That Basra had a great future in store for it as a shipping centre was early recognized by Major-General Sir George McMunn, who for some time held the post of Inspector-General of Lines of Communications at Basra. He was one of those rare soldiers with a genius for organization and a capacity for bringing to bear upon big problems a wide range of outlook, and he was never hampered by those military trammels which often mar the professional soldier and make a good general an exceedingly bad civil administrator. So General McMunn set to work to give Basra an impetus along the path of commercial progress. He planned a model city {23} which was to include residential and business sites, electric tramways, modern hotels, and public parks. It was a stupendous undertaking, but McMunn accomplished much in the face of great financial difficulties. He endowed Basra with a first-class hotel run by a chef and an hotel staff recruited from London, installed electric light, gave the evil-smelling town a vigorous spring-cleaning, and with stone quarried in Arabia buried beneath stout paving the slimy mud of some of the Basra streets. Ashar which fronts the Shatt el Arab is really the business centre of Basra. Its bazaars running parallel with Basra Creek are dark, evil-smelling, and over-crowded by human bipeds who swarm about ant fashion, and are born, live, and die in these purlieus. In the course of an hour during the busy part of the day you can count on meeting representatives of all the races and creeds of Asia in the streets and bazaars of Ashar or lower Basra. Here ebbs and flows the flotsam of the East--Jews, Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Persians, Chaldeans (merchants or traffickers these!), and coolies from India, Burma, and China, with wanderers from the remote khanates of Russian Turkestan, the latter in quaint headdress and wearing sheepskin coats whose vicinity is rather trying to sensitive noses when the thermometer is well above eighty in the shade. General Byron, with Major Newcombe of the Canadian Contingent, Captain Eve, some other members of our party, and myself were quartered in {24} the old Turkish cavalry barracks, while the remainder went into camp at Makina, two miles out. The Turks, it is true, were gone never to return, but in the honeycombed recesses of the crumbling dust-covered walls of Ashar barracks their troopers had left behind many old friends who, from the very first, displayed an envenomed animosity towards us, and attacked British officers and men with a vigour which the Turkish Army itself had never excelled. Every night raiding parties, defying alike our protective mosquito nets and the poison-gas effect of Keating's, found their way into our beds; and every morning we would crawl from between the sheets bearing visible marks of these night forays.