenchman’s wake. This incident considerably delayed the entrance of the British fleet into the Canal, but by the evening of the 23rd, the day before the Royal Irish reached Lake Timsah, 9000 men and a few stores had been landed at Ismailia; the fresh-water canal and the whole line of railway between Suez and Ismailia had fallen into our hands, and communication by land had thus been secured with the Indian contingent, which had begun to disembark at Suez on the 20th. Thanks to Lord Wolseley’s _ruse de guerre_, these successes had been obtained almost without bloodshed.