The chief columns of officers have already left for Mosul. Daily I practise walking on the wall, a space that offers opportunity for a good promenade. I want to see how much I can do. Altogether I feel a little better but the dysentery has left me very weak, and after a half-mile have to sit down. I have contrived to send my British orderly to the town where, with the money I have raised by selling some of my kit, he has bought on occasion small pieces of meat or fish, a few vegetables, and even a small fowl which we shared among six sick people. We stewed the fowl to rags and drank the soup. I have been allowed by special leave to visit General Smith in hospital. He had asked me during the last days of Kut to do A.D.C. again to him in captivity. This was an excellent chance for which I was most grateful, as it seemed doubtful whether I would last the trek. But I have no money and can't get any, and am averse to travelling on my general's supply, as money now is one's chance of life. I told him frankly that I am doubtful about being fit enough to carry on very efficiently for him, but as he is to travel in a carriage over the desert for all those hundreds of miles I could do a certain amount, and I hoped to be of use in knowing something of French and German. However, in my woebegone condition I was promptly turned down. I recognize now that I am in for the ordeal of the survival of the fittest with a heavy handicap. We hear sometimes terrible accounts of the hardships undergone over these hundreds of miles of foodless and often waterless land, to struggle over which is an achievement even for a strong man. But for one thing, we should be too dismayed to start--that is the hope and will strong within us to survive. One recognizes this show has become a competition between a man and a merciless fate. I believe I shall get through. Major Middlemas and Lieutenant Greenwood shared my room and we slept on our blankets on the floor. _Later._--We have been allowed three times into the town and wandered through a bazaar full of bootshops and cafés. Gunner Holmes sticks faithfully to me. He is lucky to have escaped the lot of the others. Shortly after our arrival we saw what even the oldest soldiers amongst us regarded as the most awful spectacle of their lives--the sight of a column of British soldiers under Turk and Arab guards entering Baghdad after the march from Kut. They were literally walking corpses, some doubled with the pains of cholera, some limping from blows received _en route_. They were pressed on by their guards. Some had lost their boots and shoes or had parted with them for food. Some fell, but under the coercion of loud shouts or a Turkish heel got up and lurched forward again.