racle, being nearly at a standstill from hard marching, and almost
surrounded by regiments sent out to cut us off. We raided the
horse-lines of a Turkish regiment that had camped beside a stream,
securing all the horses we needed and stampeding the remainder! Thus
we escaped through the gap that regiment had been supposed to close.
We got away with their baked bread, too, enough to last us at least
three days! That was not far from Diarbekr.

By the time we reached the Tigris and crossed it near Diarbekr we
were happy men; for we were not in search of idleness; all most of
us asked was a chance to serve our friends, and making trouble for
the Turks was surely service! One way and another we made more
trouble than ten times our number could have made in Flanders. Every
one of us but Gooja Singh was happy.

We crossed the Tigris in the dark, and some of us were nearly
drowned, owing to the horses being frightened. We had to abandon our
carts, so we burned them; and by the light of that fire we saw great
mounds of Turkish supplies that they intended to float down the
river to Bagdad on strange rafts made of goatskins. The sentries
guarding the stores put up a little fight, and five more of us were
wounded, but finally we burned the stores, and the flames were so
bright and high that we had to gallop for two miles before we could
be safe again in darkness. So we crossed at a rather bad place, and
there was something like panic for ten minutes, but we got over
safely in the end, wounded and all. We floated the wounded men and
ammunition and rations for men and horses across on some of those
strange goatskin rafts that go round and round and any way but
forward. We found them in the long grass by the river-bank.

At a town on the far side we seized new carts, far better than our
old ones. And then, because we might have been expected to continue
eastward, we turned to the south and followed the course of the
Tigris, straight into Kurdish country, where it did us no good to
resemble either Turks or Kurds; for we could not hope to deceive the
Kurds into thinking we were of their tribe, and Turks and Kurds are
open enemies wherever the Turks are not strong enough to overawe.
They were all Kurds in these parts, and no Turks at all, so that our
problem became quite different. After two days' riding over what was
little else than wilderness, Ranjoor Singh made new dispositions,
and we put the Kurdish headgear in our knapsacks.