lot of good in Stamboul, where he is not in very high favour at present.

The whole thing, when all is said and done, resolves itself down to about this: If a war involving operations in this “sphere” comes within the next twenty years, I,—and a couple of other chaps who are doing the same sort of work,—provided I do not lose my life, or my health, or the best of my faculties in the interim, will probably break all records outside of a Central American revolution for quick promotion. I should probably be a brigadier-general at forty, with ten or a dozen letters after my name. But if, as is likely, there is no war, I shall probably continue these little jaunts into the desert until my health gives out, when, at best, I shall be invalided home and retired on the half-pay of a captain or a major.

So, you see, my future depends entirely upon whether or not some of our neighbours, or would-be neighbours, see fit to “start something” in this little neck of Central Asia within the next decade or two. And now that Russia is in the Entente, and we are acting so entirely in concert with her in Persia, I’m very much afraid that it’s going to be a case of the “hope deferred which maketh the heart sick.”

II

The following day we caught the river steamer at Bassorah, and four days later arrived at Bagdad, F—— putting up at the grim brown fort which housed the British Consulate, post office, and telegraph station. I saw him on and off for a week, usually at tiffins or dinners given for him by some of his British friends. At other times he was not to be found. “F—— Sahib gone to bazaar,” his Pathan bearer invariably answered my inquiries; and F—— himself volunteered no more than that he was spending a good deal of time “renewing old acquaintances.” Then, at the end of about ten days, without a good-bye to anybody, so far as I could learn, he dropped from sight. “F—— is off again to his Arabs,” said his friends.

“I am much relieved,” the Consul whispered to me. “They hung on him like leeches this time, but F—— got away by togging up as an Armenian arabana driver when they were expecting him as an Arab. The Armenian came here, F—— stained his face, got into the chap’s clothes, and actually drove the arabana, with a load of passengers, to Kerbela. The Turks nabbed the real driver when they caught him going out on foot, but got little out of him, and I don’t think they know yet exactly what happened. F—— is far into the desert by this time.”

This was in 1912, and at that time no one—least of all F——, who had the most to gain by such an event—appeared to dream that the blood-drenched plains of Babylonia and Assyria were likely to echo ere many years to the tramp of hostile armies. The broad scope of Germany’s activities, extending far beyond the mere construction of the Bagdad Railway, was evident to every one; but, this notwithstanding, the general impression seemed to be that the whip-hand in this region was Russia’s. This feeling was aptly expressed by an old Turkish officer with whom I discussed Near Eastern politics at Mosul. “The Germans may build railroads,” he said, punctuating his measured speech with puffs from a gurgling hookah, “and the British may build ships, and the Turks may build dams and canals,”—referring to the reclamation work at Hindia on the Euphrates,—“but in the end the Great White Bear will come down to the Persian Gulf and have his drink of warm water.”

That the Germans had ambitious plans for controlling the commerce of the incalculably rich Tigro-Euphrates Valley no one doubted, or even that the Kaiser aimed at some sort of political control. But that German influence should prevail over that of Britain and Russia in Constantinople, to the extent of aligning the Porte on the side of the Kaiser against the Triple Entente, was not dreamed of in Mesopotamia, even by the Turks themselves. The price to the Entente, however, of alienating Italy from the Triple Alliance by acquiescing in that Power’s conquest of Tripoli, was the irretrievable loss of Turkey’s friendship; and with the succession of Enver Pasha to the War Ministry at the end of the first Balkan conflict, there is no doubt that the Porte stood absolutely committed to action with Germany. After the outbreak of the present war, Turkey’s participation on the side of the Central Powers was only a matter of the Kaiser’s nod. Enver Pasha, educated in Berlin and always actively anti-Russian, had spent nearly two years in preparation for the struggle which the Germans had doubtless assured him was inevitable; and the making ready for a fight to the death at the Dardanelles was not allowed to interfere with a general stiffening of the Eastern defences. This, briefly, was the way in which it came about that Britain is facing Turkey instead of the long-prepared-against Russia in the Mesopotamian “theatre.” But I will let my friend F——, to whom it was given to help set and stage the opening scenes of the play, tell something of what happened up to the moment of his tragic exit.

Late in the fall of 1914, a hastily scribbled card reached me in California. “Things looming large at last,” it read. “Am off for the ‘P.G.’[1] to-morrow with big work in prospect. Will write when I can get anything of interest passed.” The card was post-marked Karachi, and dated but a few days previous to Turkey’s official entry into the war. I took it, therefore, that the Indian Government had discounted this action, and that at the moment the Turks opened hostilities by bombarding the Russian coast, F——, doubtless with considerable forces, was on the way to his “sphere.”

The promised letter was long delayed, and when it came bore the post-mark Bassorah, not in the pothook Turkish characters, but in plain English letters, while the blue two-and-a-half anna stamp of India appeared in the corner formerly sacred to the narrow, pink, half-gummed one-piastre sticker which you had often to affix with a pin to keep it from falling off. Thus ran the letter:—

“I am writing you this from the one-time home port of ‘Sinbad the Sailor,’ which, I am rejoiced to say, has been under our flag for some days. The Turks had considerable forces of seasoned troops here,—doubtless you remember how much of the old town was taken up by barracks,—but, evidently because they did not expect us so soon, or in such force, had done little in the way of outpost defence. This, coupled with the facts that our naval strength was overwhelming and the river very ineffectively mined, made what might have been an operation of tremendous difficulty comparatively easy. The guns of our cruisers outranged those of the old forts at the mouth of the Shat-el-Arab, and, with sweepers working ahead of them, the light-draught gunboats peppered so hotly those dense palm groves which fringe the river banks that we had little difficulty in fighting our way through them without great loss.

“Co-operating with the advance up the river, our main force was landed above Koweit and marched across the open desert to attack Bassorah on the west, threatening the rear of the Turkish