occasionally. There are happier moments than those spent in the inky
blackness amid a torrential deluge, when you try to extricate yourself
from the wet, clinging folds of falling canvas.

Time hung heavily when the weather was bad, and we were cooped up inside
our tents without even a hostile aeroplane to shoot at. One day when the
going was too poor to take out the heavy cars, I set off in a tender to
visit another section of the battery that was stationed thirty or forty
miles away in the direction of Persia, close by a town called Kizil Robat.
We had a rough trip, with several difficult fords to cross. It was only
through working with the icy water above our waists that we won through
the worst, amid the shouts of "Shabash, Sahib!" ("Well done!") from the
onlooking Indian troops. I reached the camp to find the section absent on
a reconnaissance, for the country was better drained than that over which
we were working. A few minutes later one of the cyclists came in with the
news that the cars were under heavy fire about twenty-five miles away and
one of them was badly bogged. I immediately loaded all the surplus men and
eight Punjabis from a near-by regiment into the tenders. We reached the
scene just after the disabled car had been abandoned. Some of the Turks
were concealed in a village two hundred and fifty yards away; the rest
were behind some high irrigation embankments. The free car had been
unable to circle around or flank them because of the nature of the
terrain. The men had not known that the village was occupied and had
bogged down almost at the same time that the Turks opened fire. By
breaking down an irrigation ditch the enemy succeeded in further flooding
the locality where the automobile was trapped. The Turks made it hot for
the men when they tried to dig out the car. The bullets spattered about
them. It was difficult to tell how many Turks we accounted for. As dark
came on, the occupants of the disabled car abandoned it and joined the
other one, which was standing off the enemy but had lost all four tires