rved knives, but the
main object was looting and not killing.

It was a singular spot to find a large number of women, away up in the
heart of that elemental country of fire and water and earth. But they
remained untouched by any kind of pessimism, nor were they greatly
interested in the campaign as a military affair. All their interest was
in their work. They were a wonderful stimulus. Where a man unwittingly
tended to let things slide they exhorted and energised. In details, they
did not seem to show that gradual decadence that creeps imperceptibly
over men when isolated and overworked. It is perhaps so subtle that it
takes a woman to detect it. Women may be theoretically unscientific, but
they are essential to the maintenance of the scientific spirit and
practice. Naturally they suffered sickness, but not nearly so much as
one might have expected; for discipline plays a tremendous part in the
avoidance of sickness. It is not so much a physical factor as a moral
one. It seemed possible to induce a practice of going sick very easily,
and in that climate it was only necessary to permit some inner act of
surrender that escapes simple definition, but resembles the lowering of
a dog's tail, and one became a sick man. It was not exactly malingering.

Beyond the western boundary of the hospital, behind the officers' tents,
lay an oriental garden. An oil engine and pumps at the river's edge
supplied the water to it through channels. The machine was worked by an
Arab who, as far as one could tell, prayed to it. In the garden, full of
moist heat and splashes of colour, lived a colony of jackals, those
extraordinary spirits of hell, whose wailing and hysteria are so
amazing. I do not know how Darwin would have accounted for the
particular note they strike. It is probably on a level with the roaring
of the lion, in that it is designed to terrify. But the jackal does not
terrify by such obvious methods as the lion. He plays on your eerie,
ghostly, superstitious side. He brings up into the imagination the
malignity and hopelessness of the damned. He seems to people the night
with wailing horrors. To a man dying of thirst in the desert, the jackal
must just give the final touch of despair that makes death and
nothingness seem best. It must be strange to die, surrounded by jackals
at their chthonian litanies.

Shortly after we reached Amara, the news came that Sir Victor Horsley
had died. It was in a season of extreme heat, when de