when I had paratyphoid, he hadn’t “done fevers.” A real wonder was our Bill, and I hope he will read this some day. From about that time until about a year later, when the doctors from Kut-el-Amara joined up with us at Afion, Bill was the camp physician-in-chief, and were I ill now I would as soon go to Bill as to anyone. He was a born healer. French was not his forte, but in the chemists’ shops he always got what he wanted: went on until he did, or turned out on the counter the whole of the proprietor’s stock. “Avez-vous ammoniated tincture of quinine?” he would ask. And if the man said “No,” then Bill would counter with, “Avez-vous aucun else that will do similaire?” And in the end he would get it. As a linguist he had a natural perception of which words could be left out, or put in in English, without destroying the sense. Two events happened to me about this time which were landmarks in that desert of dullness. It was in the Greek hotel that I received my first letter from home. A very great day indeed. And it was soon afterwards, in late November, that I spoke for the first time in Asia Minor to a woman. She was an old Roumanian in a cake-shop, and to her I said, “Bu kach para,” being Turkish, my Turkish at least, for “What is the price of this?” I commend this sentence to the notice of those about to visit Turkey. It is one of the few worth knowing. It may seem strange that this should be noted as a landmark, but as a matter of fact I only spoke seven words to women between the 9th of August, 1915, and the 10th of September, 1918, and these were three of the seven. It is no small part of the multitude of causes that make prisoners queer, this deprivation of women’s society. Men sink back into barbarism very rapidly when unbuoyed by the influence of women. They do not want the feminist, the creature doomed to the sterile affection of a little lamp-post-loving dog dragging at a lead. But they want to be helped by talking to mothers, lest they forget that motherhood is by far and away the greatest thing on earth.