We spent a few days in Baghdad refitting. The cars were to go out camouflaged to resemble supply-trucks, for every precaution was taken to prevent the Turks from realizing that we were massing men for an attack. The night before we were to start, word came in that the political officer at Nejef had been murdered, and the town was in revolt. We were ordered to send a section there immediately, so Lieutenant Ballingal's was chosen, while the rest of us left next morning with the balance of the battery for Hit. The first part of the route lay across the desert to Falujah, a prosperous agricultural town on the Euphrates. Rail-head lies just beyond at a place known as Tel El Dhubban--the "Hill of the Flies." From there on supplies were brought forward by motor transport, or in Arab barges, called shakturs. We crossed the river on a bridge of boats and continued up along the bank to Ramadie. Here I stayed over, detailed to escort the army commander on a tour of inspection. The smaller towns along the Euphrates are far more attractive than those on the Tigris. The country seems more developed, and most inviting gardens surround the villages. Hit, which lies twenty miles up-stream of Ramadie, is an exception. It is of ancient origin and built upon a hill, with a lovely view of the river. It has not a vestige of green on it, but stands out bleak and harsh in contrast to the palm-groves fringing the bank. The bitumen wells near by have been worked for five thousand years and are responsible for the town being a centre of boat manufacture. With the bitumen, the gufas and mahelas are "pitched without and within," in the identical manner in which we are told that the ark was built. The jars in which the women of the town draw water from the river, instead of being of copper or earthenware as elsewhere, are here made of pitched wicker-work. The smell of the boiling bitumen and the sulphur springs is trying to a stranger, although the natives regard it as salubrious, and maintain that through it the town is saved from cholera epidemics. We had captured Hit a few weeks previously, and the aeroplanes flying low over the town had reported the disagreeable smell, attributing it to dirt and filth. "Eyewitness," the official newspaper correspondent, mentioned this in despatches, and when I was passing through, a proclamation of apology was being prepared to soothe the outraged and slandered townsfolk. [Illustration: A water-wheel on the Euphrates]