"'I make it two fingers left of that.'
"'Oh, you are going by the corps map.'
"'Two hundred and six degrees true.'
"'I was going by magnetic bearing.'
"Ominous warning of what might happen if too many guides directed the march.
"Then there was the man with the bicycle. We had no cyclometer, but two men checked the revolution of the wheel. And there were other counters of steps, of whom I was one, for counting and comparison. From these an aggregate distance was struck. But it was not until we were well on the march that I noticed the man with the pace stick, who staggered and reeled like an inebriated crab in his efforts to extricate his biped from the unevennesses of the ground before he was trampled down by the column. I watched him with a curious fascination, and as I grew sleepier and sleepier that part of my consciousness which was not counting steps, recognized him as a cripple who had come out to Mesopotamia in this special rôle 'to do his bit.' His humped back, protruding under his mackintosh as he labored forward, bent into a hoop, must have suggested the idea which was accepted as fact until I pulled myself together at the next halt and heard the mechanical and unimaginative half of me repeat 'Four thousand, seven hundred, and twenty-one.' The man raised himself into erectness with a groan, and a crippled greengrocer whom I had known in my youth, to me the basic type of hunchback—became an upstanding British private.
"Walking thus in the dark with the wind in one's face at a kind of funeral goose step it is very easy to fall asleep. The odds were that we should blunder into some Turkish picket or patrol. Looking back it was hard to realize that the inky masses behind, like a column of following smoke, was an army on the march. The stillness was so profound one heard nothing save the howl of the jackal, the cry of fighting geese, and the ungreased wheel of an ammunition limber, or the click of a picketing peg against a stirrup.
"The instinct to smoke was almost irresistible. A dozen times one's hands felt for one's pipe, but not a match was struck in all that army of thousands of men. Sometimes one feels that one is moving in a circle. One could swear to lights on the horizon, gesticulating figures on a bank.
"Suddenly we came upon Turkish trenches. They were empty, an abandoned outpost. The column halted, made a circuit. I felt that we were involved in an inextricable coil, a knot that could not be unraveled till dawn. We were passing each other, going different ways, and nobody knew who was who. But we swung into direct line without a hitch. It was a miracle of discipline and leadership.
"At the next long halt, the point of bifurcation, the counter of steps was relieved. An hour after the sapper spoke. The strain was ended. We had struck the sand hills of the Dujailar depression. Then we saw the flash of Townshend's guns at Kut, a comforting assurance of the directness of our line. That the surprise of the Turk was complete was shown by the fires in the Arab encampments, between which we passed silently in the false dawn. A mile or two to our north and west the campfires of the Turks were already glowing.