I remember an old cook of the Black Watch who persisted in wearing a saucepan on his head in the trenches at Sannaiyat when the Turks were bombarding us. The man had to be humoured, so a special cooking vessel--rather a leaky one--was set aside by the mess-sergeant for his armoury. He was nervous because the regimental bhistie had been killed by a shell. There was great lamentation in the battalion when the bhistie fell. The bhistie, that silent, willing drudge, is always a favourite with the British soldier. His gentleness, patience, and devotion are proverbial. Even in cantonments, bent under the weight of his massaq,[12] he is invested with a peculiar dignity, and in desert places he appears as one of the few beneficent manifestations of Providence. One always thinks of him as a giver; his bestowals are without number, his demands infinitesimal. I have never heard of a grumbling, or impatient, or morose bhistie, or of one whose name has been associated actively or passively with violence, or provocation, or crime. There was a dreadful day during the Ahwaz operations in May, 1915, when our troops, after a stifling night, found the wells they had counted on were dry. They were already exhausted; the temperature was 125 degrees in the shade, or would have been if there had been any shade, and to reach water they had another ten or fifteen miles' march to Kharkeh. An officer in the Indian Cavalry told me that he watched a bhistie of the Merwara battalion supporting a man, who was too weak to walk unaided, for more than two miles. When the sepoy came to the end of his tether the bhistie stayed with him a few seconds, and then relieved him of his rifle which he carried into camp. That was probably the hottest and thirstiest day's march our troops endured in Mesopotamia. A number of the Merwaras died of thirst. It was just before Dunlop's burning march over the desert by Illah and Bisaitin to Amara, when even the most hard-bitten old campaigners fell through heat-exhaustion. During all these operations the bhisties behaved splendidly at a time when any form of effort was a virtue, fetching water untiringly and pouring it over the victims of the march. [Illustration: BHIL FOLLOWERS.]