ble books, among which are _Armurath to Armurath_ and _The Desert
and the Sown_. The undeniable position which she holds must appear doubly
remarkable when the Mohammedan official attitude toward women is borne in
mind. Miss Bell has worked steadily and without a leave in this trying
climate, and her tact and judgment have contributed to the British success
to a degree that can scarcely be overestimated.

The headquarters of the various batteries were in Baghdad. There we had
our permanent billets, and stores. We would often be ordered out in
sections to be away varying lengths of time, though rarely more than a
couple of months. The workshops' officer stayed in permanent charge and
had the difficult task of keeping all the cars in repair. The supply of
spare parts was so uncertain that much skill and ingenuity were called
for, and possessed to a full degree by Lieutenant Linnell of the
Fourteenth.

A few days after I joined I set off with Somerset and one of the battery
officers, Lieutenant Smith, formerly of the Black Watch. We were ordered
to do some patrolling near the ruins of Babylon. Kerbela and Nejef, in the
quality of great Shiah shrines, had never been particularly friendly to
the Turks, who were Sunnis--but the desert tribes are almost invariably
Sunnis, and this coupled with their natural instinct for raiding and
plundering made them eager to take advantage of any interregnum of
authority. We organized a sort of native mounted police, but they were
more picturesque than effective. They were armed with weapons of varying
age and origin--not one was more recent than the middle of the last
century. Now the Budus, the wild desert folk, were frequently equipped
with rifles they had stolen from us, so in a contest the odds were
anything but even.

We took up our quarters at Museyib, a small town on the banks of the
Euphrates, six or eight miles above the Hindiyah Barrage, a dam finished a
few years before, and designed to irrigate a large tract of potentially
rich country. We patrolled out to Mohamediyah, a village on the caravan
desert route to Baghdad, and thence down to Hilleh, around which stand the
ruins of ancient Babylon. The rainy season was just beginning, and it was
obvious that the patrolling could not be continuous, for a twelve-hour
rain would make the country impassable to our heavy cars for two or three
days. We were fortunate in having pleasant company in the officers of a
Punjabi infantry battal