I haven’t had time to observe the birds here very much yet, but they seem interesting, especially the water-birds.  With regard to what I wrote to Mamma about the teal, people who have been up the river say they saw a very big flock of them at Kut.  There were a lot of snipe with them and about twenty bitterns, which surprises me.  And about eighty miles north of here there is a mud flat where great numbers of mallards are assembling for migration northwards:  and there are more bitterns there than there are higher up even.  These flocks about the equinoxes are very curious.  I expect the mallards will migrate northwards, and the teal soon afterwards will become very scarce, but I hope the bitterns will stay where they are.  The snipe are less interesting:  they move about all over the place, wherever they can pick up most food.  These people put the size of the flock of teal at a hundred and fifty and the mallards at five hundred, but you should, I think, multiply the first by a hundred and the second only by ten.

I got Mamma’s letter via the India Office just after we got here.  I quite agree with her view of war, though I must admit the officers of 1/4 Hants seem to me improved by it.  While sitting on that court martial at Agra I expressed my view in a sonnet which I append, for you to show to Mamma: 

    How long, O Lord, how long, before the flood
    Of crimson-welling carnage shall abate? 
    From sodden plains in West and East the blood
    Of kindly men streams up in mists of hate
    Polluting Thy clear air:  and nations great
    In reputation of the arts that bind
    The world with hopes of Heaven, sink to the state
    Of brute barbarians, whose ferocious mind
    Gloats o’er the bloody havoc of their kind,
    Not knowing love or mercy.  Lord, how long
    Shall Satan in high places lead the blind
    To battle for the passions of the strong? 
    Oh, touch thy children’s hearts, that they may know
    Hate their most hateful, pride their deadliest foe.

I must stop now, as a mail is going out and one never knows when the next will be.

* * * * *

NORFOLK HOUSE. 
AMARAH, September 13th, 1915.

TO HIS FATHER.

As I have written the news to Mamma this week I will tell you what I gather of the campaign and country generally.

There’s no doubt that old Townshend, the G.O.C., means to push on to Baghdad “ekdum”; and if the Foreign Office stops him there will be huge indigna.  It seems to me that the F.O. should have made itself quite explicit on the point, one way or the other months ago:  to pull up your general in full career is exasperating to him and very wasteful, as he has accumulated six months’ supplies for an army of 16,000 up here, which will have to be mostly shipped back if he is pulled up at Kut.  The soldiers all say the F.O. played the same trick on Barratt