ed to Harbe. The heat was
considerable, but the journey was short. Beyond the river plunging
shells told us that our troops were pushing up both banks of the Tigris
simultaneously.

The 21st Brigade took over Beled. With them remained the Cherub,
wielding for one day the flaming sword of retribution. Arabs had
desecrated our graves as they always did, and had stripped our dead.
The Cherub put the bodies back and dug several dummy graves. In these
last he put Mills bombs; removing the pin, he held each bomb down as
the earth was delicately piled over. The deed called for great nerve;
he could feel the bomb quick to jump under his finger's pressure. Arabs
watched impudently, sniping his party from a few hundred yards away.
Neither did they let him get more than a quarter of a mile away, when
he had finished, before they flocked down. The Cherub made his way to
the station, and watched, as a boy watches a bird-trap. The Arabs fell
to scooping out the soil badger-fashion with their hands. There was an
explosion, and the earth shot up in a fountain of clods. The robbers
ran, but returned immediately and carried off two of their number,
casualties. Then they remained to dig. Colonel Leslie, commanding the
21st Brigade, had watched from Beled Station with enthusiasm, and he
now turned a machine-gun on them. The Cherub, returning to the scene of
his labours, found that the Arabs had dug two feet deeper than his
original grave, breaking up the stiff ground with their fingers. To
these desperate people a piece of cloth seemed cheap at the cost of two
dead or wounded.

From first to last nothing moved deeper anger than their constant
exhumation of our dead, and murder, for robbery's sake, of the wounded
or isolated. Major Harley, A.P.M. of Baghdad in later days, learnt to
admire the ability of the Arabs, whose brief Golden Age, when Abbasids
ruled, so far outshone contemporary Europe. When he pressed them on
their ghoul-like ways, they replied, 'You British are so foolish. You
bury the dead with the clothes. The dead do not need clothes, and we
do.' The logic of this does not carry far. To them, as Mussulmans,
graves were sacrosanct to a unique degree; a suspicion of disrespect on
our part would rouse the whole of Islam to flaming wrath. They were
criminals, by their own _ethos_, when they desecrated our dead.
Moreover, they murdered whenever they could, in the cruellest and
beastliest fashion. The marvel is, our actions of repr