we had either of us had in
days--great pilaus of rice, excellent chicken, and fresh unleavened bread.
This bread looks like a very large and thin griddle-cake. The Arab uses it
as a plate. Eating with your hands is at first rather difficult. Before
falling to, a ewer is brought around to you, and you are supplied with
soap--a servant pours water from the ewer over your hands, and then gives
you a towel. After eating, the same process is gone through with. There
are certain formalities that must be regarded--one of them being that you
must not eat or drink with your left hand.

In Tekrit we did not find as much in the way of supplies and ammunition as
we had hoped. The Turk had destroyed the greater part of his store. We did
find great quantities of wood, and in that barren, treeless country it was
worth a lot. Most of the inhabitants of Tekrit are raftsmen by profession.
Their rafts have been made in the same manner since before the days of
Xerxes and Darius. Inflated goatskins are used as a basis for a platform
of poles, cut in the up-stream forests. On these, starting from Diarbekr
or Mosul, they float down all their goods. When they reach Tekrit they
leave the poles there, and start up-stream on foot, carrying their
deflated goatskins. The Turks used this method a great deal bringing down
their supplies. In pre-war days the rafts, keleks as they are called,
would often come straight through to Baghdad, but many were always broken
up at Tekrit, for there is a desert route running across to Hit on the
Euphrates, and the supplies from up-river were taken across this in camel
caravans.

The aerodrome lay six or seven miles above the town, and I was anxious to
see it and the comfortable billets the Germans had built themselves. I
found a friend whose duties required motor transportation, and we set off
in his car. A dust-storm was raging, and we had some difficulty in finding
our way through the network of trenches. Once outside, the storm became
worse, and we could only see a few yards in front of us. We got completely
lost, and after nearly running over the edge of the bluff, gave up the
attempt, and slowly worked our way back.

When we started off on the advance I was reading Xenophon's _Anabasis_. On
the day when we were ordered to march on Tekrit a captain of the Royal
Flying Corps, an ex-master at Eton, was in the mess, and when I told him
that I was nearly out of reading matter, he said that next time he came
ov