painted a vivid blue, and flat roofs. A minaret rises behind
it with a blue-tiled extremity supporting the upraised hand and
crescent. The streets are narrow and airless. In the shops are a mass of
articles of all descriptions: tinned stuff, tobacco, clocks, hair-oil,
cheap jewellery, odd bottles of doubtful wine, scent, rugs, copper
vessels, sweets, sauces, pickles. Innumerable flies surround everything.
On much of the tinned stuff were very old labels. No man of experience
up-country in India will touch tinned stuff of that description. The
soda water factory was in a small courtyard. There was a big green
gasometer of carbon dioxide, a glittering brass-bound pump and a filling
apparatus. Three tubs were on the floor containing a blue, a red and a
clear fluid. These, said the Arab proprietor, were English disinfectants
in which the bottles were rinsed. Here you waited until your bottles
were refilled, at one anna (one penny) each. This represented a profit
of 1,200 per cent. The water which was used for filling them was taken
from the centre of the Tigris. Ice was obtained elsewhere, made from an
ammonia plant, in bars two feet by six inches. The necessity for ice was
imperative, but it could only be supplied in small quantities then.
These native plants were mostly taken over by the military as time went
on. A single bad heat-stroke case would often use up the whole day's
supply to the hospital. That was why ice was an imperative necessity. It
meant so many lives saved. In India ice is manufactured by machines in
quantity wherever it is required.

[Illustration: A CONVOY OF SICK AND WOUNDED.]

After soda water, the sick Tommy requires certain delicacies in food.
Eggs and chickens and fruit and vegetables were necessary. The
quartermaster soon began to lift up his voice. What with the supply and
transport depots of the Indian Army and our own Army Service Corps, and
the inevitable confusion of two different Army systems, he became
extremely irritable. This confusion existed in every department. On the
medical side, there was the British scale of field ambulances and
hospitals, and this differs entirely from the Indian scale. What could
have been more suitable for muddling than this? Its effects could be
seen in the expression of the quartermaster.

I can see him clearly, a plump, stocky man, with arms akimbo, his helmet
on the back of his head, the flesh of his face in folds of disgust with
sweat pouring off him, an