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Oo!"

Bully beef came along in the afternoon, and we had landed with full water-bottles, for drinking water was unavailable. Towards evening some double-roofed tents were run up. The men settled down in the empty sheds alongside the creek. We got to bed in a thunderstorm--a vivid zigzag banging affair that circled round most of the night. The rain turned the ground into something beyond description as regards its slippery properties. Only a native donkey can keep footing in such ground. There is no road metal available in Mesopotamia. It is a stoneless place. The frogs trumpeted in chorus all night; packs of dogs or jackals swept about in droves, once at full pelt through our tent, like devils of the storm. It was nightmarish, but sleep brought that wonderful balancing force that sometimes clothes itself in dreams, and steeps the spirit in all that is lacking. Just before falling asleep I reflected that Adam and Eve might well have been excused in such a country.

BASRA

We reached Mesopotamia when the hot weather was beginning. The campaign to relieve Kut was at its height, and the wounded and sick were coming down river in thousands. Apart from these there were big reinforcement camps on Makina Plain, and all around us the daily sick rate was rapidly increasing, and men straight from England, unused to hot climates, were being sent in big batches off the incoming transports. There was very little ice to be had, and so far as we were concerned there were no fans, electric or otherwise, with which to ventilate the sheds.

The urgency of the situation demanded that we should open what wards we could for the reception of sick and wounded at once. We had no nurses, partly because there was no accommodation for them. Four sheds alongside the creek were got in order. Iron bedsteads draped in white, mosquito nets resembling bridal veils, bedside tables, and cupboards arranged themselves in rows. An immense hammering and shouting filled the stifling air. The sheds began to look moderately inviting--neat and clean, smelling faintly of antiseptics which smelt better than the things in the creek. At first about fifty beds were put into each shed; in a short time beds were crowded into every available corner of the clearing. Fresh sheds were being erected by natives. Since the ground was undermined by marsh, the sheds had to be built on piles driven six feet into the spongy soil. There was only one pile driver, which resembled a cross-section of a lamp post, and was worked by a fatigue party of wild-haired Indian troops from Afghanistan regions. One would have thought from their flashing eyes when the pile driver crashed home that they played a secret game in which each imagined his bitterest enemy was in the place of the pile.

The problem of water arose at once. There was no general water supply at that time, and each unit had to solve its own problem. Our supply had to come from the creek, which was thick and turbid and contained a multitude of unsavoury things. At first it was sedimented with alum, which precipitated the suspended matter in a gelatinous mass, and the clear fluid was chlorinated with bleaching powder. There is only one consolation in drinking well chlorinated water. You know that it contains nothing except chlorine. With whisky it forms a mixture that it is difficult to describe. After a time two tanks were put in order and arranged on brick furnaces, and from a third tank water that had been allowed to settle was run off and boiled. These were satisfactory. An hour's exposure of the boiling water in jars of porous clay--chatties--made it decently cool. Chatties of great size were procured from the bazaar and placed outside each ward. Nowadays water comes in pipes from the Shatt-el-Arab, being taken from the middle layer, which is clearest. The best water comes from the Euphrates, which joins the yellow Tigris at Kurna about forty miles above Basra. It sends down a tributary which flows into the Tigris a few miles above Basra. From here water could have been conveyed in pipes. But the scheme was thought unnecessarily elaborate and costly.

It must be remembered that in a place like Mesopotamia water is the main problem. A clear, clean, pure water supply means an incalculable saving of life. A dirty supply may mean the failure of the campaign. In order to get good water for troops nothing should be neglected or overlooked, and no kind of compromise should be permitted. There is perhaps not a single act in war more criminal and more worthy of death than to allow troops to muddle along and get what water they can, under local arrangements, when a pure central supply is possible.

After soda water, the sick Tommy requires certain delicacies in food. Eggs and chickens and fruit and vegetables were necessary. The quartermaster soon began to lift up his voice. What with the supply and transport depots of the Indian Army and our own Army Service Corps, and the inevitable confusion of two different Army systems, he became extremely irritable. This confusion existed in every department. On the medical side, there was the British scale of field ambulances and hospitals, and this differs entirely from the Indian scale. What could have been more suitable for muddling than this? Its effects could be seen in the expression of the quartermaster.

The chickens were poor. Three might weigh in the aggregate a pound and a half. The supply of eggs was limited when procured through contractors, but it was possible to obtain a few from other sources. As regards fruit, there was practically none. Potatoes were procurable in this part, but not higher up the river. Owing to the intense heat and lack of storage accommodation, vast quantities of food perished. Piles of boxes containing cigarettes, that had lain in the sun, were found to contain nothing but fine dust on being opened. It was the same way with biscuits. Potatoes rotted in millions. The whole problem was one of immense difficulty. The milk that was used was almost wholly tinned. The use of fresh milk which was tried later at Amara was not a very successful experiment. It required careful boiling, and often curdled in mass. It was then boiled in a large number of small vessels, with better results, but the supply drawn from outlying villages, and brought down by river, was never adequate, and boiled milk is not very pleasant. Bread was baked in the neighbourhood by army bakers, and eventually, when proper ovens were made, was good. Sugar was plentiful, sandy in colour, and full of extraneous matter, but quite adequate. There was no shortage in tea. Fresh meat was a ration in Basra, but Indian cooks seemed to make a better job of it than British. It was tough and stringy and required a great deal of stewing. Rice was an occasional ration in Basra, and a daily ration higher up, where it took the place of potatoes. Lime juice, as a ration, was very uncertain. It was possible to get it in the bazaar, and the Tommy could get it at the Y.M.C.A. huts. Of these huts it is impossible to speak too highly. The Tommy alone knows what he would have done without them. You drank, in the hot weather, amazing quantities of fluid, and lime juice and water was the usual mixture until the sun went down. One paid two shillings and eightpence--two rupees--for one of those long, narrow, golden bottles, with leaves and fruit moulded on their exterior. Wines and spirits could be ordered through agents in Basra from Bombay at reasonable rates. Bombay is about five days by steamer from Basra. It was almost a universal experience to find alcohol necessary in the evening. The mind was exhausted, food was unattractive, conversation was impossible, the passage of time immeasurably slow, and a restless irritation pervaded one until a dose of alcohol was taken. Its effect was humanising. Still, it is worth remembering that the Prophet forbade alcohol to the people of the country. But then he permitted other things.

Owing to the complaints about food supplies, in the early part of June, in the second year of the campaign, there was published an order that all troops were to have certain fruit and vegetable variations in diet. Lists of articles were given, and the scale was very generous and sensible. The actual supply of the stuff, however, did not come as we might have been led to expect. This was because most of the articles in the lists were starred, which meant that they were only supplied when available, and I suppose India, which had to run several other expeditions besides Mesopotamia, could not possibly produce enough material to satisfy all requirements. At this time, too, many of the cargo vessels were occupied in bringing immense supplies of wood from India, and the local produce of Mesopotamia did not go nearly far enough for the purpose. Some officers planted various seeds in patches adjoining their quarters, but the business of watering them was troublesome. A ration of fresh limes was served to our men on the 21st of June for the first time, but the supply of these ran out the next day. Some of the men retained these small, wrinkled fruits as curiosities. Fish, an intermediate diet for intestinal cases, was sorely missed. But it was quite out of the question. The river fish, of course, were fairly numerous, but the uncertainty of their supply was too great, and they had to be cooked very soon after being caught. There was always a great deal of amateur angling in the evenings, and in the creek by our hospital a kind of mud fish was caught, full of small, apparently unattached bones, and tasting flat and stale.

It is curious to reflect that, in the second year of the campaign, this great country of future agricultural development which is traversed by immense volumes of water and whose atmosphere resembles that of a hot-house, could not produce sufficient fruit or vegetables to supply the relatively small military forces it contained. For these forces, if stretched out along one bank in single file, each man at arm's length from his fellow, would not nearly have reached from the mouth of the Shatt-el-Arab to Basra itself. And the front lay more than two hundred miles above Basra.

THE SICK AND WOUNDED

The sick and wounded began to arrive as soon as the wards were ready, coming up the creek in boats from the convoys that were in the river. The convoys consisted of river boats with a big barge lashed on each side. The steamers were taken from many quarters, from the great rivers of India, from the Nile--some saw service in the Nile War--and from the Thames. Some were local and belonged to Messrs. Lynch, who ran a service to Baghdad before the war. Some burned coal and some oil. A large convoy--that is the steamer and its two lateral barges--might carry three or four hundred cases in emergencies. The time they took to travel from the front down to Basra, which is a distance of about two hundred miles, depended very much on the luck they experienced in getting through the Narrows. The passage of this bit of the river will be described in a later page. Three days was a pretty quick journey. Travelling by night was impossible. In rounding the sharp bends of the river, which winds across the plain in a most extraordinary manner, these convoys often cannoned helplessly against the banks. At well-known cannoning places Arabs collected with baskets of eggs and chickens and melons for sale. The sick and wounded lay closely packed on the deck under a single thickness of canvas awning. In the great heat of midsummer this was insufficient protection, but it was impossible for the medical officers of the ships to obtain any extra canvas, and it was thought that reed matting in close proximity to the funnels would be dangerous. Tinned milk for bad cases and bully beef, stew, and bread and jam for those fit to eat it were the main rations, but soup and eggs were often available. The difficulties of catering for a crowded convoy, with only a small galley, were considerable. Water was taken from the river, and chlorinated in tanks on board.

On reaching Basra the convoys discharged their patients either at the big British hospital, that was formerly the palace of a Sheik, and stands on the river's edge, or at one or other of the Indian hospitals that lie beside it. The accommodation for British troops was not great at the time, so that it was the custom to transfer cases as soon as possible into the hospital ships, which could come right alongside the piers, and send them to India. Our hospital had four hundred beds available within a short period. As a matter of fact, many more were squeezed into odd places during times of pressure.

The appearance of the sick and wounded defies description. Like the Gallipoli lot, only worse, they were lean, gaunt, haggard skeletons, hollow-eyed, with rivulets of perspiration furrowing the dirt of their faces. Looking back from a better state of affairs to those days, the strange spectres that staggered off the boat become softened in outline. It is only by the aid of pen, pencil, brush or film that their grimness is kept alive in the mind.

They cheered up considerably after a day or two, and when it came to censoring their letters, not a word of complaint did one find; nor, for that matter, any news. The absence of nurses was a disappointment for them, but the luxury of a spring mattress, of cool water in quantity, and of being under a roof out of the sun made up for that in some degree. They were full of rumours. Of the general situation they knew nothing. One said we had half a million men in the field. Another reckoned we had a division or two at the most. Many seemed to put the figure at six divisions. A British division is about eighteen thousand men, and an Indian division less. They were sure that Kut would be relieved. It was at the time when the news was looked for daily. The whole place was rich in tales. Every depot on shore, and every ship in the stream, had its stories. Kut was to be occupied by us on the following Sunday. General X had stated it quite decisively, with an elegant gesture of confidence. General Y had sworn it, banging the table. General Z had mentioned it casually, a cigar between his teeth. The Turks were hopelessly demoralised. They had no ammunition, no food, and no heart. Hopes ran high, and everyone who came up from Ashar was eagerly questioned. We woke one morning to hear a great noise of steam sirens from the river, and for a time lay in blissful happiness, certain it could only mean one thing. It was like the night we lay on the Gallipoli sand some days after the landing, in the darkness, sipping our first tot of rum. Our hearts were merry, for had we not just heard that Achi Baba had fallen, that Bulgaria and Roumania had declared war on Turkey, and that the crackle of musketry to the north-east was due to certain Boers who were swarming up the heights overhanging the Kishlar Rocks? She must be a woman of temperament, Rumour, for when she smiles she is so charming; but when she frowns, who can be so ugly?

During this time considerable activity prevailed throughout the Basra region. Near by, on Makina Plain, a vast flat expanse of bare earth beyond the shadow of the palm plantations, a perpetual dust arose. Transport columns, guns and troops were always on the move, and the camps grew in size until the whole place was dotted with white canvas and yellow matting huts. The skirling of the pipes, the beating of the drums, the sound of the bugle and the tramp of feet continually came from the road that ran along the bank opposite the hospital. Wagons rumbled over the wooden bridge, and the deep note of the incoming steamers reverberated over the groves. But a difficulty began to arise. All these incoming troops that were concentrating on the plain were new to the country. The heat was increasing rapidly. It had long passed the limits of the most intense English summer, and the mercury was now rising above 100 degrees in the shade. The sky was cloudless and brassy. The floods each day left great areas of damp, steamy marsh when the tidal river fell. Mosquitoes were beginning to fill the night with their thin screaming. Small, almost impalpable, colourless insects, whose bite is like a red hot wire and who can penetrate the meshes of an ordinary mosquito net with ease, began to infest the place. These were sand-flies. They are surely the most successfully maddening insect ever designed by the Lord of Flies. They give rise to a malady known as sand-fly fever, which is like influenza and drains the body of all vitality for many days. In addition to this, either the food, the water, the dust, or the day flies were spreading about a form of diarrhoea which rapidly turned into dysentery. The day flies were a swiftly growing army. Breeding grounds in the surrounding camps, in the horse lines, the bullock lines and native villages were numerous. They were nothing like the flies at Mudros when the whole roof of a tent at night might be uniformly black with them, and eating was in the nature of a free fight. A couple of hundred or so to each tent was perhaps the average, but they made rest a matter of difficulty. The Red Cross fortunately supplied us with instruments of fly destruction, and later on fly experts were sent out.

The result of all this was that the curve of sickness began to mount steeply, and it became necessary to make some provision for the victims. Since our position was central as regards reinforcement camps, we were delegated to deal with local sick, and after that arrangement very few of the cases sent down from the front came our way. For the first few days the number of incoming sick could be dealt with adequately. But as time went on, and the mercury rose higher and higher in the lifeless air, the number increased and became formidable. Long lines of ambulance wagons and bullock tongas crept steadily from every quarter to the hospital. Beds were crowded into every corner of the wards. We had no fans. Imagine, you who live in civilisation, what an electric fan may mean. You can see it spinning in the corner of your club or restaurant and think nothing of it. But in that place it meant the difference between life and death. Picture yourself tossing in a high fever in the centre of a stifling ward, with the temperature above 90 degrees all through the night, and not a breath of wind stirring. Then think what it would mean to find yourself placed suddenly under the whirling vanes of a big fan, lying with your mouth wide open, taking great gulps of the cool rushing air. When we moved up river, three months later, it was rumoured the fans were on their way from India.

The maladies that were commonest were malaria, diarrhoea, dysentery, jaundice and heat-stroke. There were some scattered cases of cholera, and a few of typhoid. The typhoid began in earnest later on, as well as sand-fly fever. Besides these there was a skin disease which we called Basra sore--a very indolent ulcer which is not painful, but tends to spread over the legs and arms, leaving a flexible, bluish scar when it eventually heals. There was also an ill-defined syndrome, termed variously Mesopotamitis or acute debility, or the Fear of God. Officially one described it as the effects of heat. But of all these the most pitiful was heat-stroke.

HEAT-STROKE

I do not know of any other malady so dramatic, or so painful to witness, as heat-stroke, with the exception, perhaps, of acute cholera. It is something that belongs to Mesopotamia in a peculiar sense, in that it seems to express in visible and concentrated form the silent hostility of the country which was noticed by the ancients. For Mesopotamia welcomes no man. It is a profound enigma. What do those two gigantic rivers mean that rush through those vast stretches of barren land? For what ultimate destiny were they designed? It is like looking on two enormous electric cables, carrying a current of incalculable amperage, lying beside a vast but motionless machinery, because no contact has been made. Whatever the answer may be it has been long in coming. Dwelling beside them, one cannot help speculating, for there is a kind of fatality that concerns the disposition of matter in Nature. Oil fields and rubber trees existed, one might say, as enigmas, until the internal combustion engine and motor cars dawned on the world and explained their riddle. This was their fate. And of Mesopotamia, who shall say that it may not be concerned with a yet unborn attitude in us Europeans when we will turn wholly to the produce of the earth?

To gain some idea of heat-stroke it is necessary to grasp the conditions that produce it. A typical hot day begins with a dawn that comes as a sudden hot yellow behind the motionless palms. A glittering host of dragon-flies rises up from the swamps, wheeling and darting after the mosquitoes. In the growing light mysterious shapes slink past. They are the camp dogs returning from their sing-song, which has kept you awake half the night. Inside the mosquito net you see various gorged little insects struggling to get out of the meshing through which they passed so easily when they were slim and hungry. The hot beam of the sun picks out your tent, and the mercury goes up steadily. At five you are bathed in perspiration as you lie in bed. It has been in the neighbourhood of 90 degrees throughout the night; you have probably spent most of it smoking in a chair in the moonlight listening to horses whinnying, donkeys braying, dogs barking and yelping without a pause, and men groaning and tossing in the steamy sick tents. The business of getting up is one of infinite weariness. There is nothing fresh in the morning feeling. At eight the mercury is probably 100 degrees. At times, as you dress after a tepid bath, it is necessary to sit down and take a rest. Your vesture is simple--a thin shirt, open at the collar, and a pair of shorts, stockings and shoes. During the day your feelings do not correspond to the height of the mercury, for after breakfast a certain amount of energy possesses you, and the morning's work becomes possible. But after a couple of hours, in the neighbourhood of eleven, when it may be anything from 110 to 120 degrees in the shade, a kind of enervation sets in. This is partly due to lack of food. For some reason we found it necessary to eat a considerable amount. The theory of a simple diet, a little fruit, meat once a day and in small quantity, did not work out in practice. After midday the world is a blinding glare and the intake of air seems to burn the lungs. A comparative stillness descends on the scene. On the plain activities cease. Through the double canvas roofing of a tent the sun beats down like a giant with a leaden club. The temperature in the wards increases. At the worst moments you feel distinctly that it would be possible, by giving way to something that escapes definition, to go off your head. A spirit of indifference to everything is necessary. Any kind of worry is simply a mode of suicide. A man, for instance, who feels continually he ought to be up and doing, and that to lie still in vacancy is a sin, does not do well, unless, perhaps, he dwells in a cool stone house, under fans, with plenty of ice, as was the luck of some. There must be no inner conflicts. Cranks soon suffer. Life becomes simplified. An oriental contempt of the West, with all its preoccupations, grows insensibly. When a dripping orderly came to rouse you to see some case, you understood perfectly the attitude of mind that has produced the idea of Kismet. Why move? If the man dies, it is Allah's will. It is Allah's will that he is sick. Let him remain in the hands of Allah.

It was during the afternoon and evening that heat-stroke occurred in the main when the humidity of the air began to go up. A great many of the new troops had no idea of the danger of the sun. The Tommy does not estimate a situation very quickly. The attempt to change the main meal of the day to an evening hour did not meet with success, and during the afternoon the men would sit bucking away in their tents, and refuse to adapt themselves to the idea of a siesta. Moreover, the Tommy is obstinate by nature and does not like to give in. He goes on marching in the sun, even though he feels bad, and the collapse is swift and fatal.

At about five o'clock, with the temperature falling and the humidity of the air increasing, a period of intense discomfort set in. Perspiration was so profuse that clothes became wringing wet like bathing suits, even if you were sitting still. A kind of air hunger ensued. The few birds in the groves sat with their beaks wide open. It was then that the ambulance wagons began to roll in with their burden of heat-stroke cases, and continued until after sunset. It is a malady which, as I have said, is dramatic and painful to witness....

A heat-stroke station was prepared at the water's edge containing a couple of baths and an ice chest, and patients were put into the chill water as soon as possible. They were slapped and punched and laved till they began to turn blue and the temperature fell. Then they were put in a blanket, if any collapse showed, or just left naked on a bed in the open. Fear played a powerful part in the malady. It tended to produce it and to cause relapses, and it was good practice to use direct counter-suggestion whenever the patient was conscious, as well as brandy and morphia. The worst of it was that many of those patients who recovered over night died next afternoon as they lay in the suffocating ward. What was possible with wet sheets and small pieces of ice was done, but it was a wretched business, and those who were in Basra at that time and saw those spectacles will never forget them; nor will they forget the silent, impotent rage that filled the mind at the thought of the giant-bodied, small-headed Colossus of war which makes a useless sacrifice of men in ways such as these every day. But it had one useful effect, perhaps. A really Zoroastrian reverence for the sun came after seeing a case, and a man learnt to look on his pith helmet and spine pad as his best friends.

MIRAGE

On the 28th of April, after a week of conflicting rumours, we heard that Kut had fallen. As a nation we take reverses with consummate coolness. Whatever one thought inwardly, work went on as usual, and in the men's lines there was very little comment. Up to the last moment Rumour was optimistic. She spread a most mysterious yarn about the ship that tried to escape Turkish vigilance and get to Kut with supplies. It was, she said, full of gold. For what purpose she did not specify, but it sounded promising. This was her last fling. After that she changed her mask and looked ugly. Forty thousand Arabs were mustering at Kuweit. German cruisers were in the Persian Gulf, sinking shipping right and left. The Turks were coming down on Nasireyah in tremendous force. Trouble was brewing at Shaiba. In the last respect she proved correct, though the trouble was not great. At Shaiba, which lies about twenty miles west of Basra across the plain, a remarkable battle was fought in the April of the year before. A Turkish force of twelve thousand regulars and thirty odd guns, with numerous Arabs, was routed at an extreme and critical moment, it is said, owing to a mistake. The mistake, for once, was on the part of the Turks. Fighting had been very severe. We had no reserves and things were looking black. Numerous Arab tribesmen who had remained as neutral spectators were beginning to take it into their heads that we were losing, and that only means one thing to them. It means they at once join forces with the victorious side, and add their ghastly devilry to the general merriment. The Turks, under Suleiman Askari, had been certain of victory. Victory would have meant the evacuation of Basra, if not of Mesopotamia. So sure had the Turks been that they had struck a medal for the occasion, celebrating the triumph of the capture of Basra. Our men found sacks full of these cheap aluminum badges in the Turkish trenches, and they were sold afterwards in the bazaar at Basra by the thousand. But the Turks never wore them, for, at the most extreme and critical moment, across the plain there came a swirling column of dust, a flashing of wheels, and a thundering of hoofs. The sight was too much for the Turks. Another battery, or even a whole brigade of artillery, after those three exhausting days of fighting, was not worth waiting for. So they rose from their trenches and began to flee, and the Arabs, changing their minds with incredible swiftness, fell on them in the rear and cut and slashed them about considerably. In the meanwhile the strange column galloped up. But there were no guns. In place of guns stood a strangely assorted collection of wagons, spring carts, tongas--anything on wheels--that a certain doctor had got together and brought up at full speed to take away the wounded. The Turkish Commander, Suleiman Askari, committed suicide.

A New Zealander came into hospital one day from Shaiba way. He was a wireless man, and being so, had found something in the desert that puzzled the science of his mind. He explained the matter. Out there it is a white, undulating expanse, burning hot, but with more air than in Basra. There are extraordinary effects of perspective. A man standing a short way off may assume gigantic proportions, or look like a dwarf. A motor car near by would seem to lose its solidity and dissolve into a few filmy lines. The mirage of water is everywhere. An Arab might lie in the open and no one would see him. A post might look like a horseman at full gallop. It was a country of topsy-turveydom as regards the subjective estimate of the eyes. But what puzzled the wireless man was this. He thought he understood how eye-strain and difference of refractive power of the layers of heated air, or reflected light from the ground and such physical considerations could cause these illusions. But what he could not understand was how it came about that several men would experience exactly the same illusion. Why should a post simultaneously appear as an Arab on horseback or an Arab crawling stealthily on the ground to half a dozen men? Mirage, like Rumour, is a curious thing. It may have some inner connection with the set of a man's feelings. It has its pleasant side when it paints water and palms where there is no water nor any palms. It has its sinister side when it clothes the most innocent features of the landscape in images of dread. Who knows how it touched up that flying column of ambulance wagons in the eyes of the Turks? There are certain areas that are constantly the site of mirage. Our gunners found this a continual difficulty at the front, for the hostile Arabs, knowing the mirage areas, would get into them and make ranging impossible. A transport column on the move through mirage is a curious sight. You see, across the plain, a long line of black dots, which are the wagons on the move. But apparently they are passing through the centre of a narrow lake, that runs in the same direction as their line of advance. The reflection in the lake is perfect in every detail and that is suspicious, for a train of wagons and horses crossing a shallow lake would stir up the water and disturb reflection. But there is another thing that helps you to recognise mirage. At the tail of the column rises a cloud of dust and here and there along the line you can make out a little wreath of dust rising apparently from the surface of the mirroring water.

The fall of Kut did not ease the pressure at the hospitals. The sick rate was increasing steadily. The Shimal, the north-west wind that comes just in time to make it possible for you to believe in Providence, was not due until the middle of June. Down by the river-side, where the official meteorological station stood, the day temperature was far over 100 degrees, and up in the airless creeks, in the palm groves, it was much higher. Clinical thermometers cracked if they were left lying about on tables. Our staff was getting seriously depleted. No Tommy had to work so hard as those hospital orderlies, and it is not surprising that our casualties in sick men were very heavy. Clerks in the office became ward masters at a moment's notice. But in spite of all this the spirit of the place remained unshaken. However great the heat, it did not destroy that sense of humour which is the glory of the British Army. Rather be beaten and retain that sense than be victorious and lose it. And if you come to think of it, no man who retains his sense of humour is ever really beaten.

THE DAY'S WORK

The great distances that separate the main stations in Mesopotamia, and the long sea voyage between Basra and Bombay, threw a considerable strain on that part of the army that sits in offices and deals with army forms. At Poona the supreme headquarters of the campaign resided amid the clear breezes of the Indian hills. The consequence was that in cases where two or three copies of a form would have sufficed on the Western front, there it was necessary to multiply them indefinitely, so as to satisfy all the various authorities down the line. For example, in sending sick to India, a nominal roll is compiled with name, number, rank, regiment, nature of disease and so on. This, in triplicate, is an ordinary procedure anywhere. But in Basra it was necessary, for some reason, to make out over twenty copies, and this is a long business on a typewriter that will only do a small number at a time, and is wanted for other things. It also caused a great delay before indents could materialise. You wished, say, to order a truss for a patient. Out there, owing to the heat, articles of this nature perished quickly. You reported the measurements to the quartermaster. He made a copy of the indent in triplicate, as well as an office copy. The indents went to the Assistant Director of Medical Services for approval. They were then sent back to the quartermaster. He then sent them to the Base Medical Depot, who acknowledged their receipt and said they would be sent to India as soon as possible. In India they passed through other complicated machinery and the weeks went by. A truss, I suppose, is worth a few shillings.

There were three other factors that added to the difficulties, apart from distance. One was the bar at the mouth of the river, which made it impossible for deeply laden vessels coming up the Persian Gulf and drawing many feet of water to pass without unloading in part into another vessel. The other was that strip of river between Kurna and Amara known as the Narrows, where river boats with supplies stuck constantly, especially when the floods fell and the water was low. One boat sticking here would hold up all traffic.

The third factor was the effect of the excessive heat. This effect, rather subtle in itself, might be called the psychological factor of the situation, for there is not the slightest doubt that it produced a kind of cussedness in everyone, from the highest to the lowest, and sapped energy and made changes unwelcome. For excessive and prolonged heat--and the hot season lasted seven or eight months--rouses a defensive mechanism of inertia whose aim is to preserve life. You saw that in the earliest cases of incipient heat-stroke. A man felt suddenly all the power go out of his legs. He wanted to lie down, and this was the best thing he could do.

Mental exertion became almost impossible. Reading was not easy, writing was a burden, and thinking a matter of extreme difficulty. Your interest lay in watching the simplest thing. A Japanese fly-trap with its slowly-turning, sticky surfaces was fascinating. There was a spice of oriental cruelty in the way it slowly entrapped the fly, and it was exactly that which made the appeal. You soon understood how it comes about that the Eastern takes all the natural facts of life for granted, without bothering about fine shades, and acts on them unquestioningly. What is called altruism in the West seems artificial. It is not cynicism exactly that the place breeds, and I never met anyone who was sentimental in Mesopotamia, but it is a kind of descent that occurs to a level of values that are coloured black and white, quite plain. A man who expected to throw a spell over the country and act as a stimulant on everyone would truly need to possess a prodigious character. "In the tropics there is going on continually and unconsciously a tax on the nervous system which is absent in temperate climates. The nervous system, especially those parts which regulate the temperature of the body, is always on the strain, and the result is that in time it suffers from more or less exhaustion." The common effect of this is a "deficient mental energy generally commencing with unnatural drowsiness or loss of appetite and a yearning for stimulants which culminates in that lowering of nerve potential which we know so well as neurasthenia." Thus write the professors of medicine in India on the effects of prolonged heat. I would add to it a large mental element, partly induced by the lack of any kind of amusement, by the want of interest, and by the peculiar effect of a landscape that is entirely flat and uniform. An artificial mountain scenery, painted on canvas, such as one used to see at Earl's Court, would have been a blessed relief. I think a London fog would have been delightful. Towards the end of September, a few small, fleecy clouds appeared one day in the sky and everyone ran out and stared solemnly at them as if they were angels. But there is one phrase that sums up the prolonged effects of heat better than any scientific rigmarole. It takes the silk out of a man.

In Basra there was published daily a small, excellent newspaper which gave the latest Reuters and printed selections from papers that came by the mail. It was sorely missed when we went up river. I believe it was edited by a lady. There was a club in Ashar where it was possible to sit under electric fans. In old Basra there was an Arab theatre, containing a few dancing girls and a cinematograph. But the arrival of the mails was the great feature of life out there. They came roughly once a week, and it is difficult to describe with what emotions they were received. The whole district became revivified for a space under their influence.

The dates were now hanging in big masses of oval, greeny-yellow fruit, some in clusters of two hundredweight and more, and the palm leaves were turning brown at their points. The scarlet of the pomegranate trees had vanished from the date groves and the floods were beginning to fall. It had been necessary to surround the hospital clearing with a mud wall, or bund, about four feet in height, in order to keep out the water, for at times there is as much as a six foot rise when the tide comes up the Shatt-el-Arab.

At any simple job of this kind the Arabs are quite good. They can plaster mud on a roof, or make a bund, or run up a mud and reed hut, or raise the level of the flooring of a ward, and they take their time over it. But anything that savours of machinery is usually beyond them. It was a common saying amongst the Arabs that sickness stopped as soon as the dates were gathered in. That proved to be untrue. It was a long while until the dates were ripe, and after they were gathered sickness still continued. The amount of heat those dates required before they turned yellow and soft, and their skins began to crinkle faintly, was extraordinary. For weeks and weeks they remained hard and green, though exposed to the fiercest heat of the sun. Pomegranates, in the same way, hung for months before their skins turned to that beautiful deep mahogany hue of the ripe fruit.

On a particular day at the end of June one might have fancied a crisis had been reached. Curiously enough, by the irony of coincidence, the Reuters of that day contained the news that it had been stated in Parliament that, in the interests of the public, no statement would be made about the state of affairs in Mesopotamia.

That night it was rumoured that Verdun had fallen....

The gift of a large fleet of motor ambulances presented by the cinema people at home was a great boon, for urgent cases could be transported to hospital rapidly, instead of jolting over the plain in bullock tongas. Unfortunately, the axles of these cars were not quite equal to the rough work, and in a short time they were sent away to other spheres where roads were better. The ground in our neighbourhood was so undermined by floods that on one occasion one of these cars, standing empty, suddenly broke through the upper crust up to its axles. A great deal of perspiration flowed before it was extricated.

THE NARROWS

We left Basra when the Arabs, and the Indian troops, were celebrating the Mohammedan feast of Ramadhan. During the feast, which lasts a month, night is turned into day. No food is allowed, in theory, from sunrise to sunset. Drums beat, dogs howl, cocks crow and the revellers shout and wail and clap their hands in long, rhythmic, staccato periods, and explosions of powder occur under the crescent moon.

Kurna is the Garden of Eden. It lies at the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris, and is a small hamlet of white houses. Here there is a wide area of date palms and a great brown, tranquil stretch of river. A white doorway in a yellow wall, shaped like a pear, marks the supposed position of Paradise. The doorway bears a tablet with an Arabic inscription. Behind the doorway, just visible over the wall, a tree grows. This may or may not be the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, because a dwarfed sinister tree lower down, to which barges tie up, is given the name. But I prefer the one in its walled garden, a faded, simple, harmless-looking tree. And the result of eating its fruit can be moralised on here, for on one side of it is the bazaar square, where whisky and beer and tobacco are sold, and on the other side is the telegraph office with the news of the war blazoned on the iron-studded door and an armed sentry before it.

At night there was a lot of lamp-signalling all round the horizon in naval code. One caught M.M.O. repeatedly and then a lot of figures. Some fires lit up the sky line to the north. On that night the heat was beyond description. A plague of sand-flies and mosquitoes descended on the ship. No one slept a wink. The mules screamed and kicked. There was not a breath of air. A heavy smell pervaded the ship, and at times it seemed that one's mind wandered a little. Before dawn a great cry came out of the steamy darkness from some worshipping Arab and was repeated twice. After a long silence a cock crew far across the plain and was answered a hundred times. Then came a misty blue light and a sudden glare of yellow. The day had begun and the engines started.

A monitor passed, bristling with guns and painted a vivid green. Ezra's tomb is a mosque standing stark on the brown plain beside the river in a clump of palms. It is kept in beautiful preservation, for it is visited by pilgrim Jews. Against the lovely blue of the dome, with its circle of gold, a tall palm leans, bending sharply inward as if to kiss the Prophet's last resting-place in some sudden mood of devotion. Some way above it lies a big village, and as we passed crowds of Arabs lined the bank. Naked boys dived into the river after money. The women, dashing types with nose rings, clad in robes of wonderful vermilion and purple colours, ran along the banks with fowls and eggs for sale. Herds of black buffalo, submerged up to the nose, basked in the water.

At one lonely place we passed a small shelter, a roof of yellow matting supported by a few posts, containing six rather pale-hued women with richly coloured robes and bangles seated in a semi-circle on the ground. Outside stood the lord of the manor, very swarthy, in dazzling white, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, scowling ferociously as he surveyed the plains. He was a kind of policeman, I believe, in our pay. At any rate he seemed to be, like policemen in general, a strong lover of domestic life. Six wives may have contributed a little towards overcoming the extreme monotony of life in the place.

At three in the afternoon as we bumped and scraped and panted up the tortuous river, we came on the familiar sight of a convoy stuck, broadside on, across the river in front of us. A little smoke came from her funnel. The sun beat savagely down on her apparently deserted decks. Behind her there was nothing but shimmering plain and the occasional flash of water. Our engine-room telegraph rang. The engines stopped and we slewed into the bank and dropped anchor. Then the skipper and his navigating lieutenants withdrew to their cabins and the engine-room staff, composed of an Englishman who had run boats up to Baghdad for ten years, and a few Christian Baghdadies--powerful dark men, who seemed to speak a kind of French--disposed themselves for rest on the lower deck, and a great peace descended on the scene. Away over the horizon, north and south, some columns of smoke were visible coming from other convoys that were converging on the Narrows. It was necessary to wait for the tide, as well as for a tug. There was nothing to do but to watch the plain. At first sight it appeared lifeless, an expanse of golden browns, reds and yellows, with a sharp purple rim on the skyline. But closer observation showed long lines of cattle, mere dots in the distance, moving slowly in search of pasture. In the shadow of a hummock an Arab boy and girl sat together motionless. A mile along the level two Arabs were rhythmically swinging water up from a cutting by means of a shallow vessel with ropes attached to the side. The flash of it caught the eye, and there was a patch of vivid emerald where the water fell. To the north it was possible to make out the arms of a semaphore lying idle. There was no sound in the place. The river itself flowed silently. Only the occasional deep drone of a hornet or the note of a mosquito came to the ear. The sun seemed to be drawing the land together, sucking up all the sap it contained.

As we sat and gazed at these bending and twisting Narrows the idea arose that it might be possible, by a little cutting, to do away with the worst bits and open up a straight channel. For there were two main places of obstruction, called the Devil's Elbow and Pear Drop Reach. But it is necessary to say this with caution, for tampering with great rivers like the Tigris may cause unthought-of trouble. It upsets the natural balance of the waters.

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