ed in their bitter
little minds as they saw. Among the rest, Sowter and I dug a hole, dug
deeply, widely, with much laughter and joyfulness. And to us, as the
afternoon wore towards evening, came the C.O., and, after watching us
for a few minutes, told us that we marched in an hour.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] 'Two and a Half Years in Mesopotamia,' _Blackwood's Magazine_
March, 1916.

[6] South Mesopotamia; north is Jezireh.

III

THE FIRST BATTLE OF ISTABULAT

These men, the steadfast among spears, dying, won for themselves
a crown of glory that fadeth not away.--_Greek Anthology._

In the quiet light we crossed the railway, and moved up to the Median
Wall, in all a march of perhaps a mile and a half. This wall was old in
Xenophon's time[7]; and along its northern side his army moved,
watching, and watched by, the troops of Tissaphernes, moving parallel
on the other side. He speaks of it as twenty feet in breadth and one
hundred feet in height. Once it was the border between Assyria and
Babylonia, and must have stretched to the Euphrates. Even now it runs
from the Tigris far into the desert. It has crumbled to one-third of
the height given by Xenophon. The semblance of a wall no longer, it is
a mighty flank of earth, covering tiers of bricks. It effectually hid
our movements as we crossed the plain before it. The Turk was
shrapnelling the wall and its approaches, endeavouring to reply to some
howitzers. These last we left on our right. As I happened to be the
nearest officer, the major came up and asked me that the
Leicestershires should move more to the left, in case any of his guns
had a premature.

We fell silently into our places behind the wall. The artillery behind
us were favoured with a certain amount of zizyph-scrub; but the wall
furnished no cover but itself. Fowke, who at all times indulged in a
great deal of gloomy prognostication, known as 'Fowke-lore,' and
received with delight, but not quite implicit belief, foretold that on
the morrow our cavalry--it was a point of principle with the infantry
to assume that the cavalry, as well as all Higher Commands, were
capable of every stupidity and of nothing but stupidity--would cut up B
Company, his own, who had a certain unattractive duty assigned to them
on the extreme left. He also told us that the Median Wall would be
shelled to blazes, which seemed pretty probable.

The clearest figure in my memory for this hurried, stealthy evening is
J.Y. C