Meanwhile at Gwalior a pleasant surprise was in store.  We had “train rations” on the usual measly Indian scale, but for tea on Saturday we were to rely on tea provided by Scindia at Gwalior.  Happily a Maharajah’s ideas of tea are superior to a Quartermaster’s, and this is what we had for fifty men!  Unlimited tea, with sugar, twenty-five tinned cheeses, fifty tins of sausages and twenty-five 2lb. tins of Marie biscuits!  This feed tinted the rest of the journey rose-colour.

The only other incident was the loss by one of the men of his haversack, which he dropped out of window.

Yesterday, Sunday, was much cooler.  When I woke at Bhopal it was only 76 deg. and it only got even as high as 89 deg. for about half-an-hour.  We ran into rain in the afternoon.

We reached Bhusawal at 7 p.m. and had to wait four hours to be picked up by the Nagpur mail.  In the refreshment room I met a Terrier gunner officer who was P.M.C. of the Mess at Barrackpore when we messed there in December.  He was just back from a course at Mhow and had been positively told by the Staff Officers there that his and most other T. batteries were to be sent back to Europe in a month’s time:  and moreover that a whole division of Ts. was going to the Persian Gulf and another to E. Africa.

The air is full of such rumours.  Here the Embarkation N.C.O. says 78,000 K’s have already sailed to relieve us.  But the mere number of the rumours rather discredits them.  And the fact of their using us for drafts to P.G. seems to show they don’t intend moving the units.

We left Bhusawal at midnight and arrived here at 9.15 without incident.  Bombay is its usual mild and steamy self, an unchanging 86 deg., which seemed hot in November, but quite decently cool now.

This boat is, from the officers’ point of view, far more attractive than the “Ultonia.”  Being a B.I. boat it is properly equipped for the tropics and has good 1st class accommodation.  She is about 6,000 tons.  The men are, I’m afraid, rather crowded.  There will be 1,000 on board when complete.  We pick up some at Karachi.  We sail to-morrow morning.  If not too sea-sick I will write to Papa and post it at Karachi.

I am going out now to do a little shopping and get my hair cut, and I shall post this in the town.

P.S.—­The whole country is deliciously green now, not a brown patch except the freshest ploughed pieces, and the rivers no longer beggarly trickles in a waste of rubble, but pretty pastoral streams with luxuriant banks.

* * * * *

“S.S.  VARSOVA,”

August 21st,1915.

To N.B.

I don’t know when I shall next get one of your letters.  It will have to follow me painfully round via Agra.  And if I post this at Basra, it will have to go back to Bombay before starting for England; though people here are already talking of the time when we shall have finished the Baghdad Railway and letters come by rail from England to Basra in about 5 days.