mall, wrinkled fruits as
curiosities. Fish, an intermediate diet for intestinal cases, was sorely
missed. But it was quite out of the question. The river fish, of course,
were fairly numerous, but the uncertainty of their supply was too great,
and they had to be cooked very soon after being caught. There was always
a great deal of amateur angling in the evenings, and in the creek by our
hospital a kind of mud fish was caught, full of small, apparently
unattached bones, and tasting flat and stale.

It is curious to reflect that, in the second year of the campaign, this
great country of future agricultural development which is traversed by
immense volumes of water and whose atmosphere resembles that of a
hot-house, could not produce sufficient fruit or vegetables to supply
the relatively small military forces it contained. For these forces, if
stretched out along one bank in single file, each man at arm's length
from his fellow, would not nearly have reached from the mouth of the
Shatt-el-Arab to Basra itself. And the front lay more than two hundred
miles above Basra.

III

THE SICK AND WOUNDED

The sick and wounded began to arrive as soon as the wards were ready,
coming up the creek in boats from the convoys that were in the river.
The convoys consisted of river boats with a big barge lashed on each
side. The steamers were taken from many quarters, from the great rivers
of India, from the Nile--some saw service in the Nile War--and from the
Thames. Some were local and belonged to Messrs. Lynch, who ran a service
to Baghdad before the war. Some burned coal and some oil. A large
convoy--that is the steamer and its two lateral barges--might carry
three or four hundred cases in emergencies. The time they took to
travel from the front down to Basra, which is a distance of about two
hundred miles, depended very much on the luck they experienced in
getting through the Narrows. The passage of this bit of the river will
be described in a later page. Three days was a pretty quick journey.
Travelling by night was impossible. In rounding the sharp bends of the
river, which winds across the plain in a most extraordinary manner,
these convoys often cannoned helplessly against the banks. At well-known
cannoning places Arabs collected with baskets of eggs and chickens and
melons for sale. The sick and wounded lay closely packed on the deck
under a single thickness of canvas awning. In the great heat of
midsummer this was in