unfit embarked in two heavily-loaded boats for Bagdad. 

 They had evidence at intervals how the men were faring 

 on their march. 



The men had on the second day to march not eight, 

 as promised by the Turks to the officers, but eighteen 

 miles, and afterwards twelve to fifteen miles per day. 

 They were herded like sheep by mounted Arab troopers, 

 who freely used sticks and whips to flog forward the 

 stragglers. 



"Food was very short," proceeds the official report, 

 the heat was intense, the clouds of dust perpetual, and a 

 great number of the men had now neither boots nor water- 

 bottles. Their escort stripped them still further; by the 

 time of their arrival at Bagdad most of the Arab guard 

 were dressed in odds and ends of British uniforms, stolen 

 during the march. There was little or no control by the 

 Turkish officers, who usually rode at the head ofl the 

 column. The only mitigating influence was that of the 

 Turkish doctor who accompanied the march ; his name 

 which was Ilia 1 deserves to be recorded, for he was untir- 

 ing in his ministrations to the men; but he could, of 

 course, do little among the thousands who needed him. 

 One day the fourth of the march had absolutely to be 

 given over to rest. This was at Azizie, where some 350 

 sick, British and Indian, were left behind in a sort of 

 cowshed, densely crowded and filthily verminous, to follow 

 later by river. The rest struggled on, many of them now 

 half naked, all so near the limit of exhaustion that there 

 were daily deaths by the roadside. So, after nine days' 

 march, the column arrived at Bagdad on the I5th May, 

 and were marched for three or four hours through crowded 

 streets before being taken to the place where they were 

 to encamp." 



AN HISTORIC CRIME. 



The report goes on : "There remains to be told what 

 had happened to the main mass of the prisoners, those 

 who had been judged capable of the journey up country 

 and across the Syrian desert to Asia Minor. Week after 



1 Dr. Ilia is not a Turk, but a Syrian Christian. Ed. 

 55 



