lls of cheerfulness.

Life in the wards was not so bad for the patients. There was a certain
amount of literature--it was never abundant--and there was a gramophone.
There was also the occupation of killing flies with a fly-swotter,
playing card games and dominoes, grousing, yarning, sleeping and eating.
In the cool of the evening, the convalescents would line the river bank
and watch the convoys. There was bathing in the river. At times there
were rumours of sharks, for sharks go up river as high as Baghdad. It is
not possible to go far out in the stream unless one is a very powerful
swimmer. The current is very swift. Tortoises used to line the margin of
the river in the evening, with their heads sticking out above water,
while crowds of angry birds accused them from the wet mud of the shore.
Wild duck, partridge, snipe, sand-grouse and doves were fairly numerous,
and in the evenings it was possible to get a good bag. It was worth
shooting jackals, for their skins were in very good condition. The
hospital had a football ground and later on, towards the end of the hot
season, a tennis court was made with the aid of a mixture of mud and
straw. A cheery innovation was started shortly after the middle of the
year. Concert parties, organised in India from the talent of the Army,
came out and gave entertainments in the evening, and very good some of
them were.

An effort was made to further the interests of medical science, and the
Amara clinical society was started at which doctors met weekly and
discussed cases and diagnoses, and papers were read. There is, I think,
no better proof that, in its central core, medicine is an art, and not a
science, than the kind of discussion that goes on at medical meetings.
It exactly resembles the discussions that go on in political debating
societies. The monotony of life was interrupted at frequent intervals by
official inspections. Every General who passed up or down felt it
incumbent on him to visit the hospital. A crowd of lean men in khaki,
each with what looked like a large collection of stamps on his left
breast, a posse of Bengal Lancers, the warning note of the bugle, a
sudden cessation of scrubbing and dusting in the wards, the temporary
assumption of an intelligent air, of straps and leggings and tunics, a
few explanations or carefully veiled suggestions, some hearty laughs, a
popping of soda-water bottles in the mess, a receding cloud of dust on
the plain--and the inspectio