We heard from hospital of the awful sufferings of the men here who were quite unnecessarily confined in a bare baked-up field near the station. Indians and British were all mixed up, a deliberate effort of the Turk to encourage strife between the Mussulman prisoners and the others. For some days, mad with thirst, they struggled around a tiny foul pool into which the sick crawled and collapsed. It became stirred up with mud but the men, poor fellows, drank it. They have no cover from the sun except a few wretched sticks propped on poles. Baghdad is a very old city. But from its grimy and ill-kept streets and from its dust-smothered houses, the glamour of its ancient romance seems very far off. One minaret of Byzantine design we passed on our way to the town. There is nothing else to tell one of its glorious past, in fact it is said that all Baghdad was on the other bank. It is merely a drab, dull succession of buildings formed of the sun-baked mud of the desert. On the river, however, especially at sunset when the dirt and dust are obscured and only the pipes of the Baghdadis and Arabs blaze in the dusk, it is decidedly picturesque. All the sick, even if only partly able to walk, start on the desert trek for Mosul in a few days. We have heard so much of waterless marches and barren lands crossed only by the nastiest Arabs, that one has the resistless desire to try one's chance. To move is to live; to stay here is to die. _Later._--I have made a small tour of some antique shops in the bazaar with a delightful youth named Lacy of the Hants. He has just left school and is as slender and green as the young willow, and yet he has contrived to keep his manners intact, to await quietly his turn and to prefer dignified acquiescence to selfishness. We found quite an amount of silver work and even china, some of which we heard had found its way here during the war from an old caravan route from China. I have corrupted my first sentry by giving him a drink, swallowed a horrible cognac, the immediate effects of which were promising, and learned two Turkish words. One is "yok," which means "there is not," and the other is "yesak," which means forbidden!