the best part of September to get up-stream and back to
Samarra. When the boat reached Busra, scores of men were prostrate on
the deck from heat-stroke and exhaustion. In the Gulf I had a funeral.
I tried to skip to the finish of the service, with the page shimmering
and jumping before me, but had to hand the book to the captain as I
reeled down. He threw the body over, and every one flew up-deck. Later,
on the up-stream trip, we realized the fact on which all Mesopotamia
agreed, that for sheer horror the deck of a P-boat[22] is unrivalled.
Possibly it is due to the glare from the water, but our daily
temperatures of between 115 deg. and 125 deg. in the shade seemed a hundredfold
higher than they were. Just below Kut we were held up for several days
in a camp; not even Sheikh Saad in the old, bad days was more cursed
with sandflies.

I had for companion on board Kenneth Mason, engineer and archaeologist.
We passed Sannaiyat and the winding reaches where every earth-scar and
mound had a history. Here the Turk had blown up the ammunition barges,
and for hundreds of yards inland the ground was still strewn with
twisted scrap-iron; here he had set his 5.9's on the balloon, and the
evening fishing had been interrupted; here used to be the advanced
dressing-station in the times of trench warfare; here was Left Bank
Group, where our guns had been, the tamarisk thickets and wheeling
harriers, and the old shell-holes on the beach. Those crumbling
sandbanks were Mason's Mounds, and those were Crofton's O. Pip.[23]
Here were Abu Roman Mounds, and here the lines of Nakhailat or Suwada;
here were the Beit Aiessa defences; here those of Abdul Hassan and E
Mounds. It was on that angle that the _Julnar_ grounded in that
despairing, impossible attempt to run the blockade and bring food to
Townshend's men. It was in that scrub that the Turks and H.L.I.[24]
crashed when both sides launched a simultaneous attack.

We passed Kut. The river was low, and the people were growing lettuce,
while they might, on the dried sandbanks. The town front against the
palms showed its shell-holes and caverns, and we remembered how we used
to see the city, from Dujaileh Redoubt, rising up like a green
promontory. From Townshend's first battle there to the day when the 7th
Division occupied the lines of Suwada, Kut cost us not less in battle
casualties than sixty thousand men. One makes no computation of the
dead in the old cholera camps by Abu Roman, or in