Letters from Mesopotamia | Page 6

to Papa later.
They gave me a very nice farewell dinner on Friday at Agra. Raju came and sat next me and it all went off very well. Almost the whole station turned up. After dinner we sat outside, playing the gramophone, etc. Swift, seconded by Luly and Purefoy, made a determined effort to make me tight by standing me drinks and secretly instructing the Khitmagar to make them extra strong; but I was not quite green enough for that and always managed to exchange drinks at the last moment with the result that Swift got pretty tight and I didn't.
I sat in the bungalow talking to Purefoy till 2, and was up again at 6. From 6 till 11 I was busy with seeing to things and hardly had a moment's peace. We paraded at 10.45 and marched to the station, with the Punjabis band leading us. It was excessively warm for marching orders--96�� in the shade--and the mile to the station was quite enough. There was a great crowd on the platform and everyone was very nice and gave us a splendid send-off. I was too busy all the time to feel at all depressed at leaving Luly and Purefoy, which I had rather feared I should. Partings are, I think, much more trying in the prospect than at the actual moment, because beforehand the parting fills one's imagination, whereas at the moment one's hopes of meeting again come into active play. Anyway, I hadn't time to think much about it then, and I was already very sleepy. We started at 12.5.
At 1.30 Sergt. Pragnell came running along to say that L/C. Burgess was taken very bad; so I went along, with the Eurasian Assistant-Surgeon, who was travelling with us to Bombay. (These Eurasian A.-S.'s are far more competent than the British R.A.M.C. officers, in my experience.) We found Burgess with all the symptoms of heat-stroke, delirium and red face and hot dry skin. A thermometer under his armpit, after half a minute, showed a temperature of 106��. So the A.S. had all his clothes removed and laid him on a bench in the draught and dabbled him gently with water all over from the water-bottles. Apparently in these cases there are two dangers, either of which proves fatal if not counteracted: (1) the excessive temperature of the body. This rises very rapidly. In another half an hour it would have been 109��, and 110�� is generally fatal. This he reduced, by the sponging and evaporation, to about 100�� in the course of an hour. But the delirium continued, because (2) the original irritation sends a rush of blood to the head, causing acute congestion, which if it continues produces apoplexy. To prevent this we wanted ice, and I had wired on to Gwalior for some, but that was three hours ahead. Luckily at about 3 we halted to let the mail pass, and a railway official suggested stopping it. This we did, I got some ice which soon relieved the situation. But of course we couldn't take poor Burgess with us, so we wired for an ambulance to meet us at Jhansi, and put him ashore.
Meanwhile at Gwalior a pleasant surprise was in store. We had "train rations" on the usual measly Indian scale, but for tea on Saturday we were to rely on tea provided by Scindia at Gwalior. Happily a Maharajah's ideas of tea are superior to a Quartermaster's, and this is what we had for fifty men! Unlimited tea, with sugar, twenty-five tinned cheeses, fifty tins of sausages and twenty-five 2lb. tins of Marie biscuits! This feed tinted the rest of the journey rose-colour.
The only other incident was the loss by one of the men of his haversack, which he dropped out of window.
Yesterday, Sunday, was much cooler. When I woke at Bhopal it was only 76�� and it only got even as high as 89�� for about half-an-hour. We ran into rain in the afternoon.
We reached Bhusawal at 7 p.m. and had to wait four hours to be picked up by the Nagpur mail. In the refreshment room I met a Terrier gunner officer who was P.M.C. of the Mess at Barrackpore when we messed there in December. He was just back from a course at Mhow and had been positively told by the Staff Officers there that his and most other T. batteries were to be sent back to Europe in a month's time: and moreover that a whole division of Ts. was going to the Persian Gulf and another to E. Africa.
The air is full of such rumours. Here the Embarkation N.C.O. says 78,000 K's have already sailed to relieve us. But the mere number of the rumours rather discredits them. And the fact of their using us for drafts to P.G.