eventually be supported, in the staples of life, by local produce.
Transportation was ever a hard nut to crack. Railroads were built, but
though the nature of the country called for little grading, obtaining
rails, except in small quantities, was impossible. The ones brought were
chiefly secured by taking up the double track of Indian railways. This
process naturally had a limit, and only lines of prime importance could be
laid down. Thus you could go by rail from Busra to Amara, and from Kut to
Baghdad, but the stretch between Amara and Kut had never been built, up to
the time I left the country. General Maude once told me that pressure was
being continually brought by the high command in England or India to have
that connecting-link built, but that he was convinced that the rails would
be far more essential elsewhere, and had no intention of yielding.

I don't know the total number of motor vehicles, but there were more than
five thousand Fords alone. On several occasions small columns of infantry
were transported in Fords, five men and the driver to a car. Indians of
every caste and religion were turned into drivers, and although it seemed
sufficiently out of place to come across wizened, khaki-clad Indo-Chinese
driving lorries in France, the incongruity was even more marked when one
beheld a great bearded Sikh with his turbaned head bent over the
steering-wheel of a Ford.

Modern Busra stands on the banks of Ashar Creek. The ancient city whence
Sinbad the sailor set forth is now seven or eight miles inland, buried
under the shifting sands of the desert. Busra was a seaport not so many
hundreds of years ago. Before that again, Kurna was a seaport, and the two
rivers probably only joined in the ocean, but they have gradually enlarged
the continent and forced back the sea. The present rate of encroachment
amounts, I was told, to nearly twelve feet a year.