You see, we had written a good many letters from time to time on the assurance of our guards that they would be handed to the Turks for forwarding to England. Most of these were probably thrown away or deliberately destroyed, but, by a kind trick of fate, one written by myself was taken by the Turks to Sollum when the Senussi occupied that port. In this letter--no matter how--I managed to indicate that we were held captive and in danger of starvation at Bir-Hakkim. When the British retook Sollum this letter, by a second lucky coincidence, was left behind in the hastily-evacuated quarters of a Turkish officer. V--THE RESCUE AND THE RETURN TO ENGLAND Once definitely located, our rescue was only the matter of assembling the requisite strength in armoured cars and finding a competent guide. This done, our deliverance was but a question of hours. But of how they would have found things had anything delayed them for even a few days I do not care to think. It was about three in the afternoon of St. Patrick's Day--we had celebrated it in the morning by making a feeble attempt to kill off a few of the snakes that had recently begun to infest the camp--that the first car was sighted, and before we had finished pinching ourselves to prove we were not dreaming the whole force of forty-one were thundering down upon us. The ambulances pulled up, and the attendants, as soon as they could free themselves from the embraces of the men, began to shower food about. Meanwhile, the armoured cars, spreading out like a "fan," swept by in pursuit of our fleeing guards. Except for the Senussi priest, whom the sailors had dubbed "The Old Black Devil," and who had departed a couple of days previously, we had no special grounds for complaint against the men upon whom the care of our party had fallen. They had, for the most part, done the best they could for us, and we had no reason to believe that they had fared much better than their prisoners. We would gladly have interceded for them if there had been any chance. Taking it for granted, apparently, that they would receive no quarter, they had taken to their heels the moment the first cars came into sight, and a panicky sort of resistance on a part of a few of them when they were overtaken sealed the fate of the lot. Save for a few women and children, all the Arabs about the place succumbed to the fire of the machine-guns, and a score or so of graves were added to the four of the _Tara_ men we had already buried at Bir-Hakkim. We lost one more man in a hospital at Alexandria, but the rest of us, thanks to good food and careful nursing, were soon quite our old selves again. Practically every man of us is back, or about to go back, on duty. Word of my own new command comes only this morning.