a well-balanced mind. Many
a soldier sadly misses his pipe, which, of course, may not be lit on a
night march; but to me a greater loss is the silence of those other
pipes, for the sound of the bagpipes will stir up a thousand memories
in a Highland regiment, and nothing helps a column of weary
foot-soldiers so well as pipe-music, backed by the beat of drum. This
march was neither better nor worse than its fellows, and we had
covered some fourteen miles before we halted at dawn. Then we lay
down, gnawed a biscuit, tasted the precious water in our bottles, and
waited for what news airmen would bring of the enemy.

[Illustration: The Course Of The Baghdad Railway.]

[Illustration: Different Types In Mesopotamia.]

The day is not wasted on which one has seen the sun rise--perhaps some
of us changed the old saying, and felt the day would be well spent for
him who saw the sun set,--for in war, however sure the victory, so
also is the toll of killed and wounded, and the attack of an enemy
entrenched in this country, as bare and open as the African veld, is
done readily, gladly, but not without losses; and the time one thinks
of these is not in the charge, not in the advance, but in the empty
period of waiting beforehand. The needle pricks before, not during,
the race. "Remember only the happy hours," and if the most glorious
hour in life is the hour of victory in battle, so are the hours
preceding battle among the most depressing. I confess, as we sat there
idle in the chill dawn, my mind was filled not only with the hope of
victory and captured trenches, but with memories of past scenes in
France and Mesopotamia, and of a strip of ground the evening after
Magersfontein, each battlefield dotted with little groups of men lying
rigid, each marked with lines of motionless forms.

Action quickly dispels such thoughts, and we all welcomed the definite
news that was at last brought of the enemy, and our orders for a
farther advance. One brigade was immediately sent forward on the east
side of the railway in order to press back the advanced parties of the
enemy on their main position, some six miles north of our present
halting place. A brave sight it is to see a brigade deploying for
action. Even though the scarlet doublet has given place to the khaki
jacket, though no pipes sound and no colours are unfurled, the spirit
still remains; the spirit that in old days led the British line to
victory still fills these little columns