Malaria returned the second night, and with a temperature of 105° I heard we were off. I felt appallingly unsteady and my head throbbed to every movement of the donkey, as it does in such cases. I was lucky to have any donkey at all, because some of the native orderlies having lost their own donkeys clean shaved most of the others, thus erasing the letters that had been cut out of the hair of the animal. Wild and high raged many a conflict over donkeys. I found mine had been re-branded and was claimed by another. At the last moment I managed to get a tiny animal from an Arab water-carrier for my last money.
Once again we filed out to the setting sun past Bedouin camps. We crossed some heavy water-courses, and more than one humorous event occurred thereat. To see a colonel seated on a diminutive donkey that stuck midstream, refusing to budge either forward or backward while the water gradually climbed up the angry colonel's breeches, was quite entertaining. In such cases a fat Turk or Arab would seize the animal's nose while the others pushed the beast or the colonel from behind. I remember that on one such occasion a very "bobbery" major rode a donkey that had conceived an affection for mine, and always followed my little beast. So when we stuck midstream the major's beast stopped also, and, less lucky than I, his animal happened to have stopped on some quicksand so that when finally my beast was got to move the major's could not. The whole four of us were equally put out. I suggested later that we should exchange donkeys, but as I had only a slight lien on my animal the major disagreed.
A detailed account of our many wanderings would spoil the perspective of this diary. We went on through the nights and through the days; through dust-storms and heat, by night passing the fires of Arabs who awaited the stragglers, sometimes camping by Bedouin tents or pebbly water-courses, always following the trail of dead, for every mile or so one saw mounds of our dead soldiers by the wayside. We left Hammamali, a village of sulphur-baths, on the 14th June, and stumbling over rocky ground for some hours we reached far-famed Mosul, and with great delight saw again a few trees. Then appeared the mounds of Nineveh and the mounds of the palace of the great King Sardanapalus. But even the shades of Sargon, Shalmaneser and Sennacherib scarcely interested us. In the foreground we saw a great tomb which we were told was John the Baptist's! And Alexander's great battlefield of Arbela lay on the eastern plain.
The impression of life in Mosul is bad. We have some rooms in an appalling dirty barracks among gangs of Kurds in chains. Every day or so one of these is hung. Down below in the basement our men are dying wholesale. They are the survivors of previous columns. We have been compulsory guests of a Turkish officers' club. They charged us three times as much as the town did, and generally neglected us. General Melliss, however, told us to-day to go to the town. We quoted his high authority freely and went to a most excellent little Italian restaurant. The proprietor was from Naples, and we had some conversation of his old haunts. He did us very well and quite reasonably, actually cashing a cheque or two for us.
Nisibin, June 26th.—After many false rumours of wagons and carts for transport and the usual half-dozen false starts we left Mosul on June 20th. Early in the morning before starting I slipped out in the confusion of preparing the columns and did the round of Mosul absolutely unattended. With the little Turkish I had picked up and French here and there, I visited the bank quarter to try to raise some money by cheque. There was no chance of this, but I succeeded in changing the notes I had for smaller. The notes were not accepted in the bazaar, and one was charged for paper change. I had not the fortune of meeting one likely person or I should not have returned, but to attempt to escape without help in such a place with the desert all around was too hopeless. I saw merely bazaar and squabbling Arabs.
On the 20th a few tiny donkeys were given us for riding animals, about enough to allow one officer out of six a ride one hour in three. Some donkeys were on three legs, some so poor and sick they could scarcely move. For transport we were shown a set of a dozen untrained, wild and unharnessed camels, altogether the most savage and nasty brutes I have ever seen. They were unapproachable and snapped and gyrated and then trotted away. If a kit were fixed on they proceeded to brush it off. One or two had a rotten saddletree without any girths, bridles or head-straps there were none, only a piece of rotten rag or rope being around the animals' heads. We had, however, already laid in a stock of the best rope we could get, and having first fitted this into the jaws of the brutes, proceeded to fix on our kit. I was very amused at the efforts of the Turks to help us. They tied the kit actually on one camel's neck, and our Indian bearers went one better by tying it on to his legs. However, finally we got most of our kit on board, and then the fun started. First one and then another got loose, as the servants were too weak to hold them. Soon the road was a procession of fleeing camels dropping bundle after bundle in their headlong flight.
This pantomime went on for hours. It was awfully hot. We took a long time to get them refitted. An hour later, blinded with perspiration and dust and in the last stage of exhaustion, we set out again, having done only about four miles of this terrible trek of which we had heard so much and which was now said to be worse than the other we had just finished. We plodded on. Presently loud shouts of consternation broke from the rear, and we saw a gigantic camel laden up with well-roped valises, firewood, and stores topped with rugs, and a fowl or two. He simply charged through the procession, brushing every bit of kit off the other camels as he passed and setting off two or three along with him. One camel followed him with a helpless bearer seated on the top of the stores, the head-rope gone. His shouts as he was borne toward the wrong part of the horizon would have been funny if it had not meant disaster for his sahib. We rested an hour or two and then went on in two columns, one of which got lost and did several miles too much, joining us before the dawn in time to start again. The camel pantomime continued. I walked or borrowed a ride from an Arab. My endurance was to me the marvellous thing.
I was almost two stone underweight, and very unwell from the long bout of colitis, my digestion quite out of gear, weak from want of nourishment and my shell-bruise, not to mention continual pain from my eyes. Yet with all the exertion and sleepless nights, so fascinating was movement after long inaction that I managed to go along quite well, and at times felt my legs swinging rhythmically along in the night and believed it possible to be well one day again. One donkey I managed to get for my baggage and that of my fellow voyager, Lieutenant Stapleton, I.A.R., who was an official "of important dimensions" in the I.C.S., and although not much au fait with knots and donkeys, made a most excellent purchasing officer, as his Arabic was so doubtful that the Arabs, being at a loss to know his wants, had to produce all their possessions, and in this way we ended up more than once in having a goat's head when he had set out to describe the more expensive chicken. He was keen on ologies, and we called him the Ologist. One tried to extract humour out of our incongruous situations, but getting tired of being humorous we ended by examining things from the resigned angle of the fatalist.
Each day before the dawn broke we were up, and after a breakfast of tea, black bread, a small piece of cheese and two figs, or generally only raisins, we prepared to leave. Then the camel pantomime started afresh, and it was no uncommon sight to see half our convoy of camels bolting headlong in the wrong direction before a crowd of galloping gendarmes and Turks, their uplifted tails disappearing over a sand-ridge against the rising sun and their kit distributed at intervals on the plain.
On this trek we lost the sense of time. Sometimes we marched by day, but generally in the evening and well on into the night. But for us time was not. I knew two seasons only: when we walked and when we did not. I did not always sleep. We have had to rely on provisions we brought with us and live chiefly on raisins. Sometimes one was on foot, sometimes one rode, and a broken-down wagon or two offered a fraction of a seat to any one that collapsed up to the number of six. But so many from one cause or another got sick or footsore that the extra had to hang on to the wagon.