ine group of men. We got a few eggs, which were a most desirable luxury
after a steady diet of black unsweetened tea and canned beef. We happened
to have a sufficient supply of tea to permit us to make an appreciated
gift to the village.

My shoes had collapsed a few days before and I borrowed a pair from a Turk
who had no further use for them. These were several sizes too large and
fashioned in an oblong shape of mathematical exactness. Even in the motor
machine-gun service, there is little that exceeds one's shoes in
importance, and I was looking forward with almost equal eagerness to a
square meal and a pair of my own shoes. The supply of reading-matter had
fallen very low. I had only Disraeli's _Tancred_, about which I found
myself unable to share Lady Burton's feelings, and a French account of a
voyage from Baghdad to Aleppo in 1808. The author, Louis Jacques Rousseau,
a cousin of the great Jean Jacques, belonged to a family of noted
Orientalists. Born in Persia, and married to the daughter of the Dutch
consul-general to that country, he was admirably equipped for the
distinguished diplomatic career that lay before him in the East and in
northern Africa. His treatises on the archaeological remains that he met
with on his many voyages are intelligent and thorough. The river towns
have changed but little in the last hundred years, and the sketch of Hit
might have been made only yesterday.

Within three days after the rise, the waters of the Wadi Hauran subsided
sufficiently for us to cross, and I received orders to return to Baghdad.
The rain had brought about a change in the desert since we passed through
on our way up. The lines of Paterson, the Australian poet, kept running
through my head:

"For the rain and drought and sunshine make no changes in the street,
In the sullen line of buildings and the ceaseless tramp of feet,
But the bush hath moods and changes, as the seasons rise and fall,
And the men who know the bushland they are loyal through it all."

The formerly arid floor of the desert was carpeted with a soft green, with
myriads of little flowers, all small, but delicately fashioned. There
were poppies, dwarf daisies, expanses of buttercups, forget-me-nots, and
diminutive red flowers whose name I did not know. It started raining
again, and we only just succeeded in winning our way through to Baghdad
before the road became impassable.

VI

BAGHDAD SKETCHES

Although never in