the car in which I usually rode, and I have never met with a
better driver or one who understood his car so thoroughly, and possessed
that intangible sympathy with it which is the gift of a few, but can be
never attained.

We were still in the rainy season. We had to travel as light as possible,
and all we could bring were forty-pounder tents, which correspond to the
American dog-tent. Very low, they withstood in remarkable fashion the
periodical hurricanes of wind and rain. They kept us fairly dry, too, for
we were careful to ditch them well. There was room for two men to sleep in
the turret of a Rolls, and they could spread a tarpaulin over the top to
keep the rain from coming in through the various openings. The balance of
the men had a communal tent or slept in the tenders. The larger tents in
the near-by camps blew down frequently, but with us it happened only
occasionally. There are happier moments than those spent in the inky
blackness amid a torrential deluge, when you try to extricate yourself
from the wet, clinging folds of falling canvas.

Time hung heavily when the weather was bad, and we were cooped up inside
our tents without even a hostile aeroplane to shoot at. One day when the
going was too poor to take out the heavy cars, I set off in a tender to
visit another section of the battery that was stationed thirty or forty
miles away in the direction of Persia, close by a town called Kizil Robat.
We had a rough trip, with several difficult fords to cross. It was only
through working with the icy water above our waists that we won through
the worst, amid the shouts of "Shabash, Sahib!" ("Well done!") from the
onlooking Indian troops. I reached the camp to find the section absent on
a reconnaissance, for the country was better drained than that over which
we were working. A few minutes later one of the cyclists came in with the
news that the cars were under heavy fire about twenty-five miles away and
one of them was badly bogged. I immediately loaded all the surplus men and
eight Punjabis from a near-by regiment into the tenders. We reached the
scene just after the disabled car had been abandoned. Some of the Turks
were concealed in a village two hundred and fifty yards away; the rest
were behind some high irrigation embankments. The free car had been
unable to circle around or flank them because of the nature of the
terrain. The men had not known that the village was occupied and had
bogged down almost at the