We stayed six days at B. mainly on a captured Turkish pilgrim ship.  I suggest a Turkish pilgrimage as a suitable outlet for the ascetic tendencies of your more earnest spikelets.  It was hot, but nothing fabulous.  My faithful thermometer never got beyond 104 in my cabin.  The disadvantage of any temperature over 100 indoors is that the fan makes you hotter instead of cooler.  There are only two ways of dealing with this difficulty.  One is to drink assiduously and keep an evaporation bath automatically going:  but on this ship the drinks used to give out about 4 p.m. and when it comes to neat Tigris-cum-Euphrates, I prefer it applied externally.  So I used to undress at intervals and sponge all over and then stand in front of the fan.  While you’re wet it’s deliciously cool:  as soon as you feel the draught getting warm, you dress again and carry on.  This plan can’t be done here as there are no fans.  I suppose you realised that Austen Chamberlain was only indulging his irrepressible sense of humour when he announced in the H. of C. that in Mesopotamia “The health of troops has on the whole been good.  Ice and fans are installed wherever possible,” i.e. nowhere beyond Basra.  The hot weather sickness casualties have been just over 30% of the total force:  but as they were nearly all heat-stroke and malaria, it ought to be much better now.  Already the nights are cool enough for a blanket to be needed just before dawn.  Of course they run up the sick list by insane folly.  When we moved to our Turkish ship there was every hour of the day or night to choose from to do it in, and plenty of covered barges to do it in.  So they selected 10 a.m., put 150 men into an open barge, gave them no breakfast, and left them in the barge two hours to move them 600 yards, and an hour unloading baggage afterwards!  Result, out of my forty-nine, three heat-strokes on the spot, and four more sick the next day.

We left Basra on the 30th.  It took us two-and-a-half days to do the 130 miles up here, against a strong wind and current.  The Regiment has moved here from Nasiriyah.  This place is 130 miles North of Basra and 120 South of Kut-el-Amarah (always known as Kut).  As to our movements, the only kind of information I can give you would be something like this.  There are fifteen thousand blanks, according to trustworthy reports, at blank.  We have blank brigades and our troops are blanking at blank which is two-thirds of the way from here to blank; and I think our intention is to blank with all our three blanks as soon as possible, but this blank is remaining on lines of communications here for the present.  Not very interesting is it?  So I won’t reel off any more.

From the little scraps of news that have come through, it looks as if the Balkans were going to be the centre of excitement.  If Bulgaria has agreed to let the Germans through as I suspect she has, I’d bet on both Greece and Roumania joining the Allies.

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