Letters from Mesopotamia | Page 6

share in the correspondence may become even less than
before, as I shall henceforth be on more than nominally active service
and under the eye of the censor.
Luly is clamouring for lunch, which we eat at 11, and I shall have no
peace afterwards till the ship reaches a landlocked bit of Gulf: so
goodbye for the present.
* * * * *
"S.S. VARSOVA,"
BOMBAY.
August 16th, 1915.
TO HIS MOTHER.
I shall just have time to write you a line about our journey so far, and
may be able to write 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