On the banks of a stream by the roadside was a "hunger battalion" resting. Its members, men and boys, were in a state of semi-nudity; their few garments hung in tattered rags about their wasted bodies, and all looked to be in the last stage of physical exhaustion from starvation. For some the end had clearly come. They were incapable of further effort, and lay waiting for a merciful death to cut short their sufferings. Others there were who still clung despairingly to the enfeebled thread of life. They crouched on the ground, gnawing frantically at a handful of roots or coarse herbs with which they sought to assuage the terrible pangs of unsatisfied hunger. A little apart from the main body was a small group crooning a mournful dirge: it was the funeral requiem of a man whom famine had killed. The body was being prepared for burial and, before committal to earth, was being washed in the stream which supplied a near-by village with drinking water. We divided some food amongst the sorely stricken survivors of the hunger battalion. It was all we could give. They were thankful, and one man said that he and five companions had originally started {104} from Hamadan, where the people were dying by hundreds daily, in the hope of crossing the frontier to Khaniquin or Kizil Robat, at either of which places they might get work and food in the British Labour Corps. Of the six who had set out on this quest he was the sole survivor. Kermanshah is a very old Persian city, and was known to writers and travellers from the earliest Christian times. It once was a flourishing industrial and commercial centre, but much of its prosperity and glory have been dimmed by a succession of political and economic vicissitudes. The town itself has a certain military importance. It is close to the Turkish frontier, and is equidistant from Bagdad, Ispahan, Teheran, and Tabriz. During the War Turks and Russians occupied it in turn, and the Turks had a consul and a consular guard here until their army was chased out of the province. Outside the town itself the nomadic and semi-nomadic population consists chiefly of Kurds, and Kurdi is the language of the people as distinct from the merchants. Cereals are extensively grown, but, owing to the lack of communications, the cost of transporting grain to Bagdad or Teheran was triple its local market value, and it was a profitless enterprise. The grain rotted in Kermanshah while people died of hunger in adjoining provinces.