That garrison, debilitated from the long siege and the climatic conditions of Mesopotamia, were marched right across Asia Minor with hardly any clothes, no money, and insufficient food. Their nameless sufferings will never be known in full, for many died in the desert, clubbed to death by their guards, stripped naked, and left by the roadside. Others were abandoned in Arab villages, when in the last stages of fever or dysentery. Others, more fortunate, were found dead by their companions after the night's halt, when the huddled sleepers turned out to face another day of misery. Hopeless indeed the outlook must have seemed to some lad fresh from the fields of home. The brutal sentries, the arid desert, the daily deaths, the daily quarrels, the bitterness of the future, as bleak as the acres of sand that stretched to their unknown destination, the dwindling company of friends, the grip of thirst, the pangs of hunger, and the pains of death--such was the outlook for many a lad who died between Baghdad and Aleppo. Ghosts of such memories must not be lightly evoked amongst those alive to-day, friends of the fallen, but always they will haunt the trails of the northern Arabian desert. Through it all our men were heroes. To the last they showed their captors of what stuff the Anglo-Saxon is made. The cowardly Kurds, who were the worst of the various escorts provided between Baghdad and Aleppo, never dared to insult our men unless they outnumbered them four to one. Even then they generally waited until some sick man fell down from exhaustion before clubbing him to death with their rifle-butts. In the middle of the desert, between Mosul and Aleppo, a friend of mine found six half-demented British soldiers who had been propped up against the wall of a mud hut and left there to die. There was no transport, no medicines. Nothing could be done for them. They died long before the relief parties organised at Aleppo could come to their rescue. At Aleppo the hospital treatment was extremely bad. All men who were fit to move (and many who were not) were sent on in cattle trucks to various camps in the centre of Anatolia, and when at length they reached these camps after vicissitudes which were only a dreary repetition of earlier experiences, they came upon the plague of typhus at its height, and naturally, in this weakened state, succumbed by scores and hundreds. To see a body of our soldiers arriving at Afion-kara-hissar, pushed and kicked and beaten by their escort, was terrible. Our men were literally skeletons alive, skeletons with skin stretched across their bones, and a few rags on their backs. This is an exact statement of things seen. They struggled up the road, hardly able to carry the pitiful little bundles containing scraps of bread, a bit of soap, a mug, all, in short, that they had been able to save from systematic looting on the way.