Secondly, as far as we can see, the main troubles up stream are over. My account to Papa last mail was not very accurate, but I will write him the facts again, in the light of fuller information. Anyway they're back at Kut now, and ought to be able to look after themselves till our reinforcements come up. The first two boat-loads have arrived here this morning, and are pushing on. But it was a serious reverse and may have very bad effects here and in India and Persia unless it is promptly revenged.
Owing to the Salsette's grounding, there will be no mail this week.
My leg remains much the same. I can walk quite well with a slight limp but the doctor won't let me walk more than fifty yards. I am very thankful I was stopped from going up to Kut. "A" Coy. has been working at top pressure there, entrenching and putting up wire entanglements. And now they will have to stand a siege, on forty days' rations, till Younghusband and Gorringe can relieve them. So I should be very much de trop there. I always felt that my entreé into the football world should be pregnant with fate, and so it is proving.
I have been reading some Swinburne. He disappoints me as a mind-perverse, fantastic and involved. Obscure when he means something, he is worse when he means nothing. As an imagination he is wonderful. His poetry is really a series of vivid and crowding pictures only held together by a few general and loose, though big ideas. His style is marvellously musical but overweighted by his classical long-windedness and difficult syntax. Such a contrast to Tennyson where the idea shines out of the language which is so simple as to seem inevitable, and yet wonderfully subtle as well as musical.
Amarah.
December 12, 1915.
To R.K.
In the stress of the times I can't remember when I last wrote or what I said, so please forgive repetitions and obscurities.
Let me begin at November 24th, the day we heard of the victory at Ctesiphon or Sulman Pak. That afternoon I crocked my leg at footer and have been a hobbler ever since with first an elephantine calf and now a watery knee, which however, like the Tigris, gets less watery daily.