he
make it an independent state?" There was a definite limit to the number of
prisoners we could manage to carry back, but I offered the doctor to
include him. His answer was to go to his trunk and produce a picture of
his wife and little daughter. They were, he told me, in Constantinople,
and it was now two years since he had had leave, so that as his turn was
due, he would wait on the chance of seeing his family.

When the cars came up we set off again in pursuit of the elusive gold
convoy. We could get no accurate information concerning it. Some said it
was behind, others ahead. We never ran it down. It may well be that it was
concealed in a ravine near the road a few yards from where we passed. Just
short of a town called Abu Kemal we caught three Germans. They were in
terror when we took them, and afterward said that they had expected to be
shot. Under decent treatment they soon became so insolent that they had to
be brought up short.

[Illustration: A "Red Crescent" ambulance]

During the run back to Ana we picked up the more important of our
prisoners and took them with us. Twenty-two were all we could manage. I
was running one of the big cars. It was always a surprise to see how easy
they were to handle in spite of the weight of the armor-plate. We each
took great pride in the car in which we generally rode. All had names. In
the Fourteenth one section had "Silver Dart" and "Silver Ghost" and
another "Gray Terror" and "Gray Knight." The car in which I rode a
great deal of the time met its fate only a few days before the armistice,
long after I had gone to France. Two direct hits from an Austrian
"eighty-eight" ended its career.

It was after midnight when we got back to our camp in a palm-garden in
Ana. Although we had not succeeded in capturing the gold convoy, we had
brought in a number of valuable prisoners, and among other things I had
found some papers belonging to a German political agent whom we had
captured. These contained much information about the Arab situation, and
through them it was all but proved that the German was the direct
instigator of the murder of the political officer at Nejef. An amusing
sidelight was thrown in the letters addressed by Arab sheiks through this
agent to the Kaiser thanking him for the iron crosses they had been
awarded. There must have been an underlying grim humor in distributing
crosses to the Mohammedan Arabs in recognition of their efforts to
withstand the advance