umn. 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 role '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.

"Fl