Such, then, was our ship, and such its skipper! When we had arrived at Suez, where we embarked, there were several cases of smallpox amongst its Lascar firemen. The Embarkation Officer had feared infection, and had hesitated to send us on board; but he was overruled by a higher authority somewhere in Egypt or England. There was no other transport available, it was said; the units for India and for Persia were urgently needed; and, smallpox or no smallpox, sail we must--and did. The ship was terribly overcrowded. The Indian troops "pigged it" aft; the British troops were accommodated in the hold; and those of the officers who were unable to find quarters elsewhere unstrapped their camp bed and slept on deck. Fortunately it was the cool season in the Red Sea; the days were warm, but not uncomfortably so; and the nights were sharp and bracing, the head-wind which we carried with us all the way to Aden keeping the thermometer from climbing beyond the normal. Once clear of Suez everybody settled down to work, a very useful relief to the discomforts of life on an overcrowded transport. Youthful subalterns joining the Indian Army set themselves to study Hindustani grammars and vocabularies with the valiant intention of acquiring colloquial proficiency before they even sighted Bombay. Members of the {15} Bagdad Party, stimulated by this exhibition of industry, tackled Persian and Russian. We had two officers who offered themselves as teachers of the language of Iran--Lieutenant Akhbar, a native-born Persian whose English home was at Manchester, and Captain Cooper of the Dorsets, who had studied Oriental tongues in England, and had been wounded at Gallipoli in a hand-to-hand fight with the Turks. For Russian also there was no lack of teachers, the Russian officers, Captain Eve, and I taking charge of classes. In my own section, elementary Russian, I had twenty-two N.C.O.'s as eager and willing pupils. The majority were Australians, and, although dismayed at first by the bizarre appearance of the unfamiliar characters, and the seemingly unsurmountable difficulties of what one Anzac aptly described as "this upside-down language," they put their backs into it with very remarkable results, plodding away at their lessons hour after hour with unwearying zeal. Some had picked up a smattering of "Na Poo" French on the Western Front; a few spoke French fairly well; but the majority knew no foreign language at all; yet the quick alert Australian brain captured the entire Russian alphabet in forty-eight hours after beginning the preliminary assault. I have sometimes thought since that to the Gods on High our ship must have appeared a sort of floating Tower of Babel, so intent on speaking strange tongues were each and all.