of Four
Thousand Yards in France, but I have not seen it in black and white
yet.

Having so few men available there are not many parades, in fact from 7
to 8 a.m. about four times a week is all that I've been putting in.
And as a tactful Turk sank the barge containing all my Company's
documents sometime in July there is an agreeable shortage of office
business. So I am left to pass a day of cultured leisure and to
meditate on the felicity of the Tennysonian "infinite torment of
flies." I read Gibbon and Tennyson and George Eliot and the _Times_ by
turns, with intervals of an entertaining work, the opening sentence of
which is "Birds are warm-blooded vertebrate animals oviparous and
covered with feathers, the anterior limbs modified into wings, the
skull articulating with the vertebral column by a single occipital
condyle" and so on. I also work spasmodically at Hindustani. I rather
fancy my handwriting in the Perso-Arabic script. Arabic proper I am
discouraged from by the perverse economy of its grammar and syntax. It
needs must have two plurals, one for under ten and one for over,
twenty-three conjugations, and yet be without the distinction of past
and future. Which is worse even than the Hindustani alphabet with no
vowels and four z's--so _unnecessary_, isn't it, as my Aunts would
say.

* * * * *

AMARAH.

_September_ 29, 1915.

TO HIS FATHER.

One's system has got so acclimatised to high temperatures that I find
it chilly and want my greatcoat to sit in at any temperature under
80 deg., under 100 deg. is noticeably warm.

The men are getting livelier already and the sick list will soon, I
hope, shrink. The chief troubles are dust and flies. About four days
per week a strong and often violent wind blows from the N.W., full of
dust from the desert, and this pervades everything. The moment the
wind stops the flies pester one. They all say that this place is
flyless compared to Nasiriyah, where they used to kill a pint and a
half a day by putting saucers of formalin and milk on the mess table
and still have to use one hand with a fan all the time while eating
with the other, to prevent getting them into their mouths. Here it is
only a matter of half a dozen round one's plate--we feed on the first
floor, which is a gain. In the men's bungalows I try to keep them down
by insisting on every scrap of food being either swept away or covered
up: and the presence or absence of flies