here he has a couple of
glasses of tea and three or four diminutive cups of coffee to top off, and
the meal is finished. The Arab eats sparingly as a rule, but when he gives
or attends a banquet he stuffs himself to his utmost capacity.

Next morning we loaded our cars successfully and started off by rail for
Baghdad, some thirty miles away. The railroad wound across the desert,
with here and there a water-tank with a company from a native regiment
guarding it. As we stopped at one particularly desolate spot, a young
officer came running up and asked if we would have tea with him. He took
us to his tent, where everything was ready, for he apparently always met
the two trains that passed through daily. Poor fellow, he was only a
little over twenty, and desperately lonely and homesick. Many of the young
officers who were wounded in France were sent to India with the idea that
they could be training men and getting on to the methods of the Indian
army while yet recuperating and unfit to go back to the front. They were
shipped out with a new draft when they had fully recovered. This boy had
only been a month in the country, and ten days before had been sent off in
charge of his Sikh company to do this wearisome guard duty.

We spent a few days in Baghdad refitting. The cars were to go out
camouflaged to resemble supply-trucks, for every precaution was taken to
prevent the Turks from realizing that we were massing men for an attack.
The night before we were to start, word came in that the political officer
at Nejef had been murdered, and the town was in revolt. We were ordered to
send a section there immediately, so Lieutenant Ballingal's was chosen,
while the rest of us left next morning with the balance of the battery for
Hit. The first part of the route lay across the desert to Falujah, a
prosperous agricultural town on the Euphrates. Rail-head lies just beyond
at a place known as Tel El Dhubban--the "Hill of the Flies." From there on
supplies were brought forward by motor transport, or in Arab barges,
called shakturs. We crossed the river on a bridge of boats and continued
up along the bank to Ramadie. Here I stayed over, detailed to escort the
army commander on a tour of inspection.

The smaller towns along the Euphrates are far more attractive than those
on the Tigris. The country seems more developed, and most inviting
gardens surround the villages. Hit, which lies twenty miles up-stream of
Ramadie, is an exception.