ck.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] Light-armoured motor-battery.

VIII

AUJEH

Our line was where the plateau rose and then dropped steeply into deep,
narrow fissures. The night was maddening with cold, and the rum ration
came as a sheer necessity. All through this brief Tekrit campaign the
British troops were without coats or blankets. The Indian troops had
transport for theirs. The arrangement was correct in theory, since we
came from a chill climate.

None of these later Mesopotamian pushes could be much more than raids.
The rivers in this latitude were too shallow and shifting for
transport, so we had to be fed and watered by means of Ford cars. It
taxed the whole of the army's resources in Fords for Tekrit, blankets
and coats having to give way to rations. Whilst the 7th Division
pushed, the other two fronts were practically immobilized. Maude could
strike on only one at a time of our three rivers. Ramadie was fought in
September; Tekrit in November; Kifri in December; and the same round,
of Euphrates, Tigris, and Diyaleh, was followed in 1918.

So we had ten days of what seemed arctic exposure. This night after
Daur, Diggins shared a Burberry with me; natheless the night was one
of insane wretchedness. We rejoiced, with more than Vedic joy, to greet
the dawn, though the flies swiftly made us long for night again.

On the 3rd we moved slightly forward. My brigade rested, while the 19th
went on. The enemy's lines at Aujeh were taken easily. One wounded Turk
was captured. He was set on a horse, and paraded restlessly back and
forward, for some mystic reason, during the day. Fowke's solution was
that the authorities hoped the troops would count him many times over,
and been heartened by the thought that we had destroyed the Turks' last
force in Mesopotamia. When the Aujeh lines had been taken, our cavalry,
supported by the artillery, tried to rush Tekrit and burn the stores.
This proved impracticable, so we shelled the dumps at long range. My
brigade stood by, and watched from a high plateau the bursts and the
great smoke-curtains which went up, as once from burning Sodom. The
affair furnished Fowke with some excellent fooling. He would stand on a
knoll and gnash his teeth, in Old Testament fashion declaiming, 'I will
neither wash nor shave till Tekrit has fallen.' It is unnecessary to
say that the vow was kept, and overkept; and not by Fowke alone. At
other times he was plaintive and reproachful. We were shellin