We crossed the Tigris in the dark, and some of us were nearly drowned, owing to the horses being frightened.  We had to abandon our carts, so we burned them; and by the light of that fire we saw great mounds of Turkish supplies that they intended to float down the river to Bagdad on strange rafts made of goatskins.  The sentries guarding the stores put up a little fight, and five more of us were wounded, but finally we burned the stores, and the flames were so bright and high that we had to gallop for two miles before we could be safe again in darkness.  So we crossed at a rather bad place, and there was something like panic for ten minutes, but we got over safely in the end, wounded and all.  We floated the wounded men and ammunition and rations for men and horses across on some of those strange goatskin rafts that go round and round and any way but forward.  We found them in the long grass by the river-bank.

At a town on the far side we seized new carts, far better than our old ones.  And then, because we might have been expected to continue eastward, we turned to the south and followed the course of the Tigris, straight into Kurdish country, where it did us no good to resemble either Turks or Kurds; for we could not hope to deceive the Kurds into thinking we were of their tribe, and Turks and Kurds are open enemies wherever the Turks are not strong enough to overawe.  They were all Kurds in these parts, and no Turks at all, so that our problem became quite different.  After two days’ riding over what was little else than wilderness, Ranjoor Singh made new dispositions, and we put the Kurdish headgear in our knapsacks.

In the first place, the wounded had been suffering severely from the long forced marches and the jolting of the springless carts.  Some of them had died, and the Greek doctor had grown very anxious for his own skin.  Ranjoor Singh summoned him and listened to great explanations and excuses, finally gravely permitting him to live, but adding solemn words of caution.  Then he ordered the carts abandoned, for there was now no road at all.  The forty Turkish soldiers (in their Syrian clothes) were made to carry the wounded in stretchers we improvised, until some got well and some died; those who did not carry wounded were made to carry ammunition, and some of our own men who had tried to disregard Ranjoor Singh’s strict orders regarding women of the country were made to help them.  That arrangement lasted until we came to a village where the Kurds were willing to exchange mules against the rifles we had taken from the Kurds, one mule for one rifle, we refusing to part with any cartridges.