rt. Hedgehog quills and skins were common, as everywhere
in Mesopotamia. A vast hedgehog led C Company of the Leicestershires
nightly to their picket-stations. On its first appearance a man ran to
bayonet it, but the officer did not see the necessity of this, and
stopped him. So the urchin lived, and ever after paced gravely before
its friends. Then we had the usual birds. Storks nested in the town;
there were rollers and kingfishers, and a hawk or two. But the desert,
with its starved crop of dwarf thorns, had no place for bird or animal.
Men who saw Samarra after my time raved of its winter glory, its
irises, its grass knee-high, its splendid anemones. But in summer the
land lay desolate. Nothing abounded but scorpions, mantidae, and
grasshoppers.

And nothing happened but the heat. In July, in ghastly heat, men were
expected to take Ramadie. They failed, most of their heavy casualties
being from heat-stroke. But that was the Connaught Rangers and a
Euphrates affair. At Samarra we experienced nothing more dangerous
than Fritz's[20] visits. Once or twice he bombed the station. When the
railway began running, there were two accidental derailments, in the
second of which several men were killed and General Maude had a narrow
escape. By Sumaikchah a British officer and his Indian escort were
waylaid and murdered. The murderers were outlawed; but a year later the
first on our list of the whole gang walked back into occupied territory
and was taken and hanged, despite the wish of the Politicals to spare
him. Of all these events, such as they were, we heard from Barron--'the
bold, bad Barron,' who left the Leicestershires to take up 'important
railway duties' pending the renewal of fighting.

These matters are dull enough; but no recital can be so dull as the
times were, and we had to live through them. At Samarra the division
worked unmolested through the awful heats, digging the hard ground,
cutting avenues for machine-gun fire, making strong points. Wilson had
gone, but he had an adequate successor in Haigh. Thanks to him, the
Leicestershires established the singular fact that Samarra is the
healthiest spot in the world. One man died, in place of the dreadful
sequence of deaths a year before at Sannaiyat. The division's daily
sick-rate was .9 a thousand! The Leicestershires and the Indian
battalions did even better. And yet we spent the summer in a place
where fresh vegetables were unprocurable, except a most inadequate