over the wounded to them. All night long they journeyed back and forth
transporting such as could stand the trip to the main evacuation camp at
Haditha.

By daybreak we were once more under way. Under cover of darkness the Arabs
had pillaged the abandoned supplies, in some cases killing the wounded
Turks. The transport animals of the enemy and their cavalry horses were
in very bad shape. They had evidently been hard put to it to bring through
sufficient fodder during the wet winter months when the roads were so deep
in mud as to be all but impassable. Instead of being distant from Ana the
eight miles that we had measured on the map, we found that we were
seventeen, but we made it without any serious hindrance. The town was most
attractive, embowered in gardens which skirt the river's edge for a
distance of four or five miles. In addition to the usual palms and
fruit-trees there were great gnarled olives, the first I had seen in
Mesopotamia, as were also the almond-trees. It must be of great antiquity,
for the prophet Isaiah speaks of it as a place where kings had reigned,
but from which, even in his time, the grandeur had departed.

The greater part of the enemy had already abandoned the town, but we
captured the Turkish governor and a good number of the garrison, and many
that had escaped from Haditha. The disaster at Khan Baghdadi had only been
reported the afternoon before, as we had of course cut all the telegraph
wires, and the governor had not thought it possible we would continue the
pursuit so far. He had spent most of his life in Hungary and had been
given this post only a few months previous to our advance. From the
prisoners we had taken at Haditha we had extracted conflicting estimates
as to the time when Colonel Tennant, the commander of our air forces, had
been sent on, and from those we took at Ana we received equally varying
accounts. The cars had been ordered to push on in search of the colonel as